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“What does lover-boy have to say?” I ask, signaling the bartender for the tab. If I stay here and have another drink, I’ll just drown my sorrows at the bottom of a bottle and hate myself in the morning. No thanks.

“He just got home,” Oakley says, smiling down at her screen like an idiot. I also want to smile at my screen like an idiot. Is that just too much to ask? “Classes ran late, but he grabbed us dinner.” She looks up, and I want to wipe the drool on the side of her mouth. “Do you want to join us?”

“No!” Holland and I profess at the same time. We made the mistake one too many times of having dinner with the most loved-up couple in the city, and needless to say, we left a little worse for wear.

“I’m going home,” Holland says, hopping off her chair. “But I’ll see you girls for brunch later this week?”

She gives Oakley and me each a side hug, thanks me for the drinks, and makes her way out.

“Are you leaving too?” Oakley asks. “Can we split an Uber?”

“Would make sense,” I sigh. “Considering we live walking distance from each other now.”

Which we do. As of two weeks ago, I finally took the leap and invested in a nice little two story brownstone in Greenwich Village, two streets up from Oakley. Granted, it needs a paint job inside, and a few of the appliances that came with the place are in dire need of repairs, but it beats renting a shabby studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. It took a chunk of my savings, and an advance from Oakley, to make the sale, but now I have a place that’s mine and only mine. I don’t have to worry about rent, just the utilities, which are manageable on my salary. And since I’m no longer just Oakley’s Personal Assistant, my salary is now double what it was. Property seemed a good way to go.

I pay the tab and follow Oakley outside. The weather is a balmy eighty degrees outside, and the sidewalk still resembles an ebb and flow of people coming and going. I have a love-hate relationship with summer in New York; it’s as if the city decides to stop breathing and allows the heat to trap us on a daily basis. Oakley is now fluent in using the Uber app, and it only takes a few minutes for a car to stop next to the sidewalk.

The moment we’re inside, Oakley hooks her arm in mine. “You’ll find the guy,” she tells me. Her confidence is far greater than mine at this point. She doesn’t quite know how many failed attempts I had before I got Oakley and Holland involved as my ‘security detail’ and my ‘phone me as if you’re dying so I have an excuse to leave’ kind of back-up. “Let me see your profile.”

At this point, I have nothing left to lose. I lost my dignity six dates ago, three of which stood me up. It’s seriously starting to give me a complex. I pass Oakley my phone and start reading.

“This is actually pretty good,” she comments. “I’d totally date you.”

The driver gives us a look in the rearview mirror, and I can’t help it, I snort. “I was starting to wonder if I should just change it, or something. You think it’s good, but the guys I’ve ‘dated’ don’t.”

Oakley’s about to reply, when the driver, an Indian man with a gold turban, asks, “Can I see it?” Oakley and I exchange a look. Other than Sebastian, no other man has looked at it, but maybe this won't be so bad. This man doesn’t know me from a bar of soap, and maybe he’ll give me a more objective opinion. I hand him my phone, and even I have to admit the way he drives and reads my Tinder profile is impressive.

“Your expectations are too high, Miss,” he tells me, handing my phone back. Oakley and I frown.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.

“You’re on an app like Tinder to find love, yes?” I nod, somewhat intrigued by the type of advice an Uber driver can dole out. “Well, you’ve ruled out the majority of the men on the app with your bio, and even though you say ‘swipe left if…’ those are exactly the type of guys who will swipe right. You need to get off that stupid app, and do it like we do — have our parents arrange a marriage.”

I rear back, and Oakley stifles a laugh. My parents are both stuck on the farm I grew up on in Wyoming, and while my mother is desperate for grandbabies, my father isn’t about to drive his fucking tractor to the city just to find me a husband. The thought may be funny, but I’m deeply affronted that this man feels the only way I can find a man is to have it arranged. It’s preposterous. He stops outside Oakley’s building, and I know what Oakley’s retribution on my behalf will be. A bad Uber rating. A habit left behind from when she met Sebastian. We climb out, ignore the man’s complaints about his shitty rating, and I start walking towards my place just as Sebastian opens the door to greet Oakley. I look away, and when Oakley calls my name, I wave my hand without facing them. I’m busy going through Tinder again when I finally make it to my apartment. “No, no, no, no, hell no,” I say to no one as I swipe left on profile after profile.

“You’re too hairy.” Left-swipe.

“You have a beard.” Left-swipe.

“That’s so not your Mercedes.” Left-swipe.

“Catfish.” Left-swipe.

And so my evening continues. I brush my hair and tie it into a top-knot before curling up on the sofa with a glass of wine. So many assholes. I hesitate when I stumble across a profile of someone named Kalon_45_. He has a bunch of images, more than most of the guys I’ve seen. They're badly cropped, pixelated, and obviously taken from a distance so that he doesn’t know he’s being photographed. It’s another left-swipe for me, except I’m swiping so fast, I accidentally swipe right. The screen lights up with

It’s a match! Start chatting to Kalon_45_ now!

Ah, fuck. Now I have to reverse-search his images to make sure he’s not catfishing me. That’s happened before, and it wasn’t pretty. I pull the images from his Tinder profile and reverse-search them. His picture pops up on a business website — Kalon Ward Investment Solutions. Huh. The photo on his website screams silver fox,and I just found a way to waste away the rest of my otherwise boring Saturday night.