Page 42 of Swiped

The day of the BuzzFill BuzzCheck Exclusive, Nat went to work, as usual.

After the blow-up with Rami, she had crept back into bed with Thom and cried silently into her pillow before finally succumbing to exhaustion sometime around four in the morning.

When he had woken her up with coffee and a kiss on the cheek, she hadn’t been able to muster the energy to do anything but nod her thanks from bed and confirm their plans to meet up later.

He also just looked damn good turning over his shoulder to wink at her as he pulled on his dress shirt — a force too powerful for anything like better judgment.

Whatever train this was, and wherever it was going, it had left the station.

All Nat could do was go along for the ride, or more likely, the trainwreck.

The interview was scheduled for early evening as part of the opening events for the BuzzForce Expo.

So, she had eight long hours to try to stay calm.

She did some rote running of numbers and smashing of bugs in the code, but her mind was all over the place.

She mainly clicked around the internet, hoping to distract herself with clickbait articles about everything from the twenty-five things cat owners should never do, to elaborate casserole prep videos that she would never, ever, in a million years, be making.

Still, she printed the recipes and put them in her purse.

It seemed to be the same for the twins, who were unusually fidgety but still kept to themselves all morning. Every now and then, Nat would look up to see them whispering to each other in a concerned, mirrored huddle. But whenever they met her gaze, they would smile brightly, wave, and scatter.

Nat slumped in her chair and thumbed open her phone to Sara’s social media pages.

It was pathetic to try and glean whether or not her supposed best friend was planning on showing up to the interview by stalking her posts — pathetic and a long shot in terms of getting any useful information — but Nat couldn’t resist. Her feeds were the usual mix of sunsets, selfies, and salon memes.

Nothing new, nothing that announced different plans for that evening, or that she was in the market for a new, non-shitty friend.

Timidly, Nat scrolled down the grid to make sure Sara hadn’t deleted any of the pics of them together.

She hadn’t. Nat sighed with relief and a flood of dopamine. Maybe there was still hope.

Before she’d left for work, she’d seen that at some point Sara had indeed taken the Team Nat shirt and the tea, but there had been no communication about any of it.

Maybe she would show up wearing it. Or maybe she was just using it to wrap up some glassware in one of her moving boxes.

Nat swiped away from Sara’s page and let herself doomscroll her brain into numbness.

After lunch, a lush bouquet of flowers arrived from Thom with a note about how happy he was to be a part of this success with her. Nat stuck the note to the center of the office fridge with a magnet.

Only seven more hours to go.

* * *

Rami tossed in his bed. How dare Nat rob him of the simple, human pleasure of napping? On top of everything else! He checked the time again. It was barely past noon.

It wasn’t like he wasn’t tired. He’d hardly slept after getting home from the bar.

Somehow, the heady mix of nagging guilt over Allison and crushing regret over not just missing, but completely shattering his window with Nat hadn’t exactly lulled him into dreamland.

He mentally waved goodbye to the version of his life where he was fresh-faced and perky for the interview.

Nope, he’d be as worn out and stressed as ever.

He punched his pillow into a better shape and cracked his knuckle on the headboard. Perfect.

* * *

Nat’s brain felt sticky and sore, like her mouth after she’d binged a whole bag of sour gummies, but this time she’d consumed hours of videos on the internet.

Her ass actually hurt from sitting too long, which was truly a feat considering that she was a coder.

She forced her stiff legs to stand and tried to stretch out the stabbing knots of pain behind her shoulder blades.

Hadn’t she just watched a demo about using, like, a sock, two straws, and a watermelon to fix back pain?

She couldn’t remember. Her mind was a blurry smear of sassy pets, miracle neck creams, banal observations that somehow felt profound, and enough conflicting information on healthy eating to keep her afraid of the grocery store for years to come.

And yet she still had hours to kill before the interview.

She decided to stop avoiding her last resort and take a walk.

