Fading (4 page)

I’m twenty minutes early to my date. My
blind
date. As soon as we had pizza and beer, (Nate refused to drink hot chocolate) last night, Nate and Lexi wasted no time jumping on the Lilith’s-ready-to-date wagon.

It wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be, once we got past all the crazy ideas first, of course. There was Nate’s suggestion of speed dating, Lexi suggested that I move to the city and fall for an arrogant CEO since that always works out in books, apparently. So after wading through all the bullshit, they came up with something that wasn’t completely crazy, only if a little less tolerable than getting a root canal, they told me about a friend they have who is both single and looking to date. When I started asking questions about him though, they both quickly shut up and left me more than a little worried. I agreed anyway though, naturally, since they double teamed me and one of them is hard enough to say no to, the two of them together could stop wars, I’m sure of it.

It might be nice though, I mean, I’m not putting any expectations on this. I’ve never really dated before. With Gavin, we just kind of happened, we were friends and then it just grew to be more from there.

So here I sit, twenty six years old, alone, wearing a small black dress and waiting to meet whoever it is that will be my first date ever.

Pathetic.

“You must be Lilith,” A deeply amused voice breaks me from my self-pity. A deeply amused and familiar voice.

“You have got to be fucking with me.” I raise my eyes only to be met with brilliant brown ones full of laughter.

Jason.

While I try to come up with something to say that doesn’t include a dozen cuss words or a way to send my best friend and her boyfriend to hell for all of eternity, my walking, talking nightmare folds himself into the chair opposite me.

“You look lovely this evening.” He smiles charmingly at me.

“What-shit-who-damn-no-fuck!”

Nope. I’m not there yet.

I watch as Jason orders himself a drink and a refill for me, he watches the waitress walk away before he turns his attention back to me. “Okay, so I’m guessing you didn’t know about this. Well, that’s not true, I know you had no idea that your date was with me, but we figured you need to be eased into this.”

“And you’re the one who’s going to do that?” I almost laugh.

“Well, I admit that it’s not the best of ideas but you have to agree that it has its good points. Like, we already know each other, so conversation is easy and you know that I won’t try anything funny with you at the end of the date. All we have to do is treat this like a practice run, just pretend you don’t know me but you’re struggling to see past your attraction to me.”

“Are you being serious? I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.”

“Of course I’m being serious. What’s wrong with this? I’ve done a lot of dating, I can teach you how to make a date go from good to a night that no one will ever forget.”

“Jason,” I smile my thanks to the waitress when she places our drinks down and wait until she’s gone before I look back at him. “You’re forgetting one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Seeing you makes me want to throw up.”

“Oh come on, don’t be dramatic. So we don’t really get along like we used to. That doesn’t mean we can’t start over. I’ll be your friend and I’ll help you find someone who’s good enough for you.”

“That’s not why I’m doing this.”

“Then why are you doing this?”

Because I need a distraction.

Because I don’t want to sit at home alone anymore.

Because I almost destroyed my best friends relationship.

“I’m doing this because I want to have some fun. Don’t you think I’m due some? Look at my life, I mean, shit, you’ve been there for the majority of it, and I’ve seen more death and devastation than any one person should ever have to. I’m single, I have a full time job, I have my life – or well, most of it – figured out, if I want to have some damn fun for a change, then that’s what I’m going to do. That’s what your twenties are for, right?”

“Yes, they are.” He agrees easily.

“Right.” I nod at him, I’m not sure why, it’s not like I need his permission to date.

“So, let’s get started.” He settles back into his chair and flashing a charming grin my way.

“Get started on what?” I frown. What did I miss?

“Us. We’re going to date. Well, not really. It’ll be a practice run.”

“Wait…What?” I frown even harder and shake my head. “Jason, there is no ‘us’. There never will be. And we’re also not going to date, fake or otherwise.”

“Lilith.”

“Jason.”

“Why not?”

“Umm… well, let’s see, there’s the fact that I don’t like you. Isn’t that enough?”

“Nope. I think you’re just scared of falling in love with me.” He smirks but he must see something in my expression because it falls from his fast so fast that it’s almost like it was never there. “I didn’t-

“I wouldn’t fall in love with you.” I cut him off and stand. “I did that once, and if you’ll remember it didn’t turn out very good for me. If there’s one thing, the only thing that you taught me, Jason, it was that you can’t help who you fall in love with, just like you can’t force someone to love you back.” I walk away from him and out of the restaurant without looking back.

