There are always girls. Plenty of girls.
Of course, they don’t necessarily look at things the way I do. There’s the odd one who’s just after an uncomplicated shag, but most of them want the happy-ever-after. They want a ring on their finger, or at least some sort of permanence. But that’s okay: you just lie to them. You pretend to them that you want that too, so that you can get a quickie, a fast and furious fuck in a restaurant toilet cubicle, or a deserted back street, or on the beach. Occasionally, if she rates herself too highly to act sleazy, in a hotel room. Because occasionally – if the girl is particularly hot – it’s worth shelling out a few hundred bucks.
‘Why online dating?’ they always ask, despite the fact that about five million Australians are doing it, which is about a fifth of the population. In other words, it’s so bloody commonplace, it barely merits the question. But what they’re really asking is what you want from the transaction. What’s your desired end goal?
I put the minimum information on my profile. A few likes and dislikes and invented fun facts, and the fact I have my own apartment in an impressive building downtown; just enough to make me sound both wholesome and alpha. The name’s fake, but the rest is mostly true. I am fit and into sports, and I do have a well-paid job in the financial sector. Not that they’re ever going to be around long enough to test it all out, but you have to bait the hook.
And the profile pictures are all absolutely real. Up-to-date and unedited. This gives me a great advantage, because so many online creeps use old or stolen ones. When they meet me and see that I’m exactly the guy in the online images, girls are ready to buy into me. They’re convinced it’s a case of what you see is what you get, and that therefore I must be honest and trustworthy. So when I tell the ones who aren’t into casual sex that I’m a one-woman guy and that I’m actually looking for something deep and meaningful, they believe it. After all, I told them I was over six foot, and I am.
Do I feel guilty about that? Hell, no. If they think the internet is the place to find someone trustworthy and straightforward, then more fool them. The internet is the playground of the fake and the fucked-up. As for what I’m looking for: I’m prepared to entertain all types. I keep my own filters fairly open, but I screen out anyone who describes themselves as ‘voluptuous’ or ‘curvy’. That just means they’re fat.
I have three dating apps on my phone and I’ve used them to sleep with more than two hundred girls. It sounds greedy, but I put that down to the fact that I grew up in a girl drought. I come from a tiny outback town called Coonamarra, on the south-western edge of New South Wales. Population 162. Actually, we weren’t even in Coonamarra: our house was on the sheep station that my dad managed. Even driving the few miles into town was a highlight. The few local girls my age were huge, or had faces like dropped pies. The only looker in Coonamarra was Susie Duggan, and she was five years older than me. I lost my virginity to her when I was fourteen, but a year later she got married to some guy who worked on a cattle station near Binalong, so that was that.
Apart from Susie, there was only Marlene, who worked in the local bar, and Kirstie Daley, whose mum was friends with my mum. Marlene was about thirty-five, but she’d give you a handjob if you helped her clear the glasses at the end of the night. And Kirstie and I were just mates. I didn’t fancy her, and anyway she preferred girls. Even so, we made a pact that until our options increased, we would practise kissing on each other. We practised and practised. There was fuck all else to do in Coonamarra, so we became very good at it.
Oh, and there was also Kirstie’s younger sister Zoey, but she didn’t really count either. She was a clingy, homely-looking kid a few years younger than Kirstie and me, who used to trail around after us, always wanting to know where we were going and asking to come too. Kirstie used to rib me about Zoey having a crush on me, but, to be honest, I just remember her back then as being a massive pain in the arse. As it goes, I was to end up viewing her very differently. But back then I had no idea quite how much things would change where Zoey Daley was concerned.
I was happy enough at school. For the most part, I did fine academically, but my favourite subject by some margin was Theatre Arts. I took part in every dramatic production I could. Mr Powell, the head of Drama, rated me and cast me in most of the leads. As an only kid with no company at home, I had a highly developed imagination and a distinct sense of the dramatic, acting out little stories and plays as soon as I was old enough to read and write. But, of course, my practical, Calvinist Scottish parents did not regard acting as a proper job, so I never pursued it as a career, even if I did get to use my acting skills in other ways.
When I eventually got out of there and went to study Business Administration at University of Technology, Sydney, I got plenty of opportunity to use my kissing prowess. At least one new opportunity every night. Because I was an only child, my dad was sold on the idea that I’d stay in Coonamarra and work on the cattle station with him, maybe one day even take over his job. I persuaded him that that studying business would make me even better placed to run the farm. Not that I had any intention of doing that. Not ever.
My parents had emigrated from Scotland in the early 1970s and been relatively old when they eventually had a kid after years of trying. Mum’s spinster sister, Agnes, also emigrated, but the only other family contact we had was when my maternal grandfather, Dougie, visited from Scotland. He was a dour man, but with a twinkle in his eye, and he had time for me, which my parents never did. But because of the distance and the expense he was only able to make it out to Oz a couple of times, and when I was about fifteen, he died. I couldn’t even go to his funeral, which cut me up a heap.
