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In that moment, I caught something else, a thing under the joke. I’d watched Dante do the same thing to rattled customers and skittish first-dates and once to a kid having a panic attack by the bathrooms. He hadn’t ribbed me. He’d reached down, picked up the most humiliating thing on the table, and turned it into something I could laugh at so I wouldn’t have to keep holding it alone.

That was the whole of Dante if you knew where to look.

He guarded you even when the only threat was your own bad night.

Something warm moved through my chest. I didn’t examine it because examining it wasn’t on the schedule, and there was a pelican to consider and an ice machine to bury.

“Thank you, Dante,” I said.

“Wasn’t listening,” he said again, turned a page, and that was the end of what he was going to give us.

Finn reappeared and hauled Benji up off the floor by one arm. “All right. That’s enough. You’ve had your fun, and everyone’s whole again.”

“I’ll never be whole,” Benji said, still laughing. “He got scored in a bathhouse by a man wearing absolutely nothing.” He then drifted out of the kitchen, toward the fruit at the end of the bar, buoyant, a man handed a gift he hadn’t earned. At the corner, he turned, walked backward, and pointed at me one more time. “For the record, I think it’s great, you finally getting out, going to a bathhouse or bar or whatever. I love it for you.”

“Thanks,” I said, suspicious of every word.

“Although.” He paused, and I watched an idea arrive on his face and make itself comfortable. “Can I say something as your friend and not your employee?”

“No.”

“The bathhouse is a lot, Mark. It’s the deep end. You’re standing at the edge of the pool in floaties talking about the deep end.” He spread his hands, reasonable and dead serious under his usual nonsense. “There’s an easier way to meet people now. It’s on your phone. You download the app, you make a profile, and you swipe on the nice ones. My cousin met her husband online. It’s civilized, and it’s got pictures. No towel required.”

Down the bar, without a word or any inflection at all, Dante turned another page, but his eyes had stopped moving along the line. They stayed stopped for exactly one beat too long before they started again.

Benji saw it. Of course he did.

Benji saw everything that wasn’t about him.

I watched as his grin twitched.

“An app?” I said.

“An app,” Benji echoed, beaming, already halfway to the fruit. “Trust me. You’re going to love it.”

I want it on the record that at no point did anyone in the room tell me which app.

Chapter 3

Mark

Idecided to do it right. That was my first mistake. Though, in fairness, it’s the mistake I make about everything. Give me a problem and I’ll overprepare for it. I’ll read the manual, buy the correct tool, measure the space twice, and arrive so ready that the problem, sensing a professional, flees for its life.

Dating, I figured, was a problem like any other.

I’d simply been going about it wrong, wandering into steam rooms and coffee shops with no plan and no equipment.

Benji had handed me a tool.

All I had to do was use it correctly.

So that night, I sat at my kitchen table, opened my laptop, poured a beer I intended to nurse, and prepared to build myself a dating profile the way I’d build anything, from the foundation up.

The website did not exist.

I typed the name I’d seen on the back of the local gay magazine, or the name I was fairly sure I’d seen, into the search bar. What came back was not a homepage with a friendly log-in section or a form to fill out. What popped up was a page telling me to get the app on my phone. I tried three different spellings on the assumption I’d misread the gay mag. Each one redirected me to the same place, which was my phone, which was sitting across the table judging me as only an iPhone can.

I didn’t want to use my phone.