23 Attempts at Love

Chapter 9: Holier Than Thou

Back on Tinder we go. Once we've made a few mistakes on there, why not make some more? It's now the Easter break of my third year, and I'm finally reuniting with my friends from school: Clara, Lissy, Maddie, Sally and Anita. We were all in our third years, although Anita was in med school so she wasn't going to be graduating for a while, and I'd decided to do a masters to put off entering the real world for a little bit longer. Clara was doing the same, but for actual academic purposes and not so she could spend another year drinking, like I would be doing.

Back to Tinder. One spring evening while tucked up in my childhood bedroom I swiped on a guy who seemed surprisingly normal. It happened. It was rare but it happened. We matched instantly. God, he has good taste.

It turns out he was going into town on the same day my friends and I had planned to go out drinking. I never organised anything with him sober because I knew drunk Lucy would take over and invite him everywhere I went, so I was already mentally preparing myself to be completely ignored the day after. Nothing makes a hangover better than rejection, right?

Now it's 11pm on a Saturday night and the 6 girls and I have spent two hours pre-drinking at Clara's house, then another hour in this bar doing shots. We're trying to get as drunk as possible as quickly as possible so that we don't have to spend money later. That's the plan.

Drunk Lucy decides now would be a perfect time to message my new Tinder friend Jacob to let him know that yes, it would be a great idea for our first date to be right now and that he should ditch his friends straight away to join me and mine. Wonderful.

Weirdly, he agreed. Twenty minutes later I saw him wandering through the bar looking for my head above the crowd (no heels would ever be tall enough to let that happen). Not so sneakily, I backed away from my group of friends dancing wildly to a Taylor Swift remix and "bumped into" him at the bar.

"Hey stranger," he said coyly. He was about the same height as me in heels, which wasn't a bad thing. Nobody wanted neckache having a conversation.

"How's your night been?" I asked, grinning a little smugly. I liked that he'd walked halfway across town to come to meet me.

"Ah, it's getting better I think. My friends were a little concerned about me getting lost though, so I brought them with me..." He gestured to a group of guys sat down on a nearby table. I glanced across: they all looked decent. You can tell a lot about someone from their friends, I think, which is why I planned on keeping my hilarious and incredibly drunk friends away from him for the time being, until I could assess how drunk he was.

He bought me a drink. I flirted. A lot. It was the kind of drunken flirting where you end up touching each other's arms and laughing at stupid jokes and downing shots and forgetting that anyone else is around you... Until Maddie arrived.

"Hey! How do you two know each other?" She said, stepping into the gap between Jacob and I.

"Oh, Tinder," I told her. "We've been chatting and we just spotted each other across the bar..." I said, winking subtly at him. The rest of my friends would probably kill me for sacking off a group dance in favour of an arranged date.

"Well, it's nice to finally see you in person!" Maddie said, smiling at Jacob and batting her lashes. I knew this look. Everyone has a flirting look and I'm happy to admit that mine is very embarrassing.

"How do you two know each other?" I asked, suddenly noticing the mild panic on Jacob's face as he looked at me, then Maddie, then me again.

"We met on Tinder!" Maddie beams. She was looking between Jacob and I and obviously trying to figure out what was happening. This was suddenly very awkward.