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“Yeah, I guess you are.” All pretense of this date going anywhere was over. Allison reached into her purse and pulled out her phone. “I’d feel bad, but I think he’s on a date right now, too. Normally we text several times a night. Nothing from him tonight.”
“Such is the way of modern dating.”
“Oh, Jason, how long have you been dating?” She must have heard the weariness in his voice. A weariness he tried to pretend wasn’t there, because the sympathy in her voice cut a little.
He shrugged off her pity. “A while. Not that I haven’t had serious girlfriends, but none of them ever seem to stick.”
“No spark,” one of those girlfriends had said, when he’d asked why. That was the only reason she’d been able to give for why she was breaking up with him. Though, if he were being honest with himself, that particular relationship had been faltering ever since she’d started sending him links to different college programs for older students.
Allison’s face looked less sympathetic when she pursed her lips. “Sure you haven’t had trouble sticking to them?”
For a server who hadn’t paid them any attention practically the entire time they’d been in the restaurant, their waitress now picked the most inopportune times to pass by their table. Apparently, she’d heard Allison’s question which, following the other bits of conversation she’d overheard, made him look like the bad guy. The server’s book landed on the table with a smack, jolting his card and the pen onto the table.
“I don’t think you can come back to this restaurant,” Allison said, her eyes twinkling.
“At least not when she’s working,” he said with a gesture of his head to their retreating waitress. Which was okay. He didn’t like this place much anyway. The restaurant thought too highly of itself for his taste.
He collected the pen and his credit card off the table, added a tip to the bill and signed his name.
“Want me to pay half? I have cash.”
“Nah. If this guy is the one, your confirmation date might as well have all the trappings of a real date. It might be your last.”
She smiled, but his hopes that she’d forgotten her previous question were dashed when she opened her mouth and said, “Well, have you been the one giving up too early?”
“Is this a date or therapy?”
“Come on,” she said, giving him a gimme gesture with her fingers. “Look, we’ll probably never see each other again, and we’ve both been doing this dating thing a long time. You might as well be honest. What have you got to lose?”
She had a point. Maybe even one about him giving up on the women too soon. “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t think so.” He shook his head, shoving the book and the signed receipt to the middle of the table. “I don’t want to think so.”
“It’s the risk everyone talks about with online dating and dating apps. The pool of prospects seems to be so vast that the girl who is close enough, and might actually be better than you deserve, can’t compete with the possibilities of your imagination.” Allison said those words with no trace of bitterness in her voice. Flat, like those were the rules of the game and she’d played them, too.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He looked at dating as fun, which led credence to her statement. “But isn’t that what modern romance is? We all date and date and date until we decide we don’t want to date anymore, then we settle down with the person we happen to be with at the time?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, I think you take each person at face value and not think about how they compare to competition. Only the people able to do that get off the hamster wheel with someone. The others are either running forever or get spun off alone.”
“Yeah?” Jason wished he had another drink. Some excuse to sit here and keep talking to Allison. The removal of hope and expectation made their conversation interesting. “Sounds decidedly unromantic. Is that how you did it?”
“I like to think that I fell in love the old-fashioned way. I met a guy, liked him and the more I got to know him, the more I liked him. Nothing unromantic about that. The computer helped some and hindered some, but no more and no less than relatives would have one hundred years ago. Only the skills I used to navigate it were different.” Her smile was soft, without a trace of irony, and her focus had drifted away from him, probably to the man in her life.