At 3:30AM with no sign of sleep coming anytime soon, I consider taking something to force it, but discard the idea and pull out my laptop instead.

The blind date was a bust and since it was set up by two best friends, I’m clearly going to have to try and find someone to date myself because I can’t, or rather, won’t, trust them to even suggest another date. Who knows what else they’d try to pull in order to meddle with my affairs.

So with the two people I trust most out of the picture, I do the only thing that makes sense; I join a dating site. I mean, how bad can it be, right?

It seems simple enough. I fill in the boxes for my email address, date of birth and address. I make up a password and click submit with a smug smile.

Piece of cake.

“Holy shit.”

I blink at the screen three times before I refresh it, when the same page pops back up, I realize this isn’t going to be as easy as I originally thought. The first – of what I assume to be one of many – page of the questionnaire, from what I can tell has no real system. The questions range from the amusing – Do you own a car? What does that have to do with anything? – To the downright intrusive – What is your yearly income? – But I go through them and answer them with nothing but the complete truth. Once I’ve filled out my general stats, I’m asked to headline my profile. I use the complete truth for this too and settle on: I’m not the one you’re looking for, trust me. Can’t get much clearer than that.

Have you ever had to describe yourself in one hundred characters? It’s not easy.

My name is Lilith, I’m twenty six years old and besides working for my father, I don’t do much.

You can’t really say much about yourself. Instead I settle on mentioning my main traits.

Even though I’m twenty six, I have only been in one relationship. I’m not looking to marry you. Don’t worry.

Thankfully, the ‘describe your ideal first date’ portion of the questionnaire is optional, so I skip that. Though, I was tempted to put – anything that doesn’t include being set up by best friend to go out with someone I dislike immensely.

Once I’ve answered all the questions and filled out the descriptions, I move on to the next stage which is uploading a photo of myself. With a shrug, I open up the camera app on my phone and smile into it before uploading it. The photo captures me in my pyjamas with my glasses on and my hair in a messy bun on top of my head and I mean, besides the pyjamas, that’s how I am ninety percent of the time, so I set it as my profile picture and move onto the next step.

A personality test.

Wow. This site doesn’t mess around.

It’s a multiple choice questionnaire, which amuses me greatly as I have to disagree and agree with whether I’m a good liar, a strong believer in politics can ruin a relationship and whether faking an orgasm is acceptable.

“You cannot be serious.” I mutter when a second questionnaire pops up, this one has one hundred questions and is supposed to assess my relationship needs. I can guarantee that a hundred questions will not find my soul mate. I know this because he’s dead.

By the time I submit the questionnaire and the psychological one loads, I realize that they were all optional and skip the rest of them. My profile appears and a small box tell me that I already have eleven new messages. I click on my inbox and mentally prepare myself for what I might find.

The first few I don’t bother replying to, I just delete them because they were all variations of ‘Hi.’ I’m not sure why someone would send a simple ‘Hi,’ I mean, you could put a little more effort into it. I also delete all the ones that include ‘babe’ or ‘baby’ just because it makes me think that they either didn’t do anything beyond look at my photo or they just copy and paste the same message to everyone. For every one message I delete, another three come into my inbox and before I know it, I’m up to thirty unread messages. As I work my way through them, I come up with a system; I delete all the ones that don’t say anything beyond ‘hello’, delete the ones that ask if I’m up for some fun – if I thought they meant a trip to the carnival, I’d reply, but something tells me they have an entirely different concept of fun to me. But I make it a rule to reply to every message that makes me laugh and every one that makes me think a little.

One guy asks
‘If your mind was a room and somebody was to walk into that room, what would they see?’
which I have to admit is pretty good, so I reply to him and then check out his profile while we message back and forth for a while. I learn that he’s two years older than me and he works away a lot which is why he’s up so late tonight. He has an ex-wife which I find mildly disturbing since twenty eight seems a little young to me for someone to be married and divorced but I push my opinion to the side and set up a date with him and two others.

Around 5am my eyes start burning and it’s more challenging keeping them open than I have the energy for so I reconfirm my date times, swap numbers with them and shut down the laptop before taking myself up to bed. I’m not sure if I should be excited or nervous about my dates but it’s more than what I had going on in my life than a few days ago, so I decide to put it in the positive column. Now all I have to do is tell Lexi about it and try to work out an escape plan with her, hopefully I won’t need one.

My first date is with Mark. He’s a little older than me, he works in I.T and from what I’ve seen so far, is still single because he qualifies for the most boring man to have ever have had the pleasure of breathing air.

