3. Thea
THEA
Swipe. Swipe. Swipe.
I’m used to the motion. It’s unconscious, completely disconnected from reality.
I don’t read their profiles, don’t try to glean anything about their personality, their interests. Nope. I’m relying purely on my personal taste, nothing more. Animal instincts. I might as well be a cavewoman in an animal pelt.
Most of the guys I’m swiping left on—rejecting. Every fifteen or so I see one I can stomach. None of them have matched with me yet, but that’s to be expected. My profile is new, so the only guys swiping on me are the ones who are on their phones right now.
And do I really want to match with a guy who’s attached to his phone?
I’ve been on so many dates where they’ve kept their phone face-up on the table the entire time, never letting a text go by without taking their attention from me.
I’ve had to grit my teeth to avoid blurting out “What the fuck?” every time it’s happened.
Ugh. Ladies and gentlemen, the men of the twenty-first century.
Yet I keep swiping. Surely at least one man in this huge-ass city will—
A match!
A little shot of dopamine into my brain. For half a second, I’m a princess awaiting her noble knight.
The feeling is fleeting. Because I’ve matched with guys on the apps before, and I know what to expect. A flirty conversation over text followed by a big fat goose egg of a first date.
Though this guy—damn.
He’s my exact type. Big, hulking. Muscles for days, barely constrained by a tight button-down. Granite jaw, heavily stubbled cheeks, and long golden hair billowing in the breeze. He could be a model for the covers of those bargain-bin romance novels I love so much.
I swipe through the photos. Normally guys lead with their best look, but this guy gets sexier with each one. I hold back a gasp when I swipe to the final photo in his carousel.
He’s literally riding a white stallion.
Where have you been all my life?
I click on his profile. Twistr doesn’t allow its users to input much information. Just a name, sexual orientation, and location.
This guy is looking to date women, and lives in Chicago. Good. Not interested in anything long distance.
His name? Bobby Q.
I scrunch my forehead. Sounds like “barbecue.”
I’ll lead with that. We can share a laugh over our first drink. He looks like a guy who knows his way around a grill. I can imagine him searing thick slabs of steak on a sizzling summer day, wiping the sweat from his brow. Bare-chested, of course.
Is it getting hot in here?
I’ll message him.
Except Twistr doesn’t have a chat feature. All you can do is request a date and time to meet.
I check the time. A little before seven.
I can doll myself up—I still have my makeup on from the news studio; I’ll just have to touch it up a bit—and be ready for a date around eight o’clock tonight.
It’s Thursday, so I’m not expecting him to be available if he works tomorrow.
I have a work event tomorrow night—blah—so it’s either tonight or we wait until Saturday.
I put the information in, and a few seconds later the app beeps.
Bobby is also available to meet starting at eight.
It’s getting real!
Wherever we’re going, it’s a half hour away, so the app tells me to be ready to leave around seven-thirty. It’ll automatically schedule a rideshare to pick me up at my place then. It won’t tell me where I’m going, and I won’t find out until we arrive at our destination.
My hair stands on end at the thought. This sounds too good to be true. Is there a catch?
I quickly search Google for more reviews of the app.
Mostly five stars, with people saying they’ve been taken places they never would have gone on their own, that the Twistr app awoke something in them they didn’t know was there.
The few bad reviews are from people who had bad dates or didn’t enjoy the places they were sent.
But you run that risk no matter where you go.
My concerns put at ease, I start to get ready.
And for the first time in months, I’m excited about a date.
I’m wearing my favorite outfit, a cocktail dress in a blue and white gingham print.
It’s vintage, the only thing left to me by my mother.
The woman who died in childbirth before I could ever meet her.
Emmy took most of her belongings for herself when she married my father, but she didn’t take this.
She said it made her look like a “slutty farm girl.”
Which, to be fair, it kind of does. The dress itself is quite nice, so I don’t quite look like a Halloween stereotype, but the gingham print screams country.
So maybe I look like a sexy farm girl. But you know what? I am a sexy farm girl.
Despite all the bullshit and baggage I carry with me from my childhood, a part of me will always be the little girl from Kettle Springs.
And I love this dress. The one gift my mother gave me.
That and my name.
Dorothea Gaelynn Storm.
Dorothea was a name she always liked. She had some distant great-grandsomething with that name, and she told my father it was timeless.
My middle name, Gaelynn, was her name. I’m proud to carry it.
