Please

Bad Date

"He said WHAT?"

Jo winced and held the phone away from her ear. Distantly she heard Kate's laughter but rather than concentrate on the sounds of her trying to get her breath back while expressing her road rage, Jo glanced around the empty bathroom.

Jo kept deleting and re-downloading dating apps, going through periods of hopefulness and then giving up. After the week she'd had, she would have rather stayed home, but she received a message from Tom, asking if they were still on for tonight.

Feeling ashamed and infuriated, Jo convinced herself to just go and see if their might be a spark. At the very least it gave her the chance to get out of the house and stop aggravating over the whole idea.

Unfortunately, Tom's sense of humour far too often incorporated saying "L-O-L am I right?" for Jo's liking. That wasn't the worst of it. About half an hour into the date, he was already intricately detailing the next few decades of their lives as a happily married couple, which included at least two properties, three children and a partridge in a pear tree.

Jo sighed when she put the phone back to her ear and could still hear Kate laughing on the other end of the line. She hoped the road rage was for her benefit.

"Just please come and get me." She begged, pinching the bridge of her nose. "I don't know if I can face him again."

"No can do chickadee, sorry."

"What do you mean no can do?" Jo demanded. "You're supposed to be my emergency call, you promised!"

"I know honey, I'm sorry! Rhys slipped with a kitchen knife and cut right into his hand. I'm taking him to the hospital."

In the background Jo could hear Rhys's voice, high and anxious. "What if I lose too much blood Kate? There's a lot of blood- what if I hit an artery?"

"You didn't hit an artery!" Kate said with a laugh. "If you did, we'd know, there'd be blood everywhere babe."

Jo supposed that was a pretty good excuse. And she had picked a place not far from home just in case. She groaned. She really didn't want to have to go back out there.

.

The door opened and Marco looked down at her once again in surprise. The seething anger that gave her the energy to catch and Uber straight from her failure of a date to Kate's house fizzled out the minute she saw him.

"I just wanted to tell you," she said, mustering as much bravado as possible, "that you're an ass."

She crossed her arms and nodded, like that was all she came to say. She pretended like she didn't know how ridiculous she sounded, needing to feel like she was at least able to salvage a small part of her dignity for the night.

"I see." Marco said before clicking his tongue and sucking in a breath. "Is there a reason you came all this way to tell me? A simple phone call would have been enough."

Jo grit her teeth as heat bloomed on her cheeks. God he was infuriating. The smile on his face told her that he meant to be, and she refused to run from him again. She forced herself to look straight into his eyes and narrowed hers. Marco interrupted her before she could say what was probably another not very well thought out insult.

"So you came here after your big date, and quite early I might had." He tapped an imaginary watch. "I'm guessing it went smoothly?"

Jo's confidence shrank. What was she doing here? Feeling the anger start to seep out of her, she straightened and uncrossed her arms to appear more reasonable.

"I heard Kate's taking Rhys to the hospital, can I wait for them here?"

Marco smirked at that and they looked at each other for an uncomfortable few seconds. He pushed the door wider, not moving out of the way.