Rob’s profile photo shows off a stylish beard and a neat haircut, both completely unobjectionable. Immediately he tells me he’s an investment banker from Bexhill with a great sense of humor, two facts that seem to willfully contradict each other. But we persevere, messaging back and forth for a few days before he invites me to a wine tasting event on the Grand Parade.
It sounds super pretentious, but I say yes because he has a nice smile and I like wine. Besides, I figure that it’s time to actually stop hiding behind the safety of my phone and get back out there. It’s been weeks since I broke up with Noah, when my life collapsed in on itself, and years since I went on what people used to call a “blind date.” But it’s time to dust myself off and move on.
Unfortunately, the minute I downloaded Connector, I was so relentlessly bombarded with messages from those aforementioned complete weirdos and absolute fuckboys that I’d turned off all notifications on the app. For the first couple of weeks, I only checked it in times of extreme boredom, or at 2 a.m., half-drunk and feeling amorous. And, okay, to be completely honest, that was how I’d matched with “The Banker.”
We agree to meet at 6:30 p.m. outside Hudson’s Wine Bar. Of course, I text Sarah beforehand, pinging her the location, just in case he turns out to be an axe murderer. But when I arrive, he’s waiting outside for me, looking handsome in his work suit, with no bloody weapon in sight.
“Gwen?” he asks, and I smile back in recognition.
“Hi,” I say, kissing him on the cheek. He smells of expensive cologne mixed with that crisp fresh-air smell that someone only has when they’ve been standing outside for a while.
“Shall we go in?” I ask. I’m wearing a short leather jacket over a cropped brown sweater and skinny jeans with semi-heeled boots, so I’m desperate to get in the warmth.
Inside, the bar is full of people fresh from the office, standing around individual tables. As we find our spot, a smartly dressed woman announces they’ll be bringing round five different wines to try, but first they will teach us how to taste with our nose. I try to listen, because so far in life I have only managed to master the art of tasting wine with my mouth, but Rob is keen to chat.
“You look nice,” he says in my ear. “How was your day?”
“Yeah, good!” I whisper back. “Yours?”
“Stressful. But this should help.”
He nods at the two half-filled wineglasses heading our way. The waiter places one next to each of us, and we dutifully stick our noses in.
“What notes are you getting?” the woman asks. “Don’t be shy, there are no wrong answers.”
“Sandalwood,” I say. I have no idea what sandalwood smells like, but at these sorts of things the answer is always sandalwood.
“Good!” she trills. “Anyone else?”
“Oh, you’re a natural,” Rob whispers to me.
As the evening goes on, the waiter regularly swaps our empty glasses for full ones. After four rounds, Rob seems a little woozy.
“Black cherry!” he shouts at random, and sniggers.
When the final glass comes out, he downs it.
“What do I win?” He grins at our host.
“I’m not sure it’s a competition,” I say. “Come on, maybe we should go to the bar.”
Half an hour later, and Rob is on his sixth glass of wine and shoveling sea salt potato chips into his mouth, in between telling me how much his last quarterly bonus was.
“How long have you been in banking?” I ask him.
“Too long!” he says, and laughs much too loud.
I begin to feel my fate is as inevitable as that of those sea salt chips, plunging to their inescapable doom.
“Sorry.” He coughs. “I’ve not been asking you enough questions. I know that’s what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it? Be curious about your life? You’re a barista, right?”
“Well, sort of. The only barista in the world who hates coffee. But I like to think I’m more like, I don’t know, an entrepreneur? I used to be a social media manager for the snacks company Delicioso, do you know them? The guys who make Snacky Nuts and Munchie Crunch? But last year I bought an old ice cream van and converted it into a mobile café. The plan is to take it round festivals in the summer,” I say. “But yeah, I serve coffee too.”
It feels weird to say “I.” The truth is Noah and I bought the van together. It had been Noah’s dream: save up enough money to quit our boring nine-to-fives and tour the country in our little coffee-mobile. Sadly, we’d only managed to get as far as the “quitting our jobs and buying the van” bit. But Rob doesn’t need those kinds of specifics. At least not on Date One.
“Cool, cool,” he says. “How’s it going? Making you rich yet? Not many tourists around at this time of year, I suppose?”
“It’s great,” I lie. “Everyone else in the world loves coffee, right? It’s almost like it’s addictive.”
“Ah, well, I don’t know if you know, but actually caffeine does boost your dopamine levels, so yes, one could become dependent on it,” he explains.
“Right, thanks, good to know,” I say, nodding.
“Well, I take it easy on the old demon-bean front. I’m more of a Frappuccino man myself,” he says with a grin.
“And a wine man, I see.”
“Black cherry!” he shouts triumphantly again, before stuffing his nose too hard into his glass and almost spilling it over himself.
“Careful,” I say, looking around to see if anyone is staring at us.
“Graham, make sure you edit that bit out!” he yells over at an empty corner of the bar.
“What?” I scan the room again. “Who’s Graham?”
“Oh, ha-ha, like, I was pretending we’re on a reality TV show, and the cameras are hidden over there!”
My face remains completely unimpressed.
“Ha,” he says, his laughter slowly petering out like a dying engine.
Luckily everyone else from the wine tasting event has wandered off and the bar’s pretty empty. I look back at Rob to see him pouring the chip crumbs from the packet into his wide-open mouth.
“Sorry, did you want some?” he asks, wiping his mouth with his sleeve and refocusing his eyes on mine.
“Bit late now.” I smile.
“You’re so nice, I bet you’d make someone a really great girlfriend,” he says when the river of crumbs finally runs dry.
