“You could ask the girl out, you know?” Casanova suggests. “Be bold in person and all that jazz.”
“What doyouknow about jazz?” Buzz snorts. He’s older than me, with a shiny bald head and has a hand with only a thumb and two fingers thanks to an accident with a buzzsaw in his early twenties.
The pair get into a heated debate that I steadfastly ignore. Before I signed up for this dating app, I never used this damn phone. I can answer when someone calls, and navigate to my contact list to call the boss, but otherwise I don’t have much use for it.
I like my phone to work as a phone, and nothing else. No fancy radio, TV, or goddamn therapist. But to get my girl, I’m gonna use the blasted thing. Even if my fat thumbs hit the wrong letters when I’m typing in the app. Even if I had to ask the guys for help finding the app.
Sabrina’s worth it. Hell, she deserves a better man than me. But when I overheard her friends at the diner talking about her finding a husband before the 13thon some random mail order groom dating site I wasn’t going to sit idly by. I’d rather die than watch her marry some loser who can’t find a wife in his own zip code.
Fuck that noise.
“Catfishing is a bad idea,” Dan tells me with a glare as he rejoins us.
“Sabrina hates fishing.”
Dan freezes in place, and the two chuckleheads arguing about whether jazz music needs vocals or not have fallen silent. I’ve missed something.
“Cole,” Casanova groans.
“I’m taking away your phone,” Dan mutters. “You can’t be allowed onto the internet without supervision.”
“Just spit it out.”
“Catfishing is purposely misrepresenting yourself online to deceive another person in the hope of tricking them into a relationship or to scam them out of money,” Casanova says.
“Oh.”
“Yeah, it’s bad.”
“Shit.”
“Don’t worry. You’ll come up with a better plan,” Dan offers in consolation. “Like talking to her.”
“We already matched.” I mutter.
“Dumbass,” Buzz says with a grin. He’s on his third marriage and considering how that trainwreck of a relationship is going he doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
Glancing at my phone I can’t help but wince as Dan and Casanova continue mocking me. Out of the crew I have the least amount of experience with modern dating. Even Buzz managed to find three women willing to marry him.
I’ve only ever wanted to marry one woman. Before I met Sabrina, I didn’t think of myself as the marrying kind. Now I might have torched our relationship before the starting line.
Dumbass indeed.
Sabrina
Meet me at the cemetery.
Ominous. We haven’t even spoken yet and the mysterious stranger I matched with continues to surprise me. He’s obviously a local. I don’t know how I missed a man who thinks a cemetery date is romantic but clearly I did.
There’s Andrew, the nerdy computer programmer, but he’s married to Emma and isobsessedwith his wife. I’m ninety percent sure I overheard them having sex in the haunted corn maze last Halloween.
I was so fucking jealous.
Twenty-eight years old and I’ve never had sex before. Not because no one was interested but because I had no interest in the fumbling boys who saw me as a conquest rather than as a person. One guy tried to sleep with me after he had ignored me while he was out on the town with his friends. Three years later his wife caught him cheating.
A shiver runs down my spine as I walk beneath the wrought iron arch of the cemetery gate. It’s open dawn to dusk and the last rays of the autumn sun burn golden behind the mountain peak, throwing long skeletal shadows across the gravel path.
If the girls knew I was meeting up with a strange man in the cemetery at night they would label me certifiable. He could be anyone. Madison and Meredith would jump straight to serial killer. Lynn would say he’s a cop trying to entrap me with a trespassing charge. Bit paranoid, that one.
