Chapter 7 #2
I still couldn’t fathom why a man of such magnificence would want to go out with me. His rugged stubble blended into his tanned, chiselled looks so poetically and his green eyes in his profile pic seemed to be sizing me up, almost daring me to try my luck with him.
After a couple of days of back and forth, I went to meet Harry in a bar in the city, nearby to where he worked and directly after we both finished work.
I was completely unrelaxed whilst leaning up at the bar.
Harry hadn’t answered my text asking him what he wanted to drink.
That meant that I would have to do some excruciating small talk at the bar when he arrived.
As it turned out, I had no time to think of said small talk, as Harry was already walking through the door of Corky’s Wine Bar. I could almost feel my tongue roll down my chin to form a makeshift red carpet for him to continue his illustrious entrance.
It was the first time I saw his dimples in their full glory, as he smiled to the doorman, brushing his wavy, hazelnut mane off his face to reveal the other dimple. He even seemed to walk in slow motion.
The barmaid couldn't take her eyes off of him either. I gave her a look as if to say, ‘Yes, I am completely out of my depth’, and she seemed to nod in agreement at the telepathy between us.
Harry was clearly excited to be out and hadn’t stopped smiling since he’d arrived. “I know. I look like shit, don’t I?” were his first words.
“No! God, no. You look… good,” I stammered.
“I know… I was joking… gotcha!” said Harry, firing some playful finger guns.
I laughed awkwardly.
“That was jokey arrogance, by the way. I’ve actually got a really bad spot. Look,” he added, pointing to it and curved his top lip in disgust at himself, still managing to look sexy as fuck.
“Oh. Gotcha. And urgh, gross,” I said, somewhat relieved.
“I did get a new shirt, though.”
“It’s nice,” I said.
“Not this one. It hasn’t bloody arrived from Vinted yet. Anyway… cocktail?”
I smiled awkwardly again.
There was only one thing for it: Mojitos––the classic cocktail for the man who didn’t know that much about cocktails.
“Mojito?” I offered.
“I suppose so, seeing as it’s the only cocktail I know. I only dropped the old c-bomb to show off. I’d actually prefer a beer.”
Was this man perfect or what?
“Just gonna put it out there. Mojitos are actually two for one,” I said, half-jokingly.
He laughed, and so I went ahead and ordered two Mojitos anyway, albeit just because I was so nervous that I couldn't even structure the sentence to ask him what beer he wanted.
As the night went on, we both got a bit banjaxed on some very sub-standard Mojitos that seemed to flow ready-made from a weathered white container, and gradually I relaxed into Harry’s dry, northern sense of humour.
Everything funny that he delivered was done with a deadpan expression that made him look like he didn't even know he was being funny, which of course made him funnier.
At the end of the evening, we were both utterly plastered.
Plastered enough for me to have the confidence to pull him in for…
The Kiss. Our mouths fitted each other like shapes in the opening minute of a game of Tetris .
He groaned lightly as we kissed, causing the force to awaken in my cock and making it hard to resist sliding my hand up his now untucked shirt.
Almost immediately after we disengaged from The Kiss, Harry insisted that we find a hotel to stay in for the night, what with him living all the way out in Essex, and him also having a shitload of disposable income.
The promise of ‘no funny-business’ was sealed with a high ten.
Well, almost. We were so smashed that we completely missed each other’s hands. Nobody mentioned it, though.
We found a swanky hotel nearby with the assistance of a reputable travel app, and Harry insisted on paying for it. I made a loose, fumbled promise about getting the next one sometime, but knew damn well that it wasn't going to be a hotel of this calibre.
On our way up to the room, Harry thought that a corridor would probably be an interesting place to playfully pin me to the wall and kiss me within an inch of my life, gradually working his hand south to unbutton my jeans, but I had other ideas.
The sight of too many discarded room-service trolleys made me think that a SWAT team of hotel staff could turn up at any moment from all directions, which rendered me flaccid and made Harry pull away and look at me with his puppy dog green eyes.
