Page 23 of Swiped

Sara stumbled in through the door with their stack of mail. Her curls stuck to her forehead with sweat, and her whole body seemed to droop. “Why is mail still a thing?” she sighed, dropping a few heavy bags on the floor.

Nat perked up. “Hey, can I borrow your shoes again tonight? Is that cool?”

“Yeah, fine.” Sara eyed her roommate with a weary caution. “So, it’s the big meetup! How are we feeling?”

“Technically we’re just meeting tonight, but I feel like I already know him, you know?” Nat blinked her sharp green eyes. “Meeting in person just feels like a formality at this point.” She stretched and cracked her neck. “We’ve got so much in common!”

“Cool, yeah, good luck!” Sara fidgeted by the sofa. “Hey, so did you get a chance to look at my résumé that I gave you the other day? My apprenticeship is almost over and I’ve got to submit a formal job app before the salon will let me wield scissors around the public.”

Nat winced and covered her face. The text exchange where Sara had asked for her help resurfaced in her mind like a phantom.

“Oh shit! I’m sorry. This whole BeTwo thing is just .

. .” She looked at Sara with guilt. “They’re totally gonna hire you!

You don’t need help from some coder who’s never had a real job. ”

Sara nodded to downplay her disappointment. “It’s fine.” She slipped some envelopes into her tote bag as she pulled out a bottle of wine and shot Nat a guilty look. “I’m probably just gonna send it in. It’s due tonight.”

Nat wasn’t sure what the envelope thing was about, but she didn’t want to ask while still feeling the tension from the forgotten résumé. “List me as a reference though, if you want?” she offered. “Or, like, the pics of my hair if that’s a thing?”

Sara nodded and grabbed a wine opener from the kitchen. “Cool, I will.”

Nat hopped up. “Yes, go get it!” She clapped her hands. “OK, now I’m gonna go grab the shoes, get dressed and go on my date.” She gave Sara a quick squeeze. “Wish me luck!”

* * *

Rami stared at his eyebrows in the bathroom mirror. Were they OK? As far as eyebrows go? It was like saying a word so many times that it lost all meaning and sounded like gibberish. He had two hairy clumps of gibberish on his face. Should he do something about that?

Tonight was his second date with Gemma. They’d exchanged numbers after the whole shopping cart incident, and already met up once for a beer (for him) and a kombucha (for her).

It’d gone surprisingly well. He’d confessed his situation of being in a livestreaming dating competition as soon as they’d sat down.

He made sure to paint Nat as not just his competitor, but an ideological scourge on society with her capitalist faith in algorithms and, if you asked him, all the technology that was supposed to bring us together and yet only pushed us farther apart.

He might have been playing to his audience a little bit.

But it worked. Gemma had nodded enthusiastically to his screed against dating apps.

She, too, felt they were capitalistic and she, too, had an innate mistrust of technology.

(Rami had left out the part about him being a coder for his own app.

It hadn’t seemed like the right time to bring it up.) In fact, Gemma was a self-proclaimed Luddite, and even if she hadn’t gotten Rami’s joke about smashing cotton mills on their next date, she hadn’t balked at the prospect of a second date, either.

She tried to live as analog of a life as possible, having been converted after a profound experience with mushrooms and a pyrotechnic statue of a giant hog at Burning Man.

Rami had never been to Burning Man, because Rami had never wanted to do anything less in his life than go to Burning Man.

But Gemma had pretty eyes and full lips, and seemed to think Rami was, against all prior evidence to the contrary from other women, absolutely amazing.

Ian’s phone blared its aggressively long ringtone for what seemed like the millionth time. Still, it broke the spell of staring at his eyebrows, and Rami headed to the source of the sound in the living room.

“That’s, like, the seventh alarm, Ian,” he said to his roommate, who was stretched out on the sofa with his head on a stack of folded towels.

“It’s not an alarm,” said Ian without opening his eyes.

“Is someone actually calling you? On the phone?”

“Looks like it.” Ian sighed.

“A voice call is rarely a good sign, man. You should answer it.”

