It’s my final cue to shift my arse and traipse upstairs. Ditch my clothes in the worn pile on the floor and check the clean stack has everything I need for when I wake up.
It does.
I’m not a fecking animal. But as I stretch out on my mattress and give in to the urge to reach for my phone, it’s hard to not feel like one.
It’s getting light outside, the heavy winter air fading to a damp morning. Rain patters on my roof, the one part of the house I know for sure is sound, and I like it better than the silence that’s clung to me since I turned off the radio downstairs. I like noise and colour and chaos. It suits me. Lonely downtime eats at my soul and has me doing stupid shit like opening FlingIt and seeing who’s online—seeing who’s onlinenear me—and feck if the first profile I see isn’t a brand new one fifty feet from where I sleep.
The photo is blank. Username…actually, I don’t know what that is, beyond the subtle code that he was born the year before I was.
LeLionDuBois96.
French, maybe? I don’t know that either and curiosity gets the better of me. My thumb hovers for less than a split second before I click the link and find myself instantly frustrated by a profile that’s vaguer than vague…ifyou don’t know what you’re looking for.
He’s left his bio blank, along with his specific interests. But this app has mandatory requirements: age, sexuality, what you’re looking for. Yeah, you can lie, but why bother? I scan LeLionDuBois96’s stats, confirming he’s twenty-nine. No shocker there. He’s bi-curious—I can work with that—and…
Feck—fuck.
He has his “would like to meet” set to MF couples, but in the notes…
Only looking for men.
I take a beat, letting that sink in. My thumb hovers over the message icon even as my conscience tries to reel me in. The mixed messages in his profile tell me he’s a newbie, and I knew it anyway, without spending another hot second in his company. Closeted for life reasons or maybe just himself. Either way, I didn’t hang around last night to see if my clumsy flirting hit home. I don’t know if he liked it or cringed his way into next Christmas, and if it’s the latter…
Don’t do it.
Don’t you fecking do it.
Sound advice. Logical advice, if I do say so myself. But being my own moral compass makes it too easy to tilt the map, too easy to make the world look how I want it to look.
And right now, I want to message him.
To say hi.
Help him settle in.
Let him know I’mright here, to see if he’ll bite. Even if I don’t know for sure that it’s him. Plenty of lads have blank profiles and intriguing usernames. Hell,Idid way back when I didn’t know one end of a man’s cock from the other, and that messy period in my life would’ve been over a lot quicker if I’d had someone—afriend—to guide me through it.
He’s not on FlingIt looking for friends.
Maybe not. But the thing about needing a pal is you don’t know it until youreallyneed one, and I tell myself that’s what has me tapping that icon and thumbing out a message.
Typing.
Deleting.
Typing again.
Before I find the balls to hit send.
HotCraic97:Like it better here? xox
Sab
I’m dying.
Or maybe I’m dead.
Four words stare back at me from my phone screen, but they don’t seem real.
