Chapter 8 Ethan
Ethan
Anotification pops up as I’m scrolling through Sip, chatting with a couple women to see if I can squeeze in a quick date before the weekend ends. It’s not ideal, but neither is being turned on by my assistant’s flannel cat pajamas.
New match in your area!
I click on the notification, which redirects me to someone’s profile.
When the name Margot appears in bold letters at the top of the screen, my stomach tilts a little.
It’s not the most common name, but I’m sure there are hundreds of Margots out there.
The odds that it’s my Margot are miniscule, especially since she’s still recovering from her breakup.
No, it can’t be her.
Unfortunately, the profile does very little to confirm or refute this. The main picture is a blurry photo of a door. I tilt my head to the side, trying to make sense of it.
I scroll down to the About Me section, where I find several huge blocks of text. The words robot and amortization jump off the page at me. I keep scrolling, counting the paragraphs as I go.
Fourteen.
There are fourteen paragraphs.
Doesn’t Sip have some sort of word limit? I guess I wouldn’t know. My bio is a couple of short sentences. It never occurred to me to write more than that.
That’s when I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this profile belongs to my newly single assistant.
***
The next morning, Margot arrives twenty minutes late. She’s never late, except one time when there was a small fire in her apartment building and everyone was evacuated.
This time, I know there’s no fire to blame.
I wonder how late she stayed up crafting her opus and photographing her bedroom door.
Maybe scrolling through messages from men who aren’t deterred by the sheer insanity of her profile.
Or worse, maybe she was up late actually responding to their messages.
Knowing Margot, she would think it was rude not to reply to every weirdo who tried to hit on her door.
The idea of her talking to all those creeps on that app brings out a protective streak in me. In a friendly way, of course. It’s clear that Margot isn’t ready to start dating again. She’s still emotionally fragile, and some men pick up on that. Some capitalize on it. I won’t let that happen to her.
Margot stays planted at her desk most of the day. At six o’clock, the rest of the office is empty, but Margot is still working. When I step out of my office and stop in front of her desk, she keeps typing. Eventually, her eyes pull away from her computer screen and find mine.
“I’m just finishing up those reports you wanted,” she says.
“They can wait until tomorrow. Let’s go grab a drink.”
She furrows her eyebrows at me and frowns. “Right now?”
I nod. “Yeah, I need to talk to you about something.”
“Oh… okay,” she says slowly. Her eyes search mine for a second before she begins to gather her things and shut down her computer.
The bar is a short walk from the office. I order a local craft beer, while Margot looks queasy at the mere mention of wine and orders a ginger ale instead. That might explain a few things about her foray into online dating last night.
She takes a tiny sip of her drink and glances up at me, looking uncertain. “So, did you need to talk about work or is this more of a… friend hang?”
“A friend hang?” I repeat with a laugh.
“I don’t know!” Margot says defensively. “It’s not like we routinely go out for drinks together after work.”
“No, Margot, this is not a ‘friend hang.’ This is an intervention.”
A skeptical laugh bubbles up from her throat. “And you thought a bar would be the best place for that?”
“Not an alcohol intervention—an online dating intervention.”
The color drains from Margot’s face, except for the rosy blooms high on her cheeks. “How do you know about that?” Each word stumbles over the last.
“I got a notification on my app.”
“Oh,” Margot says, eyebrows flying up her forehead. “Does that mean we… matched?”
Judging by the way she cringes, she’s either very disappointed or deeply terrified by the possibility.
I shake my head. “No, it means that you’re a new female user in the Denver area under the age of forty-five.”
Relief visibly washes over her features. She releases a breath and holds out a hand, as if to stop me. “Whoa there, don’t get too carried away with the flattery.”
I laugh and take a sip of my beer. “Don’t worry, I won’t. In fact, I don’t have a single flattering thing to say about your dating profile.”
Leveling a doubtful glare at me, Margot objects, “Well, you’re not exactly my target audience, Ethan.
