It was funny: modern technology could forge a connection between two people on opposite ends of the earth, but it could just as easily drive a wedge between two people standing side by side in the same room. The more Alex scrolled through his phone, the more disconnected we became. His body was only two feet away from me, but his mind was off somewhere completely unknown.
Eager to regain his attention, I tapped my fingernails against my wineglass in time to the music. Then I started to hum along with the tune. Finally, I asked, “Who is this?”
There was a pause, like he didn’t hear me. A moment later, without looking up, he said, “What?”
“The music. Who’s this playing?”
“Oh, I dunno. It’s just some Spotify playlist.”
“What’s the name of it?”
A look of irritation splashed across his face. “Gimme a second and I’ll look it up.”
“Never mind.” My voice was as sharp as a razor blade. “I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass.”
He looked at me, eyes wide and contrite. “No, no, I’m sorry.” He winced. “You’re right. I do say that a lot.” He dropped his phone on the countertop in frustration. “It’s just more of the same. Work.”
“I thought the servers were being upgraded tonight.”
“Well, someone has to monitor the upgrades, make sure everything’s going according to plan. Greg said he’d do it, but I guess there’s some error message that keeps popping up and God forbid he fucking Google it.” He winced again. “Sorry.” And again.
“It’s okay. Things happen.”
“I don’t understand why he can’t figure it out for himself. I told him you were coming over tonight, so he knows I’m busy.”
“He knows I’m here?” I flashed back to last Thursday, when Greg was giving me that creepy stare. This explained why he’d noted my existence for the very first time: he knew Alex and I were...doing something. Though last Thursday we hadn’t done anything yet, except have lunch. “What exactly have you told him?”
Alex shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “That we’re, you know, hanging out.”
Ugh. The dreaded “hanging out.” It connoted any number of things in guy-speak, all of which were firmly in the realm of “casual.”
Then again, we’d only been “hanging out” for a week. What did I expect, for Alex to announce to the entire office that we were involved in a serious, monogamous relationship?
I mean, it’s not like I would’ve minded. But it was completely insane to think about a commitment this early on.
His phone buzzed against the countertop again. “Are you serious?” He stabbed at the screen and grumbled, “Just fucking Google it, Greg.”
“This is the story of my life,” I said. “I can’t tell you how many times someone comes to the help desk with a problem that could be easily solved with a Google search.”
“I’m sure it happens all the time. To be honest, I don’t understand how half these Hatchlings got their funding. Aren’t start-up founders supposed to be innovative and resourceful?” Alex shook his head and sipped from his wineglass. “Sometimes I wish I’d never quit my last job. It was soul-sucking but at least I worked with competent people. I wasn’t harassed by idiots on my one night off.” He gestured angrily at his phone. “And if I’d stayed there, I wouldn’t be on the verge of losing my paycheck in six weeks.”
“Are you really worried you guys aren’t gonna get funded?”
“The way things are going? I don’t know. I always thought I wanted to get in on the ground floor at a start-up, but the whole experience with Hatch is making me want to run back to corporate America.”
I reached across the table and touched my fingertips to the back of his hand. “You know, you told me Hatch was just a stepping-stone to bigger and better things for you. So maybe it sucks right now, but it’s not gonna last forever. Soon you’ll be on to the next thing. And when the time is right, you’ll create the perfect opportunity.”
Alex looked at me, his eyes meeting mine, all traces of irritation gone. “You’re right. My time at Hatch has its purpose.”
“It does.”
“If I’d never started working at Hatch, I’d never have met you.” He covered my fingers with his other hand and gave them a gentle squeeze, sending a ripple of joy through my entire being.
“You never know,” I countered. “Maybe we would’ve met on Fluttr.”
“Do you think you would’ve swiped right on me?”
“It depends on what picture you used.”
“See for yourself.” He picked up his phone and loaded his camera roll, swiping through and selecting a photo. “This was my default profile pic.”
One glimpse at his screen and my stomach dropped to my feet. Because I suddenly remembered that I’d seen this photo before. On Alex’s JerkAlert profile.
I opened my mouth to speak, but had trouble forming words.
“It’s that bad, huh?” he asked.
“No. It’s just...” I trailed off, unable to finish the sentence, afraid the quiver in my voice would reveal all my insecurities.
“Your silence speaks volumes.” He smirked, then swiped through to the next photo. “Here’s the one I used before that. Any better?”
This time, it was a different image of him looking like his usual gorgeous, dapper self—but he was standing beside an even more gorgeous hazel-eyed brunette. They looked like they’d just shared a hilarious secret. His arm was wrapped tightly around her shoulder.
“Are you serious?”
“What?”
“This was really the profile pic you used?”
He glanced at the phone and then back at me. “Yeah. Is something wrong with it?”
“You’re canoodling with a beautiful woman.”
“We’re not canoodling.” He looked aghast. “This is my sister! We look exactly the same. See?”
