“Being a student is a totally different life stage, plus that’s a fifteen-year age gap. How old are you?”
“Thirty,” he says.
“Right, so you’re willing to consider women seven years younger than you but only three years older? Let me guess, they have to be six foot tall and a size eight too?”
“No, but I do prefer dating tall women. I’m six foot three, I don’t want to strain my neck constantly looking down at someone,” he says, which makes me laugh out loud.
“Ooh, diddums. Do you strain your liddle widdle neck when you talk to me?” I say in a baby voice.
“Talking while we’re sitting down is fine. If I was trying tokiss you while standing up, then I might,” he says. Despite the mischievous glint in his eye, the mention of kissing makes me look away. “How do you know seven years younger is my cutoff, anyway?”
Oops. “I might have seen your dating profile,” I admit. Will grins at this confession, and I chastise myself for making such a rookie mistake.
“Look, everyone has a set of criteria when it comes to dating,” Will tells me. “Whether it’s subconscious or explicit. Online, we’re forced to be specific, but we all have an idea of what we’re looking for.” He shakes his head. “You didn’t put a height range?”
“I put a normal range! Five foot eight is not within normal range for a woman.”
He turns to look at me, briefly pursing his lips, eyes heavy with a cool smugness. “You know, anyone would think you were upset about being outside my search criteria, Appleby.”
“Oh please, I am thrilled to be outside of your search criteria,” I say, shifting toward the passenger window, annoyed that his teasing makes me sink down in the chair and hide behind my coffee cup.
“I’d make an exception for you. You seem worth the neck strain,” Will says. I know he’s joking, but now I feel slightly giddy and curse my body for reacting this way.
“Well, sorry to disappoint you, but you aren’t my type either. I would not date a giraffe man-child,” I say primly. Then he catches my eye and we both start to laugh, though I’m not sure what’s so funny.
“The main flaw with online dating is you can’t convey sexiness. Maybe we could do a column on this,” Will says, his eyes back on the road. “Sexiness is indefinable. It has nothing to do with age or build or hair color. I saw this interview with Catherine Deneuve; she oozed sex appeal even in her seventies.”
“Plus it can’t measure where people are in their lives, how ready they are for a relationship.”
“Right, there’s no drop-down menu where you rate the state of your heart.”
I shift forward in my seat, warming to our discussion, drumming my fingers on my seat belt. “So, let’s say you meet the perfect Amazonian, twenty-six-year-old version of Catherine Deneuve. Then what? Are you looking for Mrs. Right or Miss Right Now?” I pose it playfully, but I am curious to hear what he says.
“That’s a big question,” Will says, the corners of his eyes creasing in contemplation as he taps his hand against the wheel. I notice how strong his hands look, as though he could rip a pineapple in half if he wanted to.Why am I thinking about ripping pineapples in half? That’s not a thing people do.“Why do you want to know?” Will asks, and I try to stop thinking about pineapples.
“We have a long car journey, and we’re cowriting a column about dating,” I say with a shrug. “I’m interested, as a journalist.”
“ ‘As a journalist,’ ” he says, his voice mockingly serious. “It would depend on the person. Ideally, I’d want to live a little more before I settled down. I don’t want a girlfriend just for the sake of it.” He pauses, the jokey tone absent now. “But if you meet your perfect woman, even if it’s not the perfect time, then you readjust your plans, don’t you?”
“There’s no such thing as a ‘perfect woman,’ Will,” I say, lifting my eyes to the sky.
“I saidyourperfect woman, notaperfect woman, like if I met ‘the one.’ ”
“You seriously believe in ‘the one’?” I ask him.
“Yes, I do,” he says, turning to look at me, his eyes wide with uncharacteristic innocence. “Don’t you?”
I make a “pfff” sound and shake my head.
“Did you believe in ‘the one’ when you were married?” he asks, his voice gentle now.
“How long does it take you to decide whether or not someone is ‘the one’?” I ask, ignoring his question to me.
He pauses, glancing into the rearview mirror. “I think you know quite quickly whether something’s going to be mind-blowing. I am happy on my own, I don’t need to be with someone. So, I don’t tend to go on more than a couple of dates with anyone unless I can see it’s going to be something serious. Why is that so terrible?” he asks.
“It’s not,” I say, shifting in my chair, struck by the fact he used the same phrase I often use. “You epitomize men of your generation. You swipe and you swipe, looking for something better. There’s always someone hotter, younger, taller, smarter, thinner. All these apps are designed to create an itch you can never truly scratch. No one is ‘mind-blowing.’ It’s ridiculous to set your bar that high.”
“That’s not what I do,” he says, his jaw clenched as he rubs a palm up his neck, his eyes unwavering from the road ahead. “And whatever your judgy ex-husband did to make you so cynical, don’t project that onto me.” His words burn like oil spattering from a hot pan, making me physically flinch. “You shouldn’t let him talk to you like he did back there.” Will’s voice is softer now, and the pity is so much worse than the anger or the teasing.