I scan myself in the mirror. This dress makes my boobs look amazing. I was already gifted in that area—Emmy was transparently jealous of me from the time I started budding—but this dress pushes them up and out to a new level.
I’m putting the finishing touches on my makeup when my phone buzzes. My ride is here. I guess the app connects through Uber or Lyft and takes care of the ride for me. Cool stuff.
I give Dodo a pat on the head and head out the front door, locking it behind me.
I drop my jaw as my ride pulls up. It’s a Mercury Cyclone—a muscle car from the seventies. Black with a long hood, pointed nose with hidden headlights, and aggressive fastback styling.
My father’s dream car. One of the few things I remember about him. He was saving up for it before he got sick. Then all his life savings went to his medical bills.
“A big fat waste of money,” Emmy said. “He died anyway.”
Yeah, fuck her. If that money bought my father even a few minutes more of time on this earth, it was worth it.
But the Cyclone is a good sign. That much I know.
I’m going to meet the love of my life tonight.
I wave and flash a smile to the driver. A woman, thank God. Late forties or early fifties with short hair. I don’t know her name—the app doesn’t say. She gestures me to take a seat in the back.
“Thank you for picking me up,” I say as I shimmy inside.
“You Thea?” the driver asks.
“I am.”
“For Twistr?”
“Right again.”
“Great.” She swipes on her phone that rests in a hands-free device on her dash. “Looks like we’ll be there in twenty-eight minutes.”
“Perfect. I’m meeting my date at eight.”
She nods curtly, and then we drive.
I squint as I try to look at the map on her phone’s tiny screen. “Can I ask where we’re going?”
She shrugs. “No idea. Twistr just gives me coordinates.”
“Great.”
My heartrate spikes slightly. I figured I’d know where we were going once I got in the car, that I could look up a menu or whatever if it’s a restaurant or bar.
I didn’t know if I should eat before I came here, so I threw a protein bar in my purse.
It won’t matter. The butterflies escaping their cocoons in my stomach have killed any appetite.
I pull out my phone and noodle on it for a bit as the driver—I still don’t know her name—drives downtown.
We’re heading toward the Loop, which makes sense.
Lots of stuff to do there. No traffic, as rush hour is pretty much over.
Even if it weren’t, it would be going the other way.
We’re driving south from my neighborhood on the north side of town, just below Evanston.
The silence in the car is deafening.
Normally I love a quiet rideshare, but right now I need to talk. It’ll ease my nerves a bit.
“How long have you been driving for Twistr?” I ask.
The driver draws in a long breath. “A few months. Ever since the app went live.”
It’s early March now, so it must have gone live in December. Maybe November. Probably to coincide with the holidays.
“How’s it been?” I ask.
Another long breath followed by a shrug of the driver’s shoulders. “People seem to like it. Guess they want to try new things. Most people I pick up are young like you.”
“Thank you,” I respond. I don’t know what else to say.
She lets out a short wheezy laugh. “Wasn’t a compliment. Wasn’t an insult either.”
“Okay.” I laugh uneasily.
Maybe the deafening silence is preferable to this forced conversation. I go back to my phone and read the same seven tweets I read two minutes ago.
Finally, we pull off Lake Shore Drive and ease into the heart of downtown. The driver makes a couple of turns until we’re gliding down Michigan Avenue. Finally she turns onto Van Buren and stops in front of a large building glittering with emerald bricks.
I squint. “What is this place?”
The driver gestures. “It’s where you’re going. Thought this place might be it. Lots of Twistr people seem to end up here. You must be the third person I’ve dropped off this week.”
“But where—”
The driver unlocks the doors. “Enjoy your date.”
“O-Okay.” I open the door and step outside. I’ve barely closed the door behind me when the driver rushes off.
I take another look at the building. On second viewing, only about a fifth of the bricks are actually green.
The rest just match the shade because the color is reflecting off avocado-colored sconces lining the building.
An ornate art-deco style door outlined in lime sunbursts stands at the center of the building, and all its windows are obscured by heavy velvet curtains in a lush forest shade.
The building sits on a tall foundation at least seven feet off the ground, and the only way to reach the front entrance is by zigzagging up a ramp that leads up to it. I step on the ramp—
Wow! It’s covered in sparkling golden carpet. I feel like a movie star as I ascend to the entrance. It’s actually a revolving door—hard to tell from the street. I’m about to go inside when the glittering letters of the building’s name etched in an arch above the door catch my eye.
I take a step back to read it.
The Jade Sanctum.