Ian rolled over and fixed Rami with a bleary gaze. “Deflecting anxiety about your date onto others is like . . .” He trailed off and closed his eyes. “Cutting the same bird twice in the mirror,” he mumbled.

Rami frowned and poked his roommate’s shoulder. “Hmm, even weirder metaphor than usual. And I’m not nervous to go out with Gemma, at all, actually. Why would I be?”

Ian sat up and relit the glass pipe lying on the coffee table. He took a huge inhale and gestured at Rami while holding in the smoke, as if to say, Because of you .

Rami got the idea. “Did it strike me as odd that she carries a flip phone from the mid-2000s? Or that she literally told me what time it was when I asked if she was on TikTok?” He began to pace. “Yes. Yes, it did.”

Ian nodded through another cloud of smoke as his phone blasted them with another robotic siren.

Rami stopped pacing. “Seriously, man. Do you want me to just answer it for you?”

“It’s the Green Party. They’re relentless in all the wrong ways.” Ian grabbed the phone and silenced it. “It’s their tragedy, and also mine for voting my principles.” He gestured with the smoldering pipe for Rami to continue. “You were saying?”

“OK, well, yes, I did think some things about Gemma were odd.” Rami resumed his pace around the room. “Then I realized that ‘odd’ is just another word for ‘uncommon,’ which is just another word for ‘special.’ And that is what she is.”

Ian opened his mouth to speak, but sputtered into a wracking cough.

“What this is, I mean,” Rami corrected himself. “A special opportunity to connect with someone totally outside of our digital conditioning. Sociologists would kill for this!” He stroked his freshly shaven chin. “I could do a post on Medium about it, maybe.”

Ian set down the pipe and curled up around the towels on the sofa again. “Yeah. Go get ’em, analog tiger.”

Rami watched him for a beat. “That’s it?” He peered at Ian’s scruffy face. “Weren’t you going to that Oakland art thing tonight?”

“Didn’t feel like it.”

Rami went to the kitchen and filled a glass of water for Ian. “So, you’re just going back to sleep? At seven o’clock? On the clean laundry?”

Ian waved a limp hand in the air to shoo the water away. “You still have your phone, right? Call me if she tries anything funny.”

“Of course, but that’s not the point.” Rami put the water on a coaster on the table.

Ian’s tanned surfer facade showed the rare glint of actual anger. “Then what is the point?”

“Of you not melding into one being with the sofa while I’m gone, or of my date with Gemma?”

“The second one.”

“Obviously beating Nat Lane by partnering with someone who is a modern-day Luddite would be a symbolically loaded victory.” He put Ian’s pipe onto the brass tray in the center of the table and moved away the precariously high stack of old New Yorker magazines.

“I mean, it might even turn this whole stunt into something more meaningful. It might inspire people to, how did Gemma put it, ‘engage with technology with intention.’ It could be a movement! The spark that created sea change.”

Rami pulled on his coat and checked his reflection in the hallway mirror. Now he thought his eyebrows had never looked better.

“Cool, send me the link,” said Ian, voice muffled by the towels.

“I definitely will,” he said, and headed out.

* * *

Nat again found herself in the packed lobby of a downtown hot spot.

Nick had suggested this place, a tapas bar where Nat had never been able to get a table despite many attempts and Sara’s pull with the restaurant community from her time as a bartender.

She checked her phone. He was late. Only fourteen and a half minutes, but still.

And he hadn’t texted to let her know. The supermodel-thin hostess with long hair like shining glass gave her yet another dirty look.

Nat shrugged, feeling like a different species entirely from this sublime human woman.

The hostess rolled her eyes and approached. “You’ve been waiting a while. Reservation?”

“I’m meeting,” she hesitated in front of the woman’s symmetrical, poreless face, “I’m meeting a friend.”

“We can’t seat you until the entire party is present, and parking the car doesn’t count.” Her glossed lips turned down like she’d whiffed a bad egg, but somehow it seemed like a smile. A frown-smile. “I’m gonna have to move you to the lounge area, thank you.”

She gestured with pastel, almond-shaped nails to a small armless chair and end table shoved into an alcove next to the bathrooms. A couple with identical hangdog expressions was squeezed butt-to-butt on the chair.