I run my eyes over him again as he explains some sort of system diagnostics thing, he’s been talking a lot, where as I’ve just been looking a lot, which, to be fair, there’s a lot to look at. His cheekbones are to die for but after much consideration, I’ve deduced that they would not look good on me but Lexi could rock the hell out of them. He also has those kind of eyes that are so blue that you just want to dive into them and swim around for hours. And his hair, it’s just such a perfect shade of blond that I’m already trying to figure out a way to discreetly take a photo of it on my phone to check if my hairdresser can copy it and add some highlights to my own.  If he’d just shut up for longer than ten minutes, this date would go from to kind of bad to amazing.

I briefly consider using the escape plan that Lexi and I came up with last night but since she seemed worried about the whole thing anyway, I don’t want to make it worse by telling her I want to ditch my first date.

Besides, for all I know, this is how a date goes, maybe I’m just here to listen to him talk about himself. Well, he’s not actually talking about himself as a person, he’s just talking about his work. I have to give him points for being dedicated though.

When our appetisers get taken away, I slip to the bathroom and take two of the pills that I keep in my bag. It’s a little early to be taking another dose, but I justify that if I don’t, I’ll end up fantasizing about killing my date and that’s a road I don’t want to go down.

I return to the table and Mark has a pleasant, patient smile in place. “So, what do you do when you’re not working?” I ask in a lame attempt to stop the computer talk.

“I take pretty girls out to dinner.” He grins at me and it takes everything I have to smile and not do what I want to do which is to roll my eyes.

By the time our food arrives, my pills have kicked in and the only thing I have to focus on is not letting my eyes roll into the back of my head. They may be glazed over and though they are aimed at my date, I can’t actually see him, at the moment he’s just a fuzzy outline of himself and his voice is more of a buzz than an actual sound. I can decipher when I need to laugh or just make an encouraging sound and it seems to be working. Plus, the food is really great.

“So you must go on a lot of dates.”

“What?” I shake my head, not sure if I’ve heard him correctly or if I just imagined him saying it.

“You must go on a lot of dates?” He repeats but phrases it as a question this time.

“Umm, no, not really.” I answer semi-truthfully.

“Why not? You’re beautiful, you don’t constantly talk about yourself – which is a major plus, by the way.” He winks at me and something uncurls in my stomach – something, not so great. “Oh, and there’s that look in your eyes that tells me I won’t be going home alone tonight.”

This time when he grins, I kind of want to punch him in the face.

Not going home alone?

Look in my eye?

What the hell?

“Are you drunk?” I ask slowly.

“No…” He frowns at me but I’m not deterred.

“High? Are you high?” My voice has now risen a few decibels.

“No…”

“Then you’re just hallucinating? Because there is definitely no look in my eye that says we’re going home together tonight.”

“So you’re not going to have sex with me?”

“I don’t even know you. We just met less than an hour ago.”

“So?”

“What do you mean so? I’m not going to have sex with someone I just met. I like to know more about someone before I do that. Did you honestly think that that’s how this was going to end?”

“Well… yeah,” He looks so confused that I almost feel sorry for him.

“What is it about me that made you think that I was a sure thing?”

“I didn’t...” He looks around the room as if trying to find some way out of this conversation and I’m stuck between my anger and finding this whole thing funny.

“Look, Matt-”

“Mark.”

“What?”

“My name is Mark, not Matt.” Now he’s angry.

“Okay. Sorry. Mark, this is obviously going downhill fast, why don’t we just get the bill and call it a night?”

“That’s it? You want to leave?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, what else are we going to do?” Now he’s just confusing me again.

“You can’t just cut a date short before we’ve even finished it.”

I decide not to mention that cutting it short and ending it before it’s finished is exactly the same thing and instead call upon some patience. “Mark, seriously now, can you honestly say this date is going well?”

“You don’t think it’s been good?” He asks and I can’t tell if he’s joking or not.

Not if good means that I’d like to hit myself over the head with the wine bottle, no.

“I’m not sure, I just don’t think we’ve clicked.” I settle with instead of saying what I really want to say.

“So that’s it. We didn’t click over dinner so you’re leaving?”

“Why are you making such a big deal about this?”

“I’m not. We should end it here and now, I couldn’t date you anyway. You’re a quitter.”

I don’t bother to reply to that. Instead, I get my purse, leave enough money on the table to cover my half of dinner and I leave him sitting there without a backward glance.

Was that my fault?