“True. And I screamed and cried like a baby.”
“Yup. You did.” I sipped again and it was rather tasty,and strong.
“I suppose I should be embarrassed about all that, but truthfully I’ve had so much embarrassment lately that that hardly registered.”
“I can relate!” I took another sip. God, it really was strong.
“Oh?” He eyed me curiously. “It can’t be as embarrassing as mine.”
“Trust me. Mine’s worse,” I said quite confidently, as I bit into the floating piece of pineapple which tasted more like a delivery method for rum than an actual piece of fruit.
“Never. It cannot,cannot, be worse than what just happened to me.”
I shook my head at him. “No, I win. I’m telling you. You’ve got nothing on me.”
We fell into a silence and eyeballed each other. “Okay,” he started slowly, “so picture this.” He threw his entire drink back, as if he needed the liquid courage just to tell the story. I understood. I would probably need to be borderline paralytic before I ever repeated my story to anyone. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him. “Right,” he continued, “she’s my perfect girlfriend of seven years. We’ve lived together for five of them. I bought that apartment just for her, because she liked the view, even though it added an extra half an hour to my morning commute. She’s the woman that I spoke about having kids with.” He paused for a moment and looked at me as if he wanted me to acknowledge that I was following the story so far.
“Okay. Got it,” I said.
“Now picture this; me on a rooftop garden in the middle of London, at sunset, looking out over the city, on one knee, surrounded by the rose petals of a thousand pink roses and over two hundred candles and then holding this in my hands . . .” He stopped talking, reached into his jacket pocket and pulled it out. I gasped.
18 Feb.
Okay. Good news. Researched what the likelihood of couples who meet online staying together is. It is very low! Crossing my fingers and waiting. I’ll be here for Matt when things fall apart. Maybe it will even bring us closer? (Am I a bad person for hoping that his relationship falls apart? Of course I am!)
On a different note, I watched a video of a woman sleeping with a male sex doll yesterday. No, I will not be getting one anytime soon. But it was good research for the article. Also, want to write an article about the perils of online dating and how to know whether you’re being “Catfished.” (Maybe I’ll even show it to Matt—out of “concern.” Shit, I really am a terrible friend.)
18 Feb. (later that day)
Oh no! Been researching new article and found contradictory messaging.
“Why online love is more likely to last.” Internet couples tend to be a better fit than those who meet by traditional means, according to new research
An actual psychologist wrote this. Not me doing research and making things up!
Shit. What to believe? More later . . . (Hopefully research to contradict that last part.)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Wow,” I said breathily, looking down at the ring in the box he’d just opened.
“I mean . . . Wow.” That was really all I could say, because it glinted up at me like the northern lights. A gorgeous round lavender-colored stone, surrounded by pink stones set in a rose-gold band.
“Wow. Yes, that’s what she said too.” He put the box down on the bar counter. “Only, as you can see, she’s not wearing it.”
“What happened?” I asked, tempted to reach out and touch the thing of beauty. My fingertips felt drawn to it, like a magpie to pretty pennies.
“Well,” he let out a loud, long sigh, “she said no, obviously.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Oh, no worries really. It’s okay. I mean, she only ripped my still-beating heart out, violently shredded it and then tossed it off the side of the building. No big deal.”
“Shit. That’s hectic,” I said, not really knowing what to say to him.
“But that’s not the worst part, though. She then went on to explain that actually she was in love with someone else. And actually, she’d been seeing him for the past six months, and actually she was about to tell me that she was leaving me for him and moving in with him and actually—God, that’s a lot of actuallys—apparently she’s never felt this way about anyone before. And get this, they met in our apartment block, the one we live in, because the guy lives there too.”
“Ouch.” I physically cringed for him. The image was just so awful. He seemed like a nice guy, somewhat misguided in his fashion sense and beauty regime, but I hadn’t had a man pull out a chair for me in ages, let alone attend to my injuries.
