Page 2 of Swiped

Nat could hear the genuine confusion in Sara’s voice.

She loved spending time with Sara . . . when they’d met in their college dorm as the undeclared student who couldn’t “focus for shit” when she was alone in the room and the Comp Sci programmer who pretty much never left it, their friendship had seemed written in the stars.

It still felt that way to Nat. So why didn’t Sara understand that bringing a date would make Nat’s own singledom more obvious to everyone?

It was humiliating enough to constantly hear people crack well-meaning, if unoriginal, jokes about being the creator of a dating app who didn’t have a boyfriend, but having a bestie who’d been single for maybe one week in her entire life didn’t help Nat’s ego.

Of course, this wasn’t Sara’s fault — she was gorgeous and witty and outgoing, and Nat thanked those lucky stars that her friend cared about her enough to try to be her personal ambassador to the world outside their apartment.

It was just that ever since she’d created BeTwo, social interactions tended to follow a very narrow route.

After the questions about how to find the hottest people on the app, or the tipsy confessions from the non-singles about being “so curious”, Nat would get peppered with questions about her own love life, and then, inevitably, her lack thereof.

“Of course, I believe in love,” she would say, truthfully.

“I started BeTwo to help people like me find a partner.” Which, again, was also the truth.

After all, for every one Nat’s past relationships that died on the hill of her introversion, she sharpened her sword for the cause that there had to be other people like her out there — quietly alone and yearning for a way to be quiet and slightly less alone with someone else, but without having to subject themselves to clubs or bars or, God forbid, singles events.

She did very much enjoy and very much miss sex, at the very least (hence the faerie books), and hookups were never really her style.

But then Nat would smile wistfully and say the words that she’d workshopped with her Gen Z assistants.

“But these days, my commitment to BeTwo is my most important relationship.”

And this, despite being a carefully worded smokescreen to push more questions away, was truer than her interrogators ever knew.

Because the real reason there was never going to be an enticing enough dog birthday party, or cute enough outfit in her closet, was that Nat had her own favorite evening activity that was always ready at her fingertips, always asked only the right questions, and always made her feel in control of her romantic prospects.

Even if Sara had told her many times that she thought it was weird. “Except, it’s not like you actually go on BeTwo dates, though, is it?” she asked.

Nat spun out of her closet. “Yes, I do!”

“Speed-dating your user base from the couch doesn’t really count . . .” Sara hesitated. “Or seem all that healthy, to be honest?”

Nat winced. There it was — the pity and the advice.

Anger flared in Nat’s chest as she snatched the Aragorn shirt up off the floor.

She wasn’t going to the party. But she knew that, and had known that the whole time on some level.

The show of an attempt was partly because Nat still liked being invited, but mostly because she didn’t want to wound Sara’s feelings.

But somehow it ended up that Nat was the one feeling prickles of hurt in her chest. “But you going on, like, ten different dates a week is perfectly fine?” she snapped.

Now it was Sara who winced, and Nat instantly regretted her words. That was the trouble with old friends — they knew all too well how to hurt each other, even if they didn’t really mean to. “I’m sorry—”

But Sara shook her head and held up a hand. “It’s fine.” She stood from Nat’s bed and shrugged. “I tried. Have a good night.”

“Wait!” Nat dug around in the makeup bag on her dresser. “Wear this one — it’ll look amazing on you.” She held out a plum-colored and expensive lipstick she’d bought for a work event — the best she could do for a peace offering at the moment.

Sara was gracious enough to accept it with a little twinkle in her dark eyes. “You know I love the goth shit.” She slipped the lipstick into her pocket. “And good luck with your . . . search tonight.”

* * *

Nat tugged her shirt over her hips and smoothed the wrinkles in Aragorn’s smoldering, screen-printed face as she settled into the couch.

She pulled her laptop close, took a fortifying sip of wine, and stretched her neck like an athlete getting ready for the big match.

Then she refreshed the BeTwo user base data.

