One Eyed Not-Nate

'I mean, it’s all just a big lie anyway, isn’t it? This whole happily ever after shit. We’ve all been sold this hoax, this lie, it’s been sold to ALL of us since we were born. If you ask me, (I hadn't) we’ve been fed this horseshit our whole lives. All we have to do is get a good job, meet a stunner, marry her, buy a house, have two point five kids (unsure how you have .5 of a child, but please, do go on) and that’s the secret to a happy life’.

He stops and slowly looks me up and down. Twice.

‘I mean, you’re supposed to have kids when your eggs aren’t already cooked though am I right?’ He winks at me with his good eye.

‘Then, THEN we are supposed to be satisfied with our lot in life working forty hours a week behind a desk and then, if we’re lucky, IF WE’RE LUCKY, we get to have a drink with Barry from accounts on Friday nights and then retire at 70’.

He briefly looks up at a spot above my head, I want to believe this is done in a pensive, thoughtful way, but I can’t be sure that he isn’t just quietly farting.

He continues.

‘Or, I suppose in your case, they’ve led you to believe that you should be happy enough with a girls night out on the wine every now and again?’

At this comment, I stare at my fingers, bright red from gripping the stem of my glass of Merlot.

He’s yet to take a breath. Except for that brief intermission where I can confirm that he definitely farted.

‘Anyways, you get me Sammy, right? We are brainwashed into believing that’s all we have to live for and then we die.’

Dammit, he’d had so much promise. I’d genuinely laughed out loud during some of our text exchanges. Actual LOLs. Perhaps in hindsight, there were some red flags but his pictures on Swinder were subtle yet effective. There were none of him sitting with comatose tigers or fishing expeditions or shots of him doing laps on his motorbike. He simply looked...handsome. Pensive, yet handsome. They exposed him, sitting right there in his living room, looking straight down the camera barrel with his salt and pepper hair (my weakness) and an exposed snaggletooth (also a weakness).

We’d quickly identified that we shared a love of the written word and foreign cinema. He was an Historian and then we’d bonded over Seinfeld. I’m not going to lie to you, my thirty-five year old body was ripening for him with every message we exchanged. In his pictures, he looked forty, the age he’d professed to be but it was a well aged forty and I liked that. I looked down at my barely touched Merlot again and took a large sip.

I zoned back in, in my mental absence he’d moved onto the #metoo movement.

‘All I’m saying is, women can give mixed signals ya know? And these women? They wanted to get ahead in their careers and only said boo AFTER they didn’t make it in Hollywood. And that’s just Hollywood. I’ve had women be all into me and then suddenly not and am I supposed to be responsible for their change of mind?’

Wow. I am out.

I look around. The pub is pretty packed and it’s a Thursday but this is not my local and I’m suddenly disorientated. I’m trying to process how to get out of here safely and also, where it all went so wrong. This guy doesn’t even remotely physically or mentally resemble my supposed "date". It’s not only that, I could have forgiven a white lie about age and hey, I’m not an animal, I get that we can all exaggerate or embellish on our online profiles but COME. ON.

So, I grab the ¾ bottle of Merlot and my handbag and I run. But suddenly I stop and return because no, this guy needs to hear something. I walk back and look him dead in his good eye and yell above the din ‘You’ve got it all wrong Nate, the only lie I’ve ever been told is by that the guy I was going out on a date with tonight who was twenty years younger than the guy who turned up’

He laughs. He laughs AT me.

‘Oh sweetheart, I’m not Nate, I’m his roommate, he gifted me to you, said he liked you intellectually but that your arse was WAY too big for him to and he was going to stand you up so I thought I’d give it a go on the off chance you were horny and on the lookout for sperm donor.’

Wow.

Outwardly, I was stoic and as a casual observer, you wouldn't have been able to read anything from my face. Inwardly, I wanted to do very bad things to both One-Eyed Not Nate and then the actual Nate and after that, go and burrow into my bedframe and never, ever, come out again.

Alas, as I had nothing to throw at Not-Nate, I took the high road and walked outside and called an Uber to take me directly to my best friend’s house.

I arrived, sat down, thanked the Gods for such a great friend and pulled out my ¾ full bottle of Merlot (that hopefully he'd had to pay for) and poured us both a tall glass. As she started to question me about the clusterfuck of a night, I couldn’t help but think that maybe ‘ole one eye not-Nate was right, maybe this right here, being with my best friend, this was my goddamn happy ending.