It was only a few years later, during my first term at UTS, that Dad turned yellow and lost a load of weight. It turned out to be liver secondaries from a primary pancreatic cancer that was too far gone to treat. He wasted away within three weeks and died with Mum and me at his bedside. He’d refused the offered hospice bed and insisted on staying at home to be nursed by my long-suffering mother. A gritty Highlander to the end. After he died, Mum couldn’t really stay on the station: the house went with the job. She moved up to the Northern Territory to be near to Agnes and run the local library. It’s a hell of a trek up there, and I rarely see her these days, but we talk on the phone and email a bit.
My excellence at kissing disarms the girls I meet through the dating apps. I take time over it, placing a hand on their neck and running my thumb over their lips in a teasing motion before getting my own mouth anywhere near theirs. I make soft lip contact, and only then does my tongue get involved. The fact that I go so slowly and carefully makes them think I’m really into them. It amazes me that they’re so willing to equate kissing with romance, when really it’s just all that practice Kirstie Daley and I had behind the Gully Creek Pub.
This latest girl is called Jilly. I’d been talking to her online for a week or so, while I was sleeping with Amanda. Amanda flounced off when I didn’t answer ‘married’ when she asked where I wanted to be in five years. I always overlap the preparatory chatting and the shagging, so that there’s someone new lined up when I – or the girl in this case – break off the fun. Jilly has big brown eyes and big, round breasts and a flirtatious way of running the tip of her tongue over her top teeth. She’s generally a bit of a tease, reaching out frequently to touch my hand as we talk over drinks in a trendy bar in Barangaroo Avenue.
I try to go for drinks rather than dinner with an online date. Dinner involves too much direct eye contact, and there seems to be a general expectation that the personal information shared will be revelatory. Over a dinner table, you’re expected to make a presentation, a bit like you would in a job interview. My preference is for a noisy bar; one where it’s so hard to hear that conversation can’t get past very light small talk.
After a couple of cocktails, Jilly is practically licking her lips, her left ankle rubbing up and down my shin. I lean forward. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I whisper.
There’s a cut-through from the bar to the boardwalk of the inner harbour where huge gin palaces are moored, glowing white in the moonlight. I lead Jilly down one of the unlit jetties and we indulge in a heavy make-out session. She’s an eager little thing and needs no encouragement. Once I’ve treated her to the five-star snogging experience, she’s only too happy to let me snake my hand underneath her halter top and fondle her naked tits. She’s not wearing a bra, and a cursory fumble underneath her skirt reveals she’s not wearing panties either.
Jilly pulls back, and in the faint silvery light I can see she’s smiling at me.
‘Why don’t we go back to mine,’ she whispers, her voice husky. ‘My apartment’s just round the corner.’
Five minutes later, we are inside her flat, but instead of picking up where we left off – which was basically me about to penetrate her – she fusses around opening wine, lighting candles, putting on some chill-out music.
After a few minutes of this, I’m impatient and grab her, pulling her towards me. It’s a playful gesture, but she protests with a loud, shrill ‘Owww!’
‘Come on,’ I say. ‘Let’s not mess about. We both know where this is headed.’
Jilly tries to duck my grasp and get back to the kitchen area where she was arranging glasses and tortilla crisps on a tray, but I intercept her, and this time I’m not playful. I press her against the breakfast bar, flip up her skirt and start unzipping my jeans. The more she wriggles, the harder I grow.
‘Don’t!’ she whines, ‘I’m not ready!’
‘Of course you’re ready,’ I say, as I ease myself into her. ‘You were ready back when we were in the bar, and you were stroking my dick.’
She tries to pull away from me, but I have a firm grip on her hips, and within a few seconds it’s all over. I slump forward onto her back with a gasp. She extricates herself and yanks down her dress. ‘I want you to go,’ she says coldly.
‘Aw c’mon, Julie’
‘It’s Jilly.’
‘C’mon, Jilly, you wanted to have sex, you know you did. Otherwise what was all that about back at the bar?’
‘Maybe I did. But I wanted to go at my pace. I wanted to, you know, have a bit of a convo first.’
I stare at her for a couple of seconds, sliding up my fly zipper and adjusting my shirt. ‘Okay, well we can have a convo now.’ I try to reach for the wine bottle, but she holds out an arm to stop me.
‘I want you to go.’
I ignore her and pick up the bottle.
‘Now, or else I’m calling the police.’
‘Come on, Jilly! A bit over the top, isn’t it? We just got our wires crossed, that’s all.’
But I take in her expression and pick up my jacket.
‘Okay, you win,’ I sigh, before turning round and heading for the front door.