She wasn’t sure if she’d hear back from him straight away as he was in meetings all day. ‘Back to back,’ he had said, warning her there might be a delay and not to worry about it.
Jake worked for a consultancy firm in the city. Beyond that, Marisa had no clear idea of what he did, except she knew it was about making companies more streamlined and efficient, and there was a lot of travel involved, although not always to glamorous places. Recently, he had spent several weeks in Nottingham working for a pharmaceutical firm.
‘Surprisingly good mid-century furniture shops,’ was all he’d said.
‘How are the books?’ he’d ask, and she’d tell him about the orders she’d got that week via her website from doting parents or aunts or godmothers wanting personalised storybooks for their little darlings. Marisa had a range of seven stories you could choose from online – there was the sleeping princess story, the dragon-slaying prince, the fearless adventurer, the naughty jungle monkey, and so on. You could type in the name of your child, upload a recent photograph and provide some defining characteristics, and Marisa would illustrate each book accordingly.
Her website was called Telling Tales and when it had launched last year, it was featured in some of the major glossy magazines. The Instagram account had several thousand followers and a blue tick. Marisa enjoyed the work because it was repetitive enough not to have to think too much and yet creative enough to be stimulating. It didn’t make her a fortune, despite what her carefully filtered Instagram tiles might have you believe, and over the last few months, orders had slowed and she’d struggled to pay her rent. Which was why, when Jake suggested they move in together, she had jumped at the chance. That, and the fact she was in love with him, obviously.
‘Woah, Ris, where did you find him?’ her friend Jas had asked when she had first told her about Jake.
‘Online,’ Marisa said. ‘I know, I know! You don’t need to say. It’s a miracle.’
Jas had been single for even longer than Marisa. They had spent lengthy evenings over consolatory glasses of Pinot Noir on Marisa’s sofa bemoaning the lack of decent men, and both of them had got agreat deal of enjoyment from the cliched pose of being two women in their late twenties drinking wine while bemoaning said lack of decent men. They had signed up to dating apps at around the same time, the ones named after imperative verbs which were linked to pre-existing social media profiles and required Marisa to set about creating a personality for herself.
There were lists of favourite films and music and food. Endless questions to test compatibility over areas including religion and love and sexual predilection (polyamorous or gender fluid or ‘sapiosexual’, which Marisa had to Google to find out that it meant being turned on by intelligence) and whether you’d consider dating someone in debt and whether it was more romantic to go camping in the woods or be whisked away for a dinner in Paris.
All the answers went into some mysterious algorithm that determined, down to the closest percentage, whether you were a match with Peter, the director of a graphic design company with a nine-year-old son who meant the world to him, or Wez, a tennis coach from Crawley looking for a woman with warm eyes and a sexy smile.
Marisa became numbed to the stream of men who posed shirtless with motorbikes or German shepherds or who said they were 6ft when they were actually 5ft10 or who took spooky selfies in hotel-room mirrors so that the flash rebounded and illuminated the walls in dirty white like some budget horror movie. She was unmoved by Kevin who posed with a young girl holding a teddy bear and who had written in his potted biography ‘Girl is my niece’ while linking to his favourite Spotify tracks. He had Fleetwood Mac on there, like everyone else. She messaged him anyway and they went on a date and it was, like all the others, disappointing. Not in a way that made it terrible; in a way that made it mediocre, and that was worse.
She had texted him to say thank you for the date and she had watched as the WhatsApp tick turned from single grey to double grey and then to double blue, the garishness of the jolt of colour pricking her eyes so that she realised she had been staring at the screen waiting for it to happen. He had read the message. She kept looking at her phone to see whether he would reply, looking out for the tell-tale‘typing …’ to appear, the ellipses a signal of optimistic intent, three dots suggesting continuation and open endings. But there had been nothing.
After Kevin, she had told Jas she was giving up the apps altogether.
‘I hear you, babe,’ Jas said, wincing as she recounted the evening.
‘It’s like they think I’m … weird or too much or something,’ Marisa had said. ‘I can see it in their eyes.’
‘You’re reading too much into it.’ Jas twiddled a small diamond hoop in her earlobe. ‘Like I always say, it’s maths.’
Jas had read an article online about the fact that there were fewer men than women on dating apps, and she cited it frequently.
‘And when you’re a Black woman, it’s even worse,’ she said. ‘Trust me. Hardly anyone swipes right on me.’
‘Racists,’ Marisa said.
‘Yeah, but honestly though.’ Her face was serious and Marisa felt bad. ‘It’s everywhere.’
‘I texted Kevin.’
‘Again?’ Jas looked at her.
In fact, Marisa had texted Kevin several times. At first, she simply wanted to tell him he owed her an explanation but then she had got angry and accused him of being a misogynist prick. Her last WhatsApp had simply said ‘Fuck off.’ He’d stopped reading her messages. The ticks no longer went blue. Or perhaps he had blocked her. That kind of thing had happened before.
Marisa nodded, taking the bottle of wine from Jas to fill up her glass. ‘I just wanted to draw a line under it.’
‘Makes sense,’ Jas said.
Jake had been different from the start. For one thing, he always responded to her messages. They had met at a theme party, organised by the online agency she had signed up to which prided itself on ‘finding your perfect match’. It was a dreary, fancy-dress affair and Marisa drank too much. She had chatted briefly to him at the bar and he had insisted she take his number.
She had woken up with a fuzzy head the next day, but there was already a text from Jake on her phone when she reached for it. Hemessaged her consistently for about two weeks before he asked whether she’d like to meet up for a date.
Instead of drinks or dinner, Jake had suggested a cafe in the middle of the day, which Marisa liked. It meant there would be no tipsy awkwardness at the end about whether to kiss or not. It was unthreatening and uncomplicated: a simple meeting to see whether they still gelled.
He was already sitting at a table by the window when she got there, a cup of coffee in front of him with a small shortbread biscuit on the saucer in the shape of a star. His blond-brown hair was short and unfussy, swept into place with a moderate amount of gel. His clothes were freshly pressed and unexceptional: a grey T-shirt with no logo; chinos worn in at the knees; a dark belt with a burnished brass buckle; a watch with a dulled silver strap.
When she walked into the cafe, Marisa felt a strange sense of peace settle just underneath her breastbone, as though a bird’s wings had stopped their fluttering.