I snatched the phone from his hand and studied the screen. Upon closer inspection, they did look alike. Same dancing eyes, same disarming smile, same olive skin and curly black hair. He wasn’t being rude or obnoxious with this picture; he was merely clueless.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Fluttr users make split-second decisions. They’re not going to take the time to figure out if she’s your sister or your ex-girlfriend. A woman in the photo is almost always an automatic left swipe.”
He pressed the home button to dim his phone screen. “Then we never would’ve met.”
“Simply because of a picture.”
“I told you, Fluttr’s the worst.”
“It is.” I couldn’t help but think about the dozens—or more like hundreds—of men I’d left-swiped because they were oblivious to the unspoken rules of Fluttr photo etiquette.
“Okay. I showed you mine,” he said. “Now you show me yours.”
All of a sudden, I felt shy, afraid of being judged. Even though countless men had already seen this picture and made the instantaneous decision to swipe left or right on my face, having Alex right here next to me, delivering his verdict in person, made me anxious. Especially knowing that I’d have swiped left on him without a second thought.
I didn’t have much of a choice, though. He was standing there, eyebrows raised, waiting for me to hand over the goods. So I tapped my screen and showed him my selfie. I’d snapped it on a whim, a couple of months ago, while I was walking home from work at dusk. The light had been perfect, all soft and golden, and my hair was in an unusually cooperative state. I thought it was flattering.
Alex stared at it, silent and unblinking. He hates it.
“It’s nothing special,” I said.
“It’s stunning.”
Oh.
“Your lips are just...” His gaze traveled from the face on my phone to my face in the flesh. “They’re perfect.”
Instinc
tively, my fingertips went to my lips. Alex looked hungry. Like he’d been starving for days and my body was a satisfying meal.
He moved closer, eyes still fixed on my quivering lips. Then his mouth was on mine and my hands were in his hair and we were wrestling frantically out of our clothes. We barely even made it to his bed.
When we were finished, he kissed me hard, then said, “Total fucking right-swipe.”
I giggled, still dizzy from the sex. But as the world steadied itself around me, I tuned back into my surroundings—including the acrid smell emanating from the kitchen. “Is something burning?”
“Oh, shit. The rice!” Alex launched his naked body out of bed and yanked the smoking pan of arroz con gandules from the stovetop. One peek under the lid and his disgusted face said it all. “Maybe we should order in.”
While he summoned a delivery from Adrienne’s Pizza Bar, I threw on my bra and panties and went to the bathroom to freshen up. When I emerged, Alex was sitting on the couch in his boxers, already engrossed in his phone.
“Greg still bugging you?” I asked, settling in next to him.
“Nah. I wasn’t responding to him while you and I were...you know.” He glanced up and flashed a mischievous smile. “So eventually he stopped texting me.”
“Maybe he finally figured out how to use Google.”
“Miracles do happen,” he said, adding, “It’s Café con Leche, by the way.”
“What?”
“The music. You asked for the name of the Spotify playlist before.”
“Oh, right. Thanks.”
Tossing his phone aside, he looked up at me, eyes shimmering in the dim light. No one had ever looked at me that way before, like I was adored. In that moment, I wanted to believe every word that ever came out of his mouth.
“Wanna watch something?” He pulled me close beside him, wrapping his arm around me as he turned on the TV and started scrolling through Netflix. Whether or not Alex was sweet-talking me, I still reveled in the tenderness of his touch, his affection, his lingering gaze. Having someone to cuddle with, someone so complimentary and kind, was a long-wished-for comfort. So I tried my best to lose myself in the moment, watching an Ali Wong stand-up routine and stealing kisses between sips of wine.
About twenty minutes later, the buzzer rang, and my stomach grumbled at the thought of artisanal pizza. I paused the show while Alex squirmed into his T-shirt, and the buzzer rang again. “Coming!” he yelled, as he ran to the door.
But there was no piping-hot pizza waiting on the other side. There was only Greg, standing in the hallway with that signature slack-jawed look on his face.
“S’up, man?”
In a flash, I yanked a cushion from the back of the couch and held it before me like a shield. Then I froze, thinking if I stayed perfectly still, Greg wouldn’t notice me sitting there in my underwear.
“S’up, Melanie.”
Too late.
Alex whipped his head around, panic in his eyes, before turning back to Greg. “What are you doing here?”
“You stopped answering my texts.”
“Right. Because you said you had this upgrade covered tonight.”
“Yeah, but all I thought I had to do was watch it. I didn’t think anything was gonna, like, happen.”
“Are you—” Alex stopped himself midsentence, then scrubbed a hand over his face and took a deep, cleansing breath. When he spoke again, his voice was calm. “Okay. What’s wrong now?”
Greg barreled his way into the apartment, sliding his laptop out of his messenger bag and popping it open on the kitchen counter. “It keeps saying it can’t connect.”
“What can’t connect?”
“The database.”
“Did you run a traceroute?”
“A what?”
Alex raked his hands through his hair, clearly exasperated with his partner’s ineptitude. After a moment of tense silence, he said, “Let me take a look.”
