my ex or one of his buddies, in which case they’d probably call in K-9 or something and have my car searched for drugs in between asking dispatch if they were sure I had no outstanding warrants. Ugh. That guy was a dick. You know those guys who become cops just so they can be bullies with guns and badges? That was him in a nutshell, I discovered six weeks into dating him and precisely two days before I dumped his ass and made myself persona non grata in his precinct.
Anyway.
I tapped my thumbs on the wheel as I followed a street lined with houses and leaf-heavy trees. My momentary distraction about the number of cops I had carnal knowledge of in Los Angeles vs Laurelsburg had killed all of about two minutes, and the route guidance said I still had eighteen to go before my destination. For fuck’s sake. My wandering brain had passed hours on end while I’d been driving across the country—I swear I spent like three hours in the desert having a lively internal debate about some random comment I’d overheard at a rest stop about legalizing weed. I was pretty sure there’d also been a stretch through some endless cornfields that had been a bittersweet mental montage of all the pretty and kinky men I was leaving behind in Los Angeles (some of whom I’d miss tremendously, others who could go fuck themselves).
And that little tangent about my previous tangents consumed…another two minutes.
“Oh my God, come on,” I demanded of the car, the GPS, and the road. “Can we just get there already?”
It wasn’t that much farther. It really wasn’t. After driving all the way across the stupid continent, I shouldn’t have been losing my mind over a short drive through this tiny town. Though, okay, that transcontinental drive had been at an average of eighty-five-plus miles an hour—cough, I mean, seventy-five miles an hour, since that was usually the speed limit—and this one was between twenty-five and thirty-five. Legally, anyway. So it was slow as balls.
Mostly, I was just impatient because I was beyond curious to meet Aaron and Will. We’d been chatting via Kinkbook’s instant messenger app, and they seemed like good guys so far. Will was pretty casual in his chats, not always bothering to capitalize and generally assuming that if he made a typo, I still knew what he meant, which I did. Aaron was one of those people who spelled and punctuated like he was going to get graded by a super strict English teacher. He wasn’t pretentious about it, and he didn’t say anything if I missed a letter or left off a comma, but he struck me as the type who would break out in hives if he had a momentary brain fart and used the wrong “there.”
They were both friendly and chatty. Each was chill with a good sense of humor. We weren’t getting into deep topics or personal histories, but I could have actual conversations with them that involved more than nudes and emojis.
Not that I’d have objected to nudes from either of them. Or any additional photos at all besides what was on their profile. From their pictures, they were both impossibly hot, and admittedly, that had me nervous tonight. I didn’t want to get my hopes up that I was about to meet the guys in those images, because let’s face it—most guys posted their absolute best pics on hookup profiles. Which…obviously. I did the same thing. No one was getting my hungover face or seeing what fluorescent lights did to my already pasty complexion.
But sometimes the pictures guys put up were, shall we say, not the best representation of how they looked now. I’d been with plenty of guys who weren’t conventionally flawless. Beards, bellies, baldness—whatever a guy had on offer, they were perfectly sexy to me as long as we clicked and they weren’t assholes. There was more to life than six-packs and perfect teeth, and guys who expected gym-perfect bodies were missing the hell out of some seriously hot dudes. Which was fine by me—their loss was my gain whenever I was getting my world rocked by the same guy they’d turned up their noses at.
The problem was when a photo created an expectation, and the reality didn’t quite match. Like bro, show me what you have. It’s all good. But don’t show me some Photoshopped, airbrushed, professional shot with trick lighting and flattering angles that you took ten years ago,