was single, and she was horny, and she was drunk.
So drunk. So horny. So alone.
Le sigh.
That picture called to her again, her thumb hovered over the screen, so close to swiping—
“No,” she muttered. “No men.”
Men were untrustworthy fuckers, who brought unnecessary complications.
Despite their hard cocks that could occasionally bring her to orgasm.
“Ugh.”
She tossed her phone on the mattress, hit play on her show, and settled in with her glass of wine (thanks to her hidden stash that her friends hadn’t found, ha!) and her sexy, just as fictional as the man in the app, Colonel Jack O’Neill.
See?
Her life was full.
She had good friends. She had good vibrators. She had a good job.
She had a great dog.
“I don’t need anything else, do I, Fred?”
Her fluffy friend, with his adorable golden retriever face and his fuzzy tail, glanced up at her, tail thumping on the mattress. Yeah, no. No orgasm was worth locking him in his kennel. He was exhausted after a long day of doggy day care, the excitement of her friends coming over, and currently curled up in the space where her imaginary man might reside.
Another see?
Because she didn’t have room for the app man, any more than she had room for that fictional colonel.
It was her and Fred and her bottle of wine.
That was good enough.
Except . . . it wasn’t good enough when she finished her episode and went to the kitchen for another bottle of wine, letting the show continue to play. It wasn’t good enough when she finished that wine over another episode, and her mind got thinking again, only this time swirling because she was plumb full of wine, of margaritas.
It wasn’t good enough when her reserve disappeared into the wind, and she used her drunk coordination to pick up her cell, her lack of inhibition to . . . swipe right.
Bleary eyes shutting, she let her arm drop to the bed, the phone slipping out of her grip, sleep claiming her fast and heavily.
And in the morning, SG-1 still rolling on autoplay, when her headache and hangover meant that she’d almost forgotten about the fictional man and her drunk swiping . . .
In the morning, she woke up, peeled back her lids, squinted with bleary eyes, and saw—
He’d swiped right, too.
Oh, fuck.
Chapter Six
Ben
He’d expected an immediate response.
He’d seen the red lips, the shoulder-length brown hair, the brown eyes that on first glance looked open and happy, but on closer inspection, held a slice of sad.
That sad had called to something inside him.
The eight beers he’d consumed, probably.
But still, he’d ignored everything in him telling him to delete the app, to ignore the woman, to ignore the fire that had begun burning in his gut when he’d seen the sad, and he’d swiped right.
And then he’d expected something to happen.
Instead, he’d gotten a screen telling him he had a match and then . . . nothing.
Now, there was still no response, it was morning and for some fucking reason, he was Googling what he should do after a match and realizing that he probably needed to be the one to take that first step. Which meant he was currently neck-deep in online advice telling him to send a message with everything from “Hey” to snapping a picture of his dick and texting it to her.
The first didn’t seem like enough.
The last seemed like a surefire way to get blocked and ruin any chance of tasting those pretty red lips.
So, now he’d opened up the message center and was staring blankly at the box he should be filling with words, with a pithy joke or pickup line, and was back to contemplating deleting the app again, just to put himself out of his misery.
Then his phone pinged.
With a message from her. From Stef McKay.
Hey.
She got to just say hey?
Seriously?
What the fuck was that bullshit?
Well, two could play that game. His fingers worked on the phone screen, sent those same three letters back.
Hey.
Take that. Back in her court, Ms. Stef McKay.
Then he realized he was being an idiot and knew he should be saying something else. This was basically a business deal. A transaction that would get them both something mutually satisfactory.
If he looked at it that way, all would be good.
Nodding to himself, he took off his fucking horrible with women hat and put on his business one, and then typed out a message.
You have a nice smile.
Pedestrian.
But a compliment, especially one that wasn’t about her tits (which looked nice from the small glimpse of cleavage