As the creator of the app, the codebase was her personal playground, and she could see behind the curtain any time she wanted.

Yes, she did the routine maintenance like fixing bugs and monitoring how new features were being used — the kinds of heads-down coding work that people probably assumed was most of her job.

But it was funny how it seemed like users forgot that apps were just things made by a person, not willed into existence by some kind of digital deity.

So, every single part of an app was built by human design and therefore open to human scrutiny.

For Nat, that meant the chance to vet her eligible male users for herself, all without having to create a profile or swipe or send messages.

Code sequences flashed on her screen for a few seconds and her data report blinked out its sum: twenty-seven.

That was the day’s number of new users who met her minimum pre-set compatibility factors: being straight, male, single, and active on the app for at least two months so she had some usage data to pull from.

She also made sure to only include men with pictures in their profiles.

She’d been running a dating app for a few years now, and still didn’t understand why some people never bothered with pictures.

Even the most basic assurances that someone was a real human tended to go a long way — and while she would begrudgingly admit that her AI-detecting code wasn’t perfect yet by any means, she would also happily add that it was probably the best one in the dating app market at the moment.

Nat tucked a wayward strand of curls behind her ear and started her dive into the twenty-seven prospects algorithmically lined up for the role of the love of her life.

Nat opened the first profile in her report, a thirty-three-year-old named Mike who pouted at the reflection of his tanned abs.

Shirtless selfies and in a mirror? Those were two immediate no’s, but she willed herself not to disqualify him right away.

Then she caught a glimpse of an aggressive right-wing political meme that had somehow snuck past her filters and into his photo grid, and gasped out loud in the quiet of her living room.

She knew for a fact that BeTwo had the highest standards for banned content of all the rival apps, because she took special pride in keeping her corner of the internet spic and span and sleaze-free, even if took constant vigilance.

And yet here was Mike’s meme disturbing her peace and parading around her app — these heinous things mutated faster than ooze-covered turtles.

She chewed her lip in concentration as she zeroed in on the offending metadata and zipped up the BeTwo filters once again.

Her racing heart slowed, and she toggled back to Mike’s profile and his spray-tan torso.

Now she felt vindicated that she wasn’t being judgmental when instinct had told her to nix Mike as her prospective suitor just for his muscle-mirror selfie.

She flagged the account and deleted the meme from her app forever; she was just seeing patterns in her data.

Next.

Nat genuinely liked the pics of the second guy — a thirty-six-year-old named Adam with curly hair and a studious expression and, promisingly, no exposed nipples.

He was an Australian, in San Francisco for work as a pastry chef, which checked two of Nat’s boxes: cool accent and cool, non-coding job.

She knew from her nightly user searches that there was a myriad of interesting jobs among the field of eligible men, and so why not partner up with someone who could introduce her to the exciting world of forestry or neurology or lepidoptery — or pastry cheffing.

Sure, Nat loved her work, but she probably didn’t want to talk about it at the dinner table, right?

Especially when said table could be filled with chocolatey, creamy cakes from a dessert professional.

And as for the accent thing, well, sometimes things were added to the wish list just because they were sexy, and accents were sexy.

Nat read on about Adam, the sweets-master from Sydney.

Under the question of what he values in a partner, he’d written, “I want someone who won’t be afraid to absolutely roast me!

Bonus points if it’s in front of my mates or my mum.

” Nat frowned. She’d noticed that wanting to be roasted was suddenly everywhere in her users’ profiles, and she had to say that she didn’t get it.

The desire to be made fun of in front of loved ones wasn’t enough for her to nix Adam from the running, but it did give Nat pause.

So, she looked at his user metadata. No use learning how much he loved The 1975 and wood-fired pizza if he was the kind of creep who only messaged women under twenty-five or, God forbid, sent eggplant emojis to try and get around her finely-tuned anti-dick-pic filters.

She scanned his usage records and saw right away that Adam hadn’t sent any messages in over six months. So why was he popping up as an active user? She scanned his swipe history. It was very active.

Now Nat was intrigued.