Nat squatted next to them and checked her phone. Nothing from Nick. And now it was approaching the twenty-minute mark. Her feet already hurt. She fiddled with her phone as she felt the panic rising in her chest. She opened up a text to Rami.

Nat: Have you ever been stood up for a BeTwo date?

No typing dots appeared. The clock ticked forward. She turned to the couple on the chair. “Twenty minutes late isn’t bad, right? I’m sure you two are late for dates all the time!” She tried a breezy laugh.

“I won the punctuality award in fifth grade,” said the one in a blue blazer. “So . . .”

The one in the green sweater shrugged. “I guess it’s better than thirty?”

The Hostess Goddess breezed toward them. With a flick of her long fingers, the couple leapt up as if they’d won a prize. The punctual one patted the seat for Nat to sit and gave her a sympathetic smile before practically skipping away to their table.

“I’m sure he’s on his way,” said Nat, to the empty alcove.

Her phone buzzed. It was Rami.

Rami: I’ve only been stood up once.

Twice if you count the second time.

Nat laughed in spite of the tears building like storm clouds behind her eyes.

Nat: Haha

Rami: Oh no did Nat Lane get stood up???

She watched his dots, and not just because it made not-crying easier when she had something to look at.

Rami: And on the eve of my own very promising date with a lovely woman, no less?

She gasped in spite of herself. The text landed like a punch in the gut. Then anger took its place. Who actually talked like that? Let alone texted like that? This was all his fault, anyway. She typed in a reply.

Nat: Nope. Just curious

She scanned the room yet again. No Nick. Her phone buzzed.

Rami: OK good cuz that would’ve sounded really insensitive. Sorry

Nat shook the heavy sadness from her shoulders.

Nat: Gotta go. Ordering another round

Rami: Ooh la la

She put her phone in her purse. Should she just go home? She had a vision of herself laughing fabulously at the bar as she enjoyed a solo meal. It would be the strong, feminist move to make, surely. But who has tapas alone?

The hostess approached with clicking heels. “Are you waiting for an online date?” she asked.

“That’s personal.”

She cocked her perfect head. “Is it? You’re in a public place of business.”

Suddenly, Nat hated this woman, and deeply. “Well maybe it’s none of your business.”

“It’s literally my job.” She produced another frown-smile. “Anyway, some sad guy has been at a table in the back for the last thirty minutes and, I don’t know, something tells me you two are a match.”

Suddenly, Nat loved this woman. “Where? Is his name Nick?”

The hostess rolled her fake-lashed eyes. “Don’t know. But he has Big Nick Energy.”

“Look, I know you’re making fun of me, but I am here on an online date, OK?

” Nat balled her fists as she felt the rant swelling inside her.

“And he’s super late, and he hasn’t texted, and I was all excited to meet him because we’ve been talking for days, and so I’m embarrassed enough right now, OK?

And please tell me the brand of foundation that you use! ”

The hostess put her hands on Nat’s shoulders and twisted her to see into the restaurant. She pointed to a table nearly hidden behind a concrete pillar. “He’s really hot, OK?” she said. “So even if he’s not your date, so what? Go have fun.”

Nat squinted through the low light. There, slumped at a table by himself, was Nick.

And he was, indeed, really hot.

“That’s him!” she cried, jumping up and down. “That’s totally Nick!”

“Nailed it,” said the hostess without expression.

Nat turned to her savior. “Do I look OK?”

“Sure, yes. Go.”

“Good, yes, but come with me? I’m too nervous.” Nat stopped. “No, you’re too pretty, stay here.” She stopped again. “No, come with me. Please?”

The hostess sighed and curled a long, manicured finger. “Right this way.”

Nat giggled as they neared the table. She felt like it was Christmas morning and she’d just seen the Barbie Dream House-shaped package under the tree.

“Nick?” she said.

He looked up at her. Round sapphire eyes, high cheekbones shadowed in a dashing hint of stubble, and a megawatt smile that practically made her see rainbows beaming around him.

“Nat,” he said.

“ Yayyyyyyyy ,” the hostess drawled as she dropped a thick menu onto the table with a loud thump .