Chapter 18
18
Thursday 24 March
12:50 p.m.
Had early lunch with Linda, who brought me to Black Swan to make up for standing me up yesterday.
We both ordered salads since we were in a rush, but when the food came, she picked at it listlessly while I finished mine in under ten minutes and ordered a flat white. She seemed distracted, and when I asked her what was up, she hesitated before cooking up a big Crock-Pot of BS and serving it to me. “It’s work.” She sighed dramatically. “There’s so much work and I haven’t seen my home in, like, days.”
I gave her a careful once-over. It was true that she looked less polished and stunning than usual, her pale blue silk shirt sporting faint creases and smudges of her foundation; her hair was twisted in a messy bun and she had dark under-eye circles that showed even beneath the careful application of concealer. Linda had never let a late night out or no sleep get in the way of looking hot for work. Which meant she had not spent the night at her place. Interesting.
“Really,” I said, keeping my tone neutral.
“Massimo has been keeping me so busy,” she continued. “Massimo’s my new client. A real super guy but totally obsessed with work. A lot of calls. Yeah.” She was shredding her paper napkin in a totally not-nonchalant fashion while avoiding eye contact with me.
Alarm bells were clanging away in my head. Massimo? Who
the fuck was Massimo? Linda never called her clients by anything other than their last names, or if she really hated them, their nicknames. Something was definitely up. But it was no use asking Linda—she was never going to give me any details until she was ready to do so.
“How’s the Tinder search for love going?” she asked suddenly.
I flushed guiltily. I had been so focused on Orson that I had barely replied to the Tinder messages from my remaining three matches (I unmatched with Alex, obviously), even though serial killer opener guy, Sean, was still intermittently texting me. The entire thing had more or less fizzled out and Linda’s efforts were all for naught.
“I haven’t really made myself available,” I admitted. “After I saw Jonathan Beh on Tinder it really killed my whole desire to try online dating.” I spilled about Alex and how he had hooked up with one of my colleagues, but it turns out Val had already given her all the salacious details over WhatsApp that very weekend. Thanks, Val.
Linda sighed. “There goes weeks of texting and my trusty algorithm. Well, can’t say I didn’t try to make Tinder magic happen.” She took a bite of food. “Anyway, I heard from a birdie that you had a dinner date with Orson? Care to share?”
Urgh. Val. I held my hands up in mock surrender: I, too, had been hiding things from my best friend. “Yup, we did, but, uh, we’re, uh, on a break now.”
Linda lifted an eyebrow but wisely refrained from saying anything cutting. For now. “By the way, isn’t your mom coming in, like, three weeks or something? I remember you moaning about it last month.”
She was right: I had totally forgotten that my mother was scheduled to make a pit stop in Singapore soon. Shit.
6:50 p.m.
Went home early so I could overturn the house to search for my watch.
8:20 p.m.
This is bad. The watch is the last thing my parents, well, my father, gave to me, before he passed. On top of everything that had happened that week, this is the worst.
9:10 p.m.
Googled anything and everything I could find about Orson aside from that basic LinkedIn page. Nothing. I’ve always been an awesome Google stalker, but for Orson I had curtailed my baser instincts and hadn’t gone full bloodhound. Now here I was, and yet I couldn’t find anything. Zilch. Nada. No Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, Foursquare, OpenRice, TripAdvisor reviews, nothing. Orson was, for all intents and purposes, a millennial ghost. It was also pretty certain that Orson wasn’t even his real name, as I only found two or three pictures of him, the ones used on his “official” LinkedIn page.
I’d been played by a fucking hipster Sponk swindler.
Saturday 26 March
10:30 a.m.
Finally received the results of my super expensive STD test in the post: am in the clear.
10:35 a.m.
Still got conned, though. Worse still: Orson had manipulated me using evergreen techniques known to mankind since the first caveman lied to the first cavewoman and said he’d kill a herd of woolly mammoths for her if she would be his. It’s as though I fell for the Nigerian prince scam in this day and age; it’s that bad.
5:10 p.m.
Asked Linda out for dinner but had no response. No one else in the group chat was available.
5:35 p.m.
I have no friends.
1:15 a.m.
Just back from an unusual group hang, with Suresh (!) and his friends.
