As soon as she hit send, she grimaced. She shouldn’t have said anything. He was going to think she was morbid and pathetic. Not that it should matter what he thought about her. She didn’t know him. He was just a stranger she had reached out to. She should probably go to bed, pull the covers over her head and wait until the morning came.
Instead she checked her phone.
Lonely?
Yes. So lonely.
Me too. My name is John.
My name is Kate.
Wow. Suddenly I’m not lonely anymore. Hi Kate.
Kate smiled down at the phone, charmed, as foolish as that might seem.
Hi John.
She wasn’t sure what to say after that. This really was pretty pathetic. Two lonely people on Christmas grasping for something. Anything.
Tell me why you’re lonely, he wrote.
I lost my mother a couple of months ago. Cancer. She was the only family I had. Dad left when I was a kid so it was always the two of us against the world. I thought I was prepared for life without her. I wasn’t.
She shouldn’t have said that either. It was too much honesty too fast. Surely a man on a dating app didn’t want to talk about her dead mother and the fact she’d been abandoned by her father.
I know grief. I’m sorry about your mother.
He knew grief. The look on his face in the picture said as much. Strange, but she felt more connected to this man than she had to anyone in a long time. Kate could feel tears welling in her eyes, but she blinked them away.
She was tired of crying.
Thank you. But I don’t want to talk about sad things. The point of playing this game is to have fun, right?
I’m not sure what the point of it is. A buddy signed me up. I suppose I was just trying to distract myself, then I saw your picture and I’m not kidding you made me smile.
My assistant signed me up. Said this was how people meet in 2016.
Assistant?
Kate didn’t want to talk about work either. Not that she wasn’t proud of her company. Of the hundred and twenty-two people she employed. But work had a tendency of taking over everything. Mostly because she let it. Besides, some men were intimidated by her success.
She hoped John wasn’t one of those men, but she didn’t want to risk losing his attention.
Just someone I work with, she typed.
Tell me more.
Kate read the last message and struggled with what to say.
About what?
Anything. More about your work, your life, your shoe size. I want to know it all.
I’m a size seven and a half, although I’m convinced my one foot is slightly bigger than the other. I’ve never told anyone that before.
Excellent. That’s exactly what I want to know. Okay, you have rabbit cheeks and a distorted foot. Left or right?
Right. And it’s not distorted, it’s just slightly, ever so slightly, bigger. Now you tell me something.
Sorry. I don’t have any deformities. No animal parts or strangely sized appendages.
Kate took a sip of her wine and could feel the warmth of it in her cheeks now. Talk about having liquid courage.
Really? You’re a man and you admitted you don’t have any large appendages? That’s really brave of you.
Oh CRAP! One. One VERY large appendage.
I’ll have to take your word for it.
Please do not make me send you a dick pic. I think there is something so humiliating about pointing a camera at your cock and thinking yeah, she wants to see this pop up on her phone. I’ll never understand the women who opened Anthony Wiener’s texts.
Kate chuckled, because she thought the same thing. Then she read the message again and found herself squirming over the word cock. A little rough. Maybe crude. Still, just the word affected her. Yeah, it had probably been entirely too long since she had sex.
Fine. Then no boob picture from me either. Although they are very nice.
I bet they are. That’s a secret I can tell you. I really miss breasts. I miss the way they feel in my hand, the way they taste. I think I could get off on that alone, sucking on a woman’s nipple, I’m so desperate.
Kate felt a jolt of desire in her stomach. The idea of a man holding her breasts, sucking her nipple. Not any man. This man. The man in the picture who liked to look at the ocean.
She started to type something, something that might take them down a different path, when she saw another message from him.
I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone there. I don’t want to scare you away. I was being inappropriately honest…
Kate undid what she was writing and answered him instead.
I’m not scared. I like honesty.
It was an opening. A provocation and she knew it. Maybe it would scare him away. Maybe he thought she was some slutty person who used this app for one-night hookups, and he was just one of many guys in a long line of conquests.
She hoped he didn’t think that. She hoped on some level he understood that this was different for her. Heck, she hoped it was different for him too. It was so hard to know when it was only a picture and some words.
Had they been standing together at a bar she might be able to read him better, get a sense of who he was, pick up on signs the phone didn’t allow for. But she didn’t know where he was or who he was. If she was going to do this, she supposed she had to take a leap of faith.