Tapping furiously at the keyboard, Alex cursed under his breath. Seconds passed, then minutes, and eventually the two of them were so absorbed in whatever crisis was unfolding on the computer screen, it was like I had ceased to exist. So I took the opportunity to escape to the bathroom, holding the couch cushion in front of me with one hand and plucking my clothes up off the floor with the other.
Once I was safely behind the closed door, I buried my face in the cushion and bit back a scream. Why was this guy always showing up at the most inconvenient times? If he weren’t so painfully stupid, I’d have thought Greg was intentionally trying to sabotage whatever Alex and I had going on. But clearly, he was totally incompetent. He couldn’t even fix a simple networking issue without Alex holding his hand the whole way through.
Poor Alex. Stuck in a failing business partnership with the world’s most useless start-up bro.
I got dressed and fixed my hair, allowing my blood pressure to return to a reasonable rate. As the sound of my pulse pounding in my ears began to subside, I tuned into the voices in the kitchen, so easily discernible through the cheap drywall of an overpriced Manhattan apartment.
“You’re the king, man,” Greg said. “Fucking Rico Suave!”
Alex shushed him. “Keep it down.”
“Dude, you’re so fucking smooth. I didn’t believe you when you said she was coming over. But you did it. You won, man!”
You won?
I picked up the couch cushion, hugging it to my chest, waiting for Alex to respond. Surely, he would jump to my defense and tell Greg to get bent. Because I was more than some bragworthy sexual conquest. I was not just some trophy to be won.
But all he said was, “Yup.”
Yup?
What the hell was that supposed to mean?
Apparently, Alex didn’t have a problem with Hatch’s frat house culture, after all. Sure, he criticized it to my face, but when he was alone with the boys, he was more than happy to play along.
I pushed open the bathroom door and returned the cushion to its rightful place on the back of the couch. In my peripheral vision, I could see Alex watching me, but I couldn’t bring myself to meet his gaze.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, but the moment I opened my mouth, the buzzer rang, swallowing my lie.
This time, it was the pizza, and as soon as Alex set the box on the counter, Greg flipped it open. He grabbed a slice and crammed it in his gaping maw, snorting as he chewed, like some sort of zoo animal. My stomach turned.
“Let me get some plates.” Alex’s voice sounded weary, resigned to the fact that Greg was here, eating our pizza, disrupting our date.
“I think I’m gonna head out,” I said, slipping into my shoes.
“What? Why?” Alex followed me to the door. “The pizza just got here.”
“I’m not that hungry.”
My gaze flicked toward Greg, whose sauce-smothered lips were curled in an infuriating smirk. “Smashin’ and dashin’, huh, Melanie?”
“Shut up, Greg,” Alex snapped, eager to play Prince Charming now that I was here to witness it.
I slung my purse over my shoulder and opened the door, ready to flee, but Alex squeezed my arm and gently pulled me back toward him.
“Hey,” he whispered, his breath tickling my ear. “I’m really sorry about this. This upgrade is completely screwed up now and if it bombs, Vijay’s gonna flip.”
“It’s fine. I get it.”
“I’ll make it up to you, I swear.”
I nodded, knowing full well this was just more of his insincere and meaningless smooth talk.
But when he kissed me goodbye, my whole body felt limp and tingly. And there was nothing phony about that.
17
On my way to the subway, I grabbed a slice of pizza from a hole-in-the-wall on Fulton Street. Despite what I’d told Ale
x, I actually was hungry. I just couldn’t stomach the thought of staying there, pretending I hadn’t overheard them discussing me like I was some sexual prize.
When I arrived home, Vanessa was sprawled on the couch, one hand clutching her phone, the other hand wrapped firmly around a bottle of rosé. As soon as I shut the door behind me, she asked, “Have you ever heard of this website called JerkAlert?”
My feet froze to the floor. “Um...yeah. How’d you find out about it?”
“It’s everywhere. Don’t you read BuzzFeed?”
“Right. Of course.”
“Anyway, there are some seriously messed-up guys out there.” Her thumb tapped and scrolled against her screen. “Including the guy I was supposed to go out with tonight.”
She held it up for me to see:
Name: Justin
Age: 29
Location: Williamsburg
Review: Our first date was going great until he asked to “fingerbang” me in the bar bathroom. When I told him no, he called me ugly, then ditched me with the bill.
“Oh my God,” I said.
“I canceled as soon as I saw the review.” Vanessa took a swig from her wine bottle. “Why didn’t Vilma know about this? She is so fired.”
It pleased me to know that JerkAlert was of more use to women on the New York City dating scene than an overpriced, overhyped matchmaker. So much for Whit’s claim that the site was purely about catharsis.
“You should demand your money back,” I said.
“Maybe.” She fiddled with her phone for another moment. “I looked up Ray, too.”
Not Ray. He seemed like such a nice guy, so genuinely kind and helpful. Not to mention, he had the keys to our apartment. What if he was sneaking into our rooms and rifling through our underwear drawers when we weren’t home?
Ugh.
“What does it say about him?” I asked.
“Nothing.” Her lips turned up in a coy little smile. “He’s not in there.”
How to Hack a Heartbreak Page 14