We were just texting about work (yes, Saturdays belong to our dark overlords, too) when he told me he was going out with some friends and asked me to join them. I was still down about the general situation and I didn’t know he had friends outside of work. I always thought he finished work, went home, cried himself to sleep, etc., in a spin cycle of sad adulting (I may have been projecting a little, of course).
Turns out Suresh had a whole life outside of work that involved other humans. His friends, Tu’An, Chandran, and Faisal, were buddies from law school in London, and they were all big fans of board games, in particular Settlers of Catan. So that’s what Catan actually involves: instead of some swingers’ club where they dress up as MMA fighters, they just sit there, eating sunflower seeds and talking about grain. And not the futures kind or the food kind—the kind printed on a deck of cards.
At first I thought it was super sad that a bunch of lawyers in their thirties (except for Chandran, who was now a “professional gamer”) would be spending valuable time off work playing board games, but once I found out that Chandran, who is apparently highly ranked and had even placed in the top ten of some regional Catan championship, had made close to eight thousand American dollars winning at Catan competitions and had his own following, I changed my mind. Any hobby that (a) is moneymaking and (b) involves leader boards and national rankings was a legit pursuit in my book.
Also Catan is quite fun, as a spectator sport. As in, I watched Suresh play and screamed obscenities at his opponents from time to time.
We spent close to five hours playing Settlers of Catan and drinking happy hour beer in a gamers’ café. I didn’t even look at my work phone once (especially after Suresh stashed it away).
We called it a night around 1:00 a.m., after which Suresh got in a cab with me—he didn’t have much choice since I had by then lost most of my motor skills. He half-carried me to my apartment and laid me down on my bed, brought me a glass of water and made me drink it, placed the covers over me, and was about to leave like a proper gentleman, when I spoke up. “Thank you for your help,” I said.
He came back to the bed and perched on it. “You’re welcome. Would you like to tell me what happened to you? You look miserable.”
I couldn’t admit to him that I’d been swindled. It was just too humiliating, and we were still just colleagues. Instead, I told him a partial lie. “We broke up by mutual agreement,” I croaked. “I’m just being the appropriate amount of annoyed, that’s all.”
I could tell he didn’t believe me, but he still didn’t push it. I decided to change the subject. “By the way, about your superhero strip . . . if you don’t mind, I have some suggestions.”
“Oh, you follow
TLTS
?” He seemed very pleased by this revelation.
“Yes. You should consider giving Water a nemesis, or some kind of bigger purpose, not just stick to mini stories. That would give the strip the narrative tension it lacks and make it more compelling.”
“Wow,” he said, stunned. For a moment I was worried I had pissed him off, but then he smiled and snapped his fingers. “How could I not have seen this? You’re right, he needs a larger purpose. I should give this more thought.” He looked at me. “You might have just unlocked the growth phase for
TLTS
! The strip was stagnating, Andrea, and you’ve given me much-needed inspiration.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Thank you for tonight.” On impulse, I reached out and hugged him.
“I really enjoyed hanging out with you,” he said in a low voice.
“Me, too,” I said in the same voice.
We were still holding onto each other after the “friend-zone” three-second-hug rule, unwilling or unable to let go. I was aware that his hair smelled like coconut, and I nuzzled into it. Very subtly, the chemistry in the air had changed, and his arms had definitely acquired what can only be categorized as “narrative tension.”
Oh God, what was happening? Did I . . . were we? And did I?
He lowered me gently onto the bed. I looked up, licked my lips subtly, and discreetly sucked in my belly so my boobs looked—
“Good night,” he said, pushing himself off me as though I was an anti-vaxxer and he was a pharmaceutical rep. Then, quick as a punch, he was gone. I heard a door slam on his way out.
Now am not sure what to think. On the one hand, I like that he is a gentleman. On the other hand, am I not attractive enough that he would at least try to cop a feel? I mean, a borderline dodgy butt cup that could also be a reassuring, stabilizing move as he hoisted me onto the bed? Nothing?
Cupped my own butt. On the scale of tofu to steel, it rates “ten-year-old soft toy washed too many times in cheap detergent.”
I wonder what kind of butt Anousha has.
1:45 a.m.
Puked. Felt sorry for myself. Can’t help thinking that aside from Ivan, my choices in men—i.e., Orson, Alex—have been disappointing. Maybe my taste in men reflects an underlying deficiency in my decision-making skills, off Ma’s grid.
A terrifying, disturbing thought.