“Uh, thanks,” I say. “To be honest, I’ve not been single for long, so right now I’m happy just seeing what’s out there.”
“Uh-oh, am I being rejected already?”
“Hah, no,” I say. “I’m just keeping my options open.”
“Well, I’m very open to being an option,” he slurs.
I can’t work out if that was clever wordplay or he was talking drunken nonsense, so I do my best ambiguous smile and nod.
“I really struggled to match with people on Connector at first,” he continues. “But then, well, then I found out that—”
He stops and puts his hand to his mouth, like an overexcited mime artist.
“Oops, sorry! You know, I shouldn’t really tell you that….”
“Tell me what?” I ask.
He taps his nose conspiratorially. “Sorry, trade secret.”
“No, come on, tell me what you mean?”
Rob starts to say something but suddenly stops again mid-sentence, and his eyes widen as if he’s just remembered he left the iron on. His face goes gray, and he puts his glass down for the first time this evening.
“Excuse me,” he mumbles, before getting up and walking very fast in the direction of the bathroom.
Nearly ten minutes later, he reappears, looking paler but steadier.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says, sitting down delicately. “Sorry. Look, to be honest, this is the first date I’ve been on since I broke up with my girlfriend. I guess I was a bit nervous, so I drank too much.”
“I thought you were hitting it a little hard.” I smile at him. “It’s okay. We’ve all been there.”
“No, it’s really not on, is it?” he says, looking ruefully at his half-full glass. “I’ve rather fouled this one up, haven’t I?”
I take a deep breath and push my hair back behind my ears. “How long has it been?”
For the next hour, Rob tells me about his ex, how he’d proposed with his grandmother’s ring on her birthday, after asking her father for permission. Three months later, he’d sunk half her savings into bad investments, and she’d left him to travel around South America building goat huts. By the time we leave the bar, he’s drunk again, but, to be fair, so am I.
“Shall I walk you home?” he asks.
“I’m going to bus it,” I tell him. “It’s only twenty minutes.”
“Okay, cool, I’ll walk with you to the stop then,” he says, stumbling over the curb.
Halfway to the bus stop, Rob’s phone dings and he pulls it out, the light of the screen illuminating his face. I see his eyes widen and he staggers back slightly. Steadying himself against a nearby lamppost, he jabs angrily at the screen. In his drunkenness, he can’t seem to hit the right place to open the message.
“Something wrong?” I ask.
“I just wish this bastard would leave me alone,” he says, his voice wavering.
“What do they want?”
“Money, always more money,” he mumbles.
“Tax office? Tell me about it, I do mine on January thirty-first at eleven forty-five p.m. and not a second before,” I say.
“No, worse than taxes,” he says.
I look at him and his face stiffens like he’s about to throw up again. “Forget it, I’m drunk. Talking rubbish.”
We walk the rest of the way in silence. When we eventually reach my bus stop, I look glumly at the electronic display that informs me I face an agonizing six-minute wait.
We stand there awkwardly, watching spots of rain pepper the plexiglass of the bus stop.
“You can go!” I say eventually, putting on my best friendly smile. “I can wait on my own, and it’s freezing out here! Forecast says it might actually snow, and you don’t even have a coat!”
“Oh, it’s no problem, I don’t feel the cold,” he says.
“Yeah, well, that’s the benefit of drinking three bottles of red.” I laugh.
“And the two pints I had before we met,” he adds. “Bit of Dutch courage never hurts, does it?”
Just when I think I’m stuck in some hellish time loop where I’m forced to discuss the merits of pregame drinking with Rob until the end of eternity, I see the bus approaching in the distance.
I lean in to kiss him good-bye on the cheek, and his hand slips around my waist and slowly, but very surely, down to my bottom. I immediately break away.
“Whoa, slow down, cowboy,” I say, placing my hand on his chest and gently pushing him back.
“But I thought…” he says, looking crestfallen.
“Sorry,” I say, then curse myself inwardly. Why the hell am I apologizing? “I think you need to get over your ex before dating anyone else, Rob.”
But I notice he’s not looking at me, but over my shoulder. I turn around to see a busload of people staring at us.
Even through the cold, I feel my face burn.
“Gotta go,” I say, patting him on the shoulder and jumping on board before he has a chance to protest.
I quickly squeeze my way to the back of the bus, avoiding the judgmental looks of my fellow passengers.
“Stopping here for a minute to regulate the service,” an announcement bellows over the PA system.
God, not now, I cry inwardly. Anytime but now.
Once I’m ensconced in the back seat, I stick my earbuds in and crank up the volume. I turn to see if Rob’s still waiting. It’s started to rain, and he’s looking blankly at the bus, slowly getting wetter and wetter, but seemingly still not feeling the cold. Then he gets out his phone and starts waving it in the air, shouting. I flip out one earbud to try to hear what he’s saying.
“… don’t need her. Got loads of matches! Loads!”
Rob holds the phone up to the bus window, and through the splashes of rain on the glass, I can make out his Connector app, proudly displaying a new match.
“See?” he yells to his captive audience. “Twice as fit as her.”
He points at me, and I stare into my lap, unable to hide as the whole bus compares me to the image on Rob’s cell phone screen.
Come on, move already, I telepathically beg the driver.
I hear the engine start and praise the bus gods. We pull off, leaving Rob waving his phone desperately at the taillights as the rain turns to snowflakes.
For the rest of the journey, I sit with my head leaned against the window, the sheen of singledom scraped off me in a single date. I’m back in the trenches, and war is hell.