The rain had finally let up, and the San Francisco afternoon was crisp and gorgeous as Nat walked in the direction of the waterfront baseball stadium.

It was helpful and grounding to be near water, right?

She was pretty sure that was something people said.

A group of men in business casual polos and khakis approached her on the sidewalk.

The one in navy blue with a salt-and-pepper beard shot her an approving look as she walked by.

An ironic laugh rattled in her throat. Of course, now she was getting attention, after all those failed dates, and when she had Thom and was about to pronounce it to the whole world.

The idea still felt wobbly in her mind. She had Thom. She had a boyfriend. Her long, lonely dry spell was officially over, and quite possibly forever, since he met all her criteria to a tee. What more could she want, right? She’d listed out every possible thing.

A shadow darkened her thoughts as she walked another block.

There was no way he really was the same guy who had cheated on Rami’s sister, right?

Nat had only shown him one picture in a dark bar, and Rami probably wanted to mess with her mind.

If that was the same Thom — her Thom — it would mean he’d lied to her from day one, and why would he do that?

Her mind flashed to how Eric had lied about his height on his profile and used much younger pictures of himself.

Then there was her original profile, where she’d only put in whatever the data showed her was popular to make sure someone, anyone, would actually pick her.

She jammed a crosswalk button and chewed her lip.

What was the word Rami kept using to describe being on the apps?

Vulnerable.

It would have never occurred to her. She’d genuinely thought that fielding rejections through DMs and swipes would make it so that it didn’t hurt.

When she thought about how she’d been turned down by Jake back in London, Owen in the park, and a string of other guys throughout her life, what she couldn’t forget were the looks on their faces as they’d let her know that they weren’t interested.

It was like looking into the cruelest mirror — seeing so clearly how very much someone didn’t care about you, no matter how much you cared for them.

She’d searched every cute guy’s face since, always expecting to see that same dull sheen of dismissal.

She’d never wanted to see that look on anyone’s face ever again.

Nat reached the ballpark and cut around the back toward the seal statue.

Seeing that stupid thing always cheered her up.

So, she’d made BeTwo in the hopes that moving the romantic trial-and-error into pixels on tiny screens would prevent pain, and let her users protect themselves with matches based on data before making a personal investment and exposing their hearts.

But the data was only as reliable as the users who entered it, and worse, there was no way to tell what was true until you met in person, anyway.

So then what were all the hours spent on BeTwo even accomplishing?

She rubbed the giant baseball perched on the seal’s nose and wished for good luck with the interview in a few hours.

Now she knew from her own hours of swiping, and being unmatched and ghosted threads, and toe-curling awkward dates that those seemingly small digital actions were a type of personal investment — an investment of time.

Instead of creating a shortcut around romantic vulnerability, she might have inadvertently made the path all the more twisted — literally and figuratively.

Despite the dimple of sunshine on the seal’s cheery smile, or the way the waves in the bay glittered, her nerves crackled like static around her temples, and her heart felt like a lead cannonball lodged in her chest. She wanted to talk to Sara about it, but that was impossible.

She wanted to talk to Jo, but she hadn’t figured out a way to smooth things over, and asking if she thought their whole company was a mistake before their biggest-ever PR event probably wasn’t the move.

She could talk to Thom, but something inside her knew that he wouldn’t get it.

She could practically hear his lush rumble reassuring her that she was brilliant and her algorithm was incredible — which, for the first time ever, was not exactly what she wanted to hear.

The person whom she needed to talk to, of course, was Rami.

But why would he help her? The fate of her whole career depended on proving him wrong.

So, she would sit next to him and point to her handsome boyfriend and praise her dating app, and then the contest would be over, and she’d probably never see Rami again.

If only that meant she would also stop thinking about the way his brooding eyes lit up when he made a good point, or how his dimples winked in his cheeks when he was really amused, or how safe she’d felt when he pulled her into his chest that night — all in those brief moments before she’d made him hate her again.