I’m sure there are men out there who appreciate…
” As she continues speaking, I pull up her dating profile on my phone and set it on the bar.
Her eyes drift down to the screen and her mouth clamps shut.
“What’s this?” she asks, furrowing her brow in confusion.
“That,” I say, “is fourteen paragraphs about the movie I, Robot that you wrote last night.”
“I’ve never seen I, Robot.”
“Yes, that’s very obvious, but just in case there was any lingering doubt, you actually mention that there at the bottom.”
Margot’s lips move slightly as she scrolls to the last paragraph and starts reading. She takes a deep breath and lifts her eyes to meet mine.
“Okay, so this isn’t the best dating profile.”
“Wait ‘til you see the profile picture.”
She rushes to scroll to the top of the screen and squints. “Is that…?”
“Your bedroom door? I believe so.”
Margot presses a palm to her face as if she’s trying to hide behind it and shakes her head. “I’m just going to delete the whole thing,” she says, fishing her phone out of her purse with her other hand.
“Don’t do that,” I tell her. “I’m going to help you fix it. Let me see your phone.”
With a skeptical look and her finger still hovering over the screen, one click away from deleting the app, Margot weighs her options. Eventually, she sighs and passes her phone to me.
There are three salvageable parts of her profile: her name, her city, and the fact that she’s interested in men. Everything else has to go. I start updating each section until one particular question catches my eye. Actually, it’s Margot’s answer that makes my brows furrow.
“Did you make a mistake here?” I ask. “It says you’re interested in long-term, short-term, and one-night stands.”
As soon as the words leave my mouth, I regret them. It’s none of my business. Margot would have noticed the error eventually and fixed it. But as her friend, I’d rather she didn’t have to learn the hard way from a thousand perverted messages.
Silence stretches out between us. When I finally glance up at Margot, her cheeks are bright pink. She gives an almost imperceptible shake of her head and looks anywhere but at me when she says, “No, that’s right.”
I nod and clear my throat. Leaving that section untouched, I move on to her biography.
The corners of my mouth twitch into a half-smile as I skim through her rambling opus once more before deleting the entire thing.
My fingers fly across the screen, typing up a quick but clever enough replacement.
When I’m done, I open the camera app and hold the phone up.
“What are you doing?” Margot asks, shifting nervously in her seat.
“You need a new picture. Unless, of course, your bedroom door is looking for love.”
“Right,” she says, fussing with her sweater and correcting her posture. She reaches up to remove her glasses, but I stop her.
“Leave them on. They’re very…” I bite back the word cute because it feels like it crosses a line. “… you,” I say instead.
Margot nods and poses for the camera. Her lips part in a tight, weird smile. Somehow, she manages to produce an extra chin that I’ve never seen on her before. Her eyes flare wide, and for some reason, she stops blinking.
“Try to look less scared,” I tell her.
My words have the opposite effect.
In Margot’s mind, this translates to “find something fancier to do with your left hand.” After some more fidgeting, she balls her hand into a fist and rests it under her chin.
There’s nothing supporting her elbow. It’s just dangling there while she poses like her time machine just crash landed in the middle of an 80s glamour shoot at the Sears portrait studio.
She’s overthinking this. Telling her so will only make matters worse.
“Okay,” I say gently, dropping the camera.
“Put your elbow here.” I tap the wooden bar beside her.
“Good. Now sit up straighter,” My hands move to her shoulders, lightly directing her then reach up to pull a tendril of hair forward.
I sit back and admire my work before grabbing the phone again and pointing the camera at her.
In that short time, her tight, awkward smile reappears.
“Okay, now say cheese,” I say.
The word cheese is forbidden between us due to a long-running inside joke. The unexpectedness of it makes Margot laugh, her smile transforming into something genuine and charming as I snap a few photos.
After uploading one, I pass the phone back to Margot. “All done.”