“It’s the shirt, isn't it? Bloody dancingking1989 and his shite delivery policies,” moaned Harry.
“No, no. It’s the cock, actually. It’s just out here, I get a bit… let’s just say me and The Captain here don’t do well in public. I had a bit of an ordeal once, choking on something in a Wetherspoons.”
Harry narrowed his eyes at me.
“That sounded better in my head. Come on, let’s go to the room.”
We ushered each other into the hotel room, picking up from where we left off in the corridor.
As Harry made sure the door was firmly closed, he grabbed me and kissed me again, becoming increasingly more passionate, whilst walking backwards towards the bed, pulling me with him.
Neither of us could wait for whatever was about to happen, despite us promising to be on our best behaviour, but that was when Harry stopped in his tracks and spoke, gulping down an ecstatic breath caused by our explosive kiss.
“I… I’m not in for anything serious. I just wanted to say that upfront. I do totally like you and I’m having such a fun evening,” he said with a smile as I stared at him expectantly, waiting for him to finish, well… breaking my heart?
For some reason, my brain told my face to smile, then kicked the following words out from between my lips:
“Oh God, me neither.”
The words were acting as a kind of buffer while I processed this. Here was a man I had a phenomenal connection with that was funny, gorgeous, generous, sexy and lots of other things I was so excited to find out about. I suppose what I really thought was Oh well, I’m sure I can change his mind.
The mood in the room had changed for sure and by the way Harry stilled, I wasn’t the only one that noticed.
“I just wanted to be honest is all,” he whispered.
“Absolutely. I get it, you’re not ready to settle down yet. Right?”
Harry looked sullen.
“Something like that. Fuck, I’ve really killed the moment, haven’t I? Sorry,” he said.
“Well, yeah, I think you’ll have to take the hit for this one.”
Harry playfully shoved my shoulder as a smile crept back onto his face.
“Dick.”
“Oh, you noticed,” I said, signalling down to the utterly inappropriate erection bulging in my jeans.
“Shall we just carry on with what we were doing, then?” he said.
“What kind of monsters would we be if we didn’t?” I replied.
And so, we stripped to our Thursday pants and carried on enjoying each other… but not too much; we were being good, after all.
After a while, when the ravishing of each other had sobered us up somewhat, Harry leaned into me, kissing my neck, then asked me the question I was dying to hear:
“Mini bar?”
“Mini bar,” I replied, excitedly.
Half an hour later, we’d demolished the mini bar––Pringles, Mars Bar, Nobby’s Nuts, poshcorn et al––and promptly passed out.
There were going to be two gigantic hangovers tomorrow, which ensured that both of our Friday nights would consist of a visit from a man on a moped and hours of poking around on streaming service menus trying to find something decent to watch .
It was everything a perfect first date should be, except that Harry was the person that was about to change everything for me. He was about to teach me the ways of the Serial Online Dater.
In fact, it’s safe to say that he was the one that truly set me off on the path to the dark side.
As you’re about to find out, he was the Emperor Palpatine to my Anakin Skywalker; the Tyler Durden to my Edward Norton; the John Kreese to whoever that shitty blonde kid was in The Karate Kid. You get the gist.
In the morning, I didn’t find the conversation with Harry awkward at all.
The morning-after drunken sex with a stranger can sometimes be a tricky affair at the best of times.
One doesn’t always want their sparring partner to stick around for long, but in Harry’s case, I didn’t feel the slightest need to concoct an escape alibi.
I liked him. I’d actually met somebody through the medium of 5G that I really liked––and relatively quickly in the grand scheme of things.
Yes, I liked Ben as well, but Harry just seemed less… well, dangerous. The dating apps had served their purpose. That was what it was invented for––to find a soul mate and stick with him. And Mum was going to love him.
So, being old-fashioned and a bit of a square, I asked Harry out again; as you do.
What he replied with really knocked me for six. It wasn’t a good old-fashioned rejection, which I could have taken and been upset about for a few days until I’d managed to entice someone else out. Oh no. I could have dealt with that.
