Maybe, Maybe Not

10. What a Girl Needs

She would get over her little thing with the young boy...excuse her, young man. There was no other choice. What did she look like dating someone in hot and in their twenties when she was in her forties and fine?

What little Nikko did was boost up her confidence to step out into the dating world. She had been single for two years, it did not have to stay that way. But how was she going to step out into the dating world? Wait for a meet-cute like a sweet little romance? No, that only happened in movies. Dating apps were the thing of the day, so she spent some time finding the right app that would send her hot guys.

She built her page, added some fun facts about herself, loaded cute pictures, and began to look around a bit. Men in her age range. They had to at least be in her decade, since she was comfy in her mid-forties, no younger than forty and no older than fifty. It did not take long before she found a couple of possibilities.

For her first date, it was with a fine, fit, Black man who was forty-nine. He was gorgeous with a little salt and pepper thing going on in his thick beard while he wore his hair bald, either by choice or no choice but it looked good on him. The man dressed nicely and smelled good when he gave her a light hug. He was employed at a nice job at a bank in Clayton and everything seemed fine.

Till he dropped the bomb while they were out at Ruth Chris Steakhouse.

"I'm separated. We're going through it right now and our three kids are still young so we're trying to keep it together for them. It's rough on kids, you know, divorce, so I'm still living at home with them."

She almost spit out her Prosecco.

"I mean, I'm not in the same bed or anything. I have my own little set up in the basement."

Who was he fooling? What kind of setup was that? Who knew if he ever tip-toed back upstairs and fulfilled his husbandly duties every now and then? Maybe she slipped downstairs in between the sheets. What were the kids thinking? She could not imagine having a similar arrangement with Theo like that. Hell to the no!

Nope, hard pass on that one.

The next date she went on was with an older white man, fifty-one. So even though he was out of her range, he seemed decent. Nice looking, medium height and build, with dark brown hair and blue eyes. He owned his business but did not tell her what it was till they were on their date at Kobe's Steakhouse at West Port Plaza.

"Family business, my brother and I buy and sell antique cars. We go to auction houses all over the world. Lots of money in this, so I guess you could say I'm rich."

She did not care. She tried to get into the show of watching them cook her food. Volcano onions, rolling egg rolls, rice with a heartbeat. Catching shrimp in her mouth. Why was he telling her about his money? And he went on and on about not only his money, and how he felt he was better than her because he had two college degrees.

"I went to Princeton for my undergraduate and Yale for my Master's. Really good schools you know. A lot of my customers are Alumni because that's where the money is to be made. I have to do a lot of shaking hands with some of the elite in the world."

Nope. He was going to be another Theo, a power-grabbing, money-hungry douchebag. Next!

On her third date, the guy seemed more level-headed. Just a downhome type of guy. Age forty-eight, worked as a mechanic in a retail building, so he was not rich. In fact, he had a second job selling insurance. He was divorced for about five years. She could relate to a guy like this.

"So how many kids do you have?"

"Two. Grown and out of the house." They decided to go to a simple dinner, nothing fancy, so Applebee's it was. People hated on Applebee's but the food was good enough for her. A riblet platter with fries, and sauce on the side. She did not like to get too messy, but she could do to town on Applebee's riblets.