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This whole style of dating was utterly new to me, and I would have been lying if I said that I thought I had it in hand quite yet; it was difficult, not being able to see them in person, not being able to gauge our chemistry face-to-face. And yeah, there was something strange to me about being able to work on my dating life while I lay on the couch in a face mask working on a glass of wine. But maybe that was for the best. Maybe this was the future of dating. You got to know each other inside-out before you got to know anything else about them – how they looked, how they sounded, the way they laughed – and you had that to build on when you finally did meet.
When I had seen his name pop up on my phone, it had been like a flutter from my past had come back to haunt me. I had no idea where I knew that name from and I tried not to put too much thought into it, but he seemed familiar. Joseph Mackenzie. I winced when I saw how old he was – only twenty-eight, nearly ten whole years younger than I was – but his opening message was sweet and polite and curious and I figured that it was the least I could do to give him the time of day.
We exchanged a few messages at first, nothing deep or serious, but something about the way he spoke to me made me feel good about him. The other guys, they had been quick to forget their grammar, to communicate with emojis instead of actual words. It wasn’t that I was totally averse to those things, but I felt like they were best used when you had already built a rapport with someone else. But he took his time, sending me these carefully thought-out messages that made me smile.
I would have met up with him already, but he worked offshore and was there for another couple of weeks before he made his return. I was already nervous about the thought of meeting him face-to-face.
What if he didn’t like me? He had made it pretty clear that he thought I looked good in my pictures, but that was way different than actually laying eyes on me in person. Maybe he had misread my age. Maybe he thought I was younger. Maybe he had a fetish for older women and that was all that this was to him. Maybe, maybe, maybe...
"You need to stop worrying," Mallory had told me firmly when I had come to her with all of these concerns and worries running through my mind. I had forgotten, utterly and completely, how much this dating stuff could turn me into a total maniac. When I was single, I could convince myself that I was a pulled-together, intelligent woman with self-confidence and wit and the ability to tell when someone was leading me on and when someone actually liked me. When you put a man into the equation? Yeah, less so.
"I don’t know if I can," I moaned, running my hand through my hair. I had been picking at the meal that we had ordered for lunch, my appetite lacking anyway, but I would have been lying if I’d said that there wasn’t some part of me that was scared of gaining weight before I saw him again. What if he took one look at me and called me fat or something? Oh, there was no way in hell that I could handle that.
"Yes, you can," Mallory reminded me. "You were coping just fine without him in your life, weren’t you? So it doesn’t matter whether or not he stays in it, either way."
"I guess you have a point," I muttered, conceding to her. It was strange, though, even though I knew she was totally correct, there was some part of me that was already worried about the thought of losing him. Which was absurd, I knew that, given that I had only really had a relationship that had been conducted over text thus far, but it was the closest I’d had to anything that had made me feel truly alive in a long time. I didn’t want to lose it.
"I know I do," She told me. "But still. You’ve actually met someone! I’m so excited for you."
"I think I’m excited too," I agreed, and she cocked her head at me.
"You only think you’re excited?"
"I just don’t know how I'm meant to feel!" I admitted, the words bursting out of me before I could stop them. "I was...I mean, I don’t know if I was totally happy being single, but I was coping, that’s for sure. Opening up to someone else like this...it’s a lot to take in. It’s more than I thought I would find so soon."
"You can always check out if it’s getting to be too much for you," she reminded me gently. "You have the reins here, right?"
"Yeah, but I don’t want to check out," I admitted. "That’s what’s freaking me out so much."
She reached across the table and squeezed my hand happily, a giant grin on her face.
"I knew we would find you someone," she told me proudly.
"Hey, we haven’t even met in person yet," I protested. "I don’t know if you should be getting so smug so soon."
"And yet, it’s not going to stop me," she replied teasingly. "Come on, tell me some more about him. Let me live vicariously through you."
I started to fill her in on everything that had been happening in my life the last few days; even though we had been doing teacher training, we had been split off from each other given that we were both teaching different age groups, so we hadn’t actually seen all that much of one another. And God only knew how much I needed her advice on all of this. I liked this guy so much, and yet I felt like I was so spectacularly useless when it came to dating that I had no actual clue where to start with getting him to fall for me.
"He’s an engineer," I explained. "He works on the oil rigs off the North coast, he’s been doing it for a while now. So he’s not often back on the mainland..."
"Which means that you can totally take advantage of his enthusiasm when he is, right?" Mallory suggested, waggling her eyebrows at me pointedly. I gave her a look.
"Hey, I’m trying not to let that get into my head," I replied.
"But he is hot, right?" She asked. I grinned and looked down at my coffee. Truth was, he was so hot that when I had seen that he had messaged me, I had assumed that it had been some kind of mistake on his part – he couldn’t possibly have bothered with someone like me, not when he must have had the whole pick of the women on that app at his fingertips.
He had short dark hair, the kind that waved slightly down around his ears, and these brown eyes that were flecked with gorgeous shimmers of gold. Even in his photographs, I could see how stunning they were, and I would have been lying if I’d said that I wasn’t thinking about how sweet it would be to look into them in person. His work as an engineer had given him strong arms and a slim frame. He didn’t look like those men that spent all their time down at the gym just to prove to themselves that they could lift this weight or that one; he looked like it came more organically, his muscles powerful and...mmm.
"Yeah, he’s hot," I agreed. I would have shown her a picture, but for some reason I felt like that would have been jinxing it, and it was the last thing I wanted to deal with right now. This whole thing felt so precarious and I had no intention of doing anything that might send it spilling over the edge.
"I’m just worried that the age gap is going to be a problem," I admitted. "He must have so many girls after him, girls his own age, and I can’t imagine that I’m going to be enough to keep his interest when they come calling..."
"Well, you’ve been enough so far, haven’t you?" Mallory reminded me. "That’s the thing about dating apps, you can choose from this wide range of people, so the ones you actually do reach out and message...well, you must really like them."
"I suppose so..."
"I mean, how many messages have you got from how many guys?" She pointed out. "And you’re talking to him. I bet he’s thinking just the same things that you are about you having better options."