It was much worse:
“I really enjoyed last night.”
No, not that bit .
“Look, I really like you and I was honest with you last night, when I said I didn’t want anything serious, but I feel I should tell you something else. I’ve got a third date with someone next week,” said Harry, wincing into himself.
“Ah, well… that’s… oh,” I stumbled out.
Harry looked as crestfallen as I felt.
“The worst thing is, I really like you, but here’s the thing…”
I nodded to urge him on.
“It’s just, I always see you online and I kind of get the impression that I’m probably not the only date you had lined up either?”
Damn him for being spot on. But surely that didn’t matter now that we’d met each other? Or did it? The fact I had to think about it meant that it just might.
“So, I’m thinking that maybe we should just chalk last night up as a fun one and go about our business,” he continued.
“Yeah, okay. Look, I guess if fate wants to put us together again, it’ll do its damnedest, eh?”
He reached out to touch my arm.
“Totally. I’ve got a couple of months left on my subscription, anyway. It’d be a shame to waste it,” replied Harry.
I directed a quizzical look towards his face. Now, us Brits like to get value for money, and that goes double for dating apps. Triple, even.
However, I’d never really experienced an attitude anything like this before. The act of dating never used to cost anything before I discovered the apps, so I was never concerned with getting value for money.
I thought about it. Dates were the product that the dating apps were selling you. You didn’t want to spend ￡30 to unlock all the features only to find your soul mate after one day. What a waste of cash that would be, eh?
Wow. So, this was how these online potential love interests really behave?
“I was joking about that last bit, by the way,” he added. “Third date, remember? I’m not a complete floosy.”
Ah, maybe not.
Harry went on to tell me he had been online dating for a few years already, and had gone and got himself a bit addicted, the silly sausage. It seemed to me that he had just wanted to take full advantage of the extensive menu that was being fired at him from all angles––and why not, eh?
This was the first moment when I thought that finding a mate online could actually start to form a real addiction. So far in my life, I hadn't developed an addiction for anything.
I heard that addiction was hereditary, and it just so happened that Mum was a recovering alcoholic, fifteen years dry. If it wasn’t going to be drinking, then maybe dating would be my addiction?
Well, at least it’s not one of the deadly ones, I suppose. Or is it?
I shook myself out of that train of thought.
No. I wasn't going to get myself addicted to all this stuff. I was going to find a soul mate, and make my mother proud. If not Harry, then someone else. After all, an actual relationship was everything that I had always wanted. I think it was what we all wanted, deep down—wasn’t it?
Or at least what we’re all programmed to want.
From an early age, we were led to believe that our soul mate was out there, and we spent our entire lives searching for them. Whether we admitted it or not, we were always on the scout.
The white noise of thousands of dating profiles was actually becoming more of an obstacle than an aid to the cause. I’d gone into this with the sole intention of finding something I’d never experienced before––that elusive feeling of true love.
Harry was dressed and ready to summon his Uber XL. With his hair tousled but still somehow magnificent-looking, I couldn’t believe that I was about to let this man walk out of my life.
When we were downstairs, he paid the ￡180 hotel bill without so much as a flinch, and we stumbled through the lobby to the awaiting cold, fresh air outside.
It was niggling me so much that I’d found someone so perfect who actually seemed to like me, yet was too stubborn to take things any further.
But at the same time, I thought ‘screw it’ and could feel myself voluntarily drifting towards the dark side of the dating app.
“Friends?” said Harry, offering me a pinky.
“I guess,” I replied, hooking it with mine in ever such a lacklustre fashion.
“Keep in touch, you,” he said, followed by a tightly-pressed kiss on the lips.
Yum. Raspberry lip balm. Hmm, I think I prefer that to watermelon.
As he climbed into his Uber XL, I could feel myself drifting to the dark side and almost felt the Darth Vader helmet slide down on to my head, like in that old space movie (I forget the one).