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“Were you sitting? Standing? Was there ambient lighting? Set the scene.”

“I was on my couch.”

“On your couch?” Benji sighed, as though I’d said something profound. “In your home? A stranger’s asshole entered your home? That’s practically a home invasion, Mark. You could press charges.” He gasped. “Was there a caption?”

“No.”

“No caption? Huh.”

“No hello, no name, no weather report, nothing. I opened the message, and it was just a photograph of a man’s happy pucker winking up at me like one good eye. That was the whole message. The asshole was the message.”

Benji sat back like he’d been shot, one hand to his heart. “Oh, he’s an artist.”

“He’s not an artist, Benji.”

“He’s a minimalist. He stripped away everything, the words, the foreplay, the human decency, and left only the essential image. He gave you a vertical smile. Well, like you said, it was more pucker than smile, but that’s a detail. That’s a man with a vision, Mark. That’s a man who trusts his work to speak for itself.” He was building now, getting the shine he got right before he became uncontrollable. “Did the work speak to you?”

“The work said nothing. It was an asshole. They generally don’t say much.” I scratched my scalp and sucked in a few calming breaths. “That’s what I keep—in what world is an asshole an opening line? You wouldn’t do that anywhere else. You wouldn’t walk up to a man in a hardware store, hand him a Polaroid of your glorious entrance, and wait to see how he felt about it.”

“That guy wouldn’t last a day at a hardware store.” Benji had to grip the bar.

“And it wasn’t just him, Benj.” I couldn’t stop myself, days of this now behind me. “He was the standout, sure, the asshole with no caption, bold, iconic, and puckery, but he wasn’t alone. Most of the other DMs led with a cock. Right out of the gate, even before ‘Hello.’ It was like, ‘Here’s my cock. Want it?’ No face, no name, only a cock and a distance in feet.”

“That’s a headline,” Benji wheezed. “They’re leading with their strongest assets. That’s just good copy.”

“A headline has words, Benji.”

“These guys are visual publications, like for a magazine!” Benji was fully gone now, folded halfway over the bar, wiping his eyes. “Oh my God, and you, you sweet, enormous man, you’re out here reading these DMs like they’re personal ads in the Tampa Tribune. You probably wrote back. Oh, no. Oh, no, Mark, you wrote back, didn’t you? Tell me what you wrote back—”

“I asked one of them how his weekend was.”

Benji made a sound I can only describe as a swan being stepped on, right before he slid entirely off the stool and vanished down behind the bar. From the floor, muffled, in genuine delight, I heard him say, “He sent you his entire genitalia and you asked about his weekend,” and then nothing but wheezing.

“He didn’t answer,” I said to the top of Benji’s head.

“OF COURSE HE DIDN’T ANSWER!” Benji shot back up, pink hair wild, tears streaking his face, more alive than I’d seen him in weeks. “He didn’t have words, Mark! He’d used them all up! He had no words left. He spent his whole vocabulary on a photo, which had none. I know it’s a paradox, but it’s beautiful. I could cry—” He grabbed a napkin, one of the veil napkins from the funeral still stacked by the well, and dabbed his eyes. “This is the best day of my life. I want that on my headstone. You asked about a bodyless cock’s weekend!”

“Are you finished?”

“I may never be finished, not with this. I’m going to tell this story until I’m an old man. I’m going to tell it at your funeral.” He clutched the napkin to his chest. “And then I’ll say, ‘A man sent him a photograph of his entire asshole, sans words, and Mark Delgado, God rest him, replied with a follow-up question about barbequing ribs.’ There won’t be a dry eye in the house, Mark. You’ll have united us all in grief—and confusion.”

“I’m going to go jump off the roof now.”

“Oh, no. You don’t get away that easily,” Benji said, suddenly soft, wiping the last of the tears and gazing at me with a love so total it looped back around into pity. “This tale is the tragedy of you. You’re a golden doodle in a room full of wolves, and you keep asking the wolves how their day’s going.”

In that moment, Finn appeared with a rack of clean pints, listening completely while appearing to do something else. He racked the glasses, wiped his hands, and looked at me with the flat practicality of a man about to say something so obvious it might be radical.

“Have you considered,” Finn said, “and stop me if this is too advanced, standing near an actual, live, breathing man and speaking to him?”

“That’s what the app was supposed to—”

“No, Mark, in person, in a room, with your actual mouth.” He leaned on the bar. “You’re treating dating like a supply chain problem. You keep trying to solve it through a vendor. You own a bar. You know better than any man alive that people meet people in bars. So go to one—but not this one. You can’t flirt in your own church. Go somewhere else, have a drink, talk to a man like it’s nineteen ninety-five and the phone’s screwed to the kitchen wall where it belongs.”

“An actual human being,” Benji said in mock awe, “with a last name that you learn before seeing his asshole. It’s revolutionary. Finn, you’re a genius.”

And the thing that stung? It wasn’t Finn inserting himself or Benji’s relentless teasing. It wasn’t a bad idea. In fact, it was the least bad idea anyone had offered me since this horrid dating campaign began.

“Yeah,” I said, and felt something almost like hope, which should have been my first warning. “Okay, yeah. I’ll try that.”