My stomach sinks but I fake an enthusiastic smile, having learned the hard way with Alice it’s sometimes better to just go along with her spur-of-the-moment ideas.
Refreshing my personal dating experience would probably make me better at my job, but when your date discovers you work for a dating app, one of two questions always arise.
Number One: Can you help me improve my profile?
Translation: The date has not been the explosive “love at first sight” experience Fate promises it will be.
Number Two: Can you see the messages I send other people?
Translation: they are either a creep or have plans to be in the near future.
The only date I’ve been on since William started with both questions and ended with me bursting into tears and leaving before dessert. Not exactly the palate-cleansing, passion-inducing rebound I had imagined.
Alice swipes through my photos, a gallery of a woman I think I should be and scrunches her face at the screen.
“Oh God, they are all awful pictures, right?”
“No, you look beautiful, but...” She trails off and I laugh nervously.
Yemi takes the phone from Alice and peers at the screen. “This kind of reads like a CV, not a dating profile. Aren’t you meant to be good at this kind of thing?”
I furrow my brow and peer toward the screen. I take the phone from her hand and check my profile. Photosof me smiling in a bar, with a group of university friends on a camping trip, and the rest are pictures of me at work events.
“I am! In fact, I pride myself on that skill. When I am doing it for other people,” I exclaim. “It’s like how you can see someone who has a similar body type to you and think they are stunning but then look at yourself and think: I am a blob. I can see other people’s skills, interests and fun facts and package them into something sellable—but I can never do that for myself.”
“‘Grace, twenty-nine, originally from Wiltshire so obviously a nature lover,’” Yemi reads.
Alice snorts. “Babe, you hate being outside! You like staying in with a book, and if you ever go out it’s to a, like, a museum or an art gallery or something boring.”
That point is hard to deny; growing up in the countryside had left me with an intense anti-nostalgia for the great outdoors. Instinctively, I look around the room at all the posters and art prints from those excursions, one of the few things I actually brought to our flat from William’s.
“Kind of ironic for the Marketing Manager of a dating app to have the most misleading profile ever,” adds Yemi. I glare at her despite deep down completely agreeing.
“You just got a calendar invite.” Alice puts the phone in front of my face, the bright screen making me squint.
The meeting invitation is from Catch Group CEO Martin Catcher’s personal assistant. I press thenotification and the ominous title of “Meeting” at 9 a.m. tomorrow is revealed with no other context. My eyes move down to the invitation list, and my stomach throbs with anxiety as I read off the names:
Martin Catcher has accepted the meeting.
Susie Jopling has accepted the meeting.
Dharmash Khatri has accepted the meeting.
Before I have time to process what this might mean, another message pops up:
Eric Bancroft has accepted the meeting.
Shit. I press accept a heartbeat later, not wanting to seem too slow compared to him. As Alice continues to prep for her date, Yemi offers to sit and watch the Keira Knightley version ofPride and Prejudice, sensing that I’m in no place to talk about this recent development. It’s one of the few pieces of love-centric media I can still actually enjoy without my evolved cynicism leaking through, but I can’t focus on it; instead, I find myself refreshing my emails every two minutes, hoping for some indication of what this meeting is about. And whether it means I’m getting fired.
Yemi sighs and pauses on a frame of Mr. Darcy’s perfect mutton-chopped face.
“Hey!” I reach my arm out toward the screen. “We were just getting to the hand-flexy part!”
She shoots me a stern look. “Grace, do you thinkheis freaking out right now?”
“Probably—he’s in love with someone who thinks he’s an arsehole!”
“Not Mr. Darcy, Eric Bancroft!”
