Let's Connect Read online

  About the Book

  A year after his divorce, Daniel Stroman has decided that he's too young to die—or fuse permanently with his couch. But when he downloads the dating app "Let's Connect" and starts dating, his success/fail ratio isn't encouraging until he gets a connection request from Robin.

  Everything about Robin's profile is different, from the bright little bird he's using as an avatar to the long and thoughtful answers he's written for the standard questions. He's witty, funny, and easy to talk to. Robin could be his perfect match. But Robin is holding something back.

  Then again, so is Dan—beginning with the seven-year crush he’s carried for his best friend, Trevor. Sadly, except for one brief moment, they’ve never been single at the same time.

  Or have they?

  About the Book

  > Online Now

  First Date

  Second Date

  Third Date

  Fourth Date

  Fifth Date

  Sixth Date

  Seventh Date

  Eighth Date

  Ninth Date

  Tenth Date

  Eleventh Date

  Last Date

  Beach Date

  Dan’s Curry Recipe

  Dear Reader

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Titles by Kelly Jensen

  > Online Now

  Strom

  50-year-old man

  Philadelphia, PA, USA

  Seeking men 45-55 within 20 miles of Philadelphia, PA

  Story…

  Relationship Status: Divorced

  Have Kids: No

  Want Kids: If they’re yours, sure. Not looking to decant a fresh human at my age.

  Ethnicity: I have the complexion of a mushroom. The inside part.

  Body type: Lean—through no fault of my own. I remember to eat vegetables around about the time they’re plotting escape from the refrigerator. I walk sometimes and call it hiking.

  Height: 5’10” is not short. That’s ONE INCH above the average height of North American men.

  Faith: I’ll respect yours if you respect mine.

  Smoker: Nope.

  Drinker: Not really.

  Favorite…

  Song: “Wish You Were Here”

  Movie: 2001: A Space Odyssey

  Book: Hyperion

  The most interesting thing about you…

  I’ve always wanted to own a bookstore, so for my thirtieth birthday, I bought one. Not totally spur of the moment. I don’t have that kind of cash. Now that I own a bookstore, I have even less. But being able to inhale the scent of paper every day makes me very happy. What about this makes me interesting? I’m one of the few people I know who is truly satisfied with their choice of career.

  Your desert isle keepers are (you get two):

  A hammock and a good book.

  A perfect date is…

  A myth. No one and nothing is perfect. I’d count any date a success where the conversation doesn’t suck and neither of us gets food poisoning. On a deeper level, though, I think a good date is something like a good book. You’ve read the cover, you’ve got an idea what to expect, and at the end of the night, you feel positive about the whole experience. You’d read that author again. A great date is when you’ve bought the next book before finishing the first.

  First Date

  Dan straightened his tie, pursed his lips, and turned side to side, checking his face for dried toothpaste. All clear. He cupped his hand in front of his mouth. Fresh breath, check. Smooth shave, yep. Hair—

  “Damn it.”

  Poked himself in the eye? Done.

  Bracing his hands against the marble counter in front of the mirror, Dan waited until the pain in his eye receded to a manageable level. Then he squinted at his reflection again. His left eye, an unremarkable brown, was a little watery. His right eye—also brown—was red and watery. He looked as though he’d smoked a fat doobie before coming into the restaurant. And the hair he’d tried to push away from his face? Still curling across his forehead.

  Carefully, very carefully, he combed the wayward hank of light brown and gray back, and watched, dismayed, as it flopped forward again.

  Hair? Good as it got. Also, the tie looked stupid. He wasn’t at a booksellers’ convention. He had a date. With someone he didn’t know. Someone who had, quite possibly, arrived at the restaurant while Dan lurked in front of the bathroom mirror poking himself in the eye.

  He unknotted the tie and stood there with it slung across his palm, wondering what to do with it. Pocket? His slacks were relatively fitted. His nicest pair. Should he unbutton the collar of his shirt? After slinging the tie over his shoulder, Dan unbuttoned the top two buttons, then a third, and then rebuttoned the third. Paused the playback on his reflection, trying to remember if unbuttoning the third had exposed enough skin to make him blush all over. Was it hot in here?

  He retrieved the tie, wrapped it around his hand, and mopped his forehead with it.

  Oh God. Oh God. Fuck in Heaven. Hallowed whatever. What the actual everything was he doing here? “I can’t do this.”

  “Believe in yourself.”

  A toilet flushed. The stall door opened a few seconds later, and a middle-aged man shaped like a bowling pin strolled out. He had his head down as he tucked his shirt back into his trousers, and one of the recessed spots lighting the bathroom glanced off of his bald crown. The man looked up and showed Dan a warm smile, and a sense of premonition crept across Dan’s skin.

  “Dan?” The guy tilted his head, his smile freezing in place.

  “Harold?”

  “Yeah!” Harold stuck out a hand and immediately retracted it. “Sorry. Let me just...” He gestured toward the sinks.

  Dan shuffled to the side, exposing the length of counter that had been holding him up for the past five minutes. The five minutes Harold had been sitting in a bathroom stall listening to Dan argue with himself.

  What had he said out loud?

  Also, seriously? Dan glanced toward the ceiling, blinding himself with another of the lights. This was how his first date in seven years was going to start? In a bathroom, with a suspicious odor wafting out of a recently abandoned stall?

  Harold had managed to move toward the dryers and was busy waving his hands beneath a feeble stream of air. “I can’t say as I’ve ever met a date in a bathroom before. Definitely a first.”

  Dan’s smile felt as weak as the air from the dryer. “Same.”

  With a last wave of his hands, Harold extended the right. “How do you do?”

  Dan accepted the shake, only realizing he had a tie wrapped around his palm as their hands met. “Oh, um. I looked up the dress code online and there wasn’t one, so I googled pictures of the place and a lot of people were wearing ties, so I thought I should wear one. Of course, when I got here, I figured out I’d probably been looking at pictures of a Friday night, not a Saturday night and that all the guys wearing ties had probably just finished work, and, well...”

  He was still shaking Harold’s hand. Cheeks burning beneath a blush likely as fierce as the red rimming his right eye, Dan yanked his hand back to his side and then shoved it into his pocket. Still wrapped up in his tie. He could feel the bulge. His trousers weren’t made for hand-in-pocket poses. Definitely not designed for hand-wrapped-in-tie-and-shoved-in-pocket poses.

  Fuck.

  He had a better vocabulary. Really, he did. Obviously, he’d left it at Little Volume, his Germantown Avenue bookshop, along with a well-creased copy of Hyperion. It was his fifth time reading it. Never got old. In fact, he’d rather be there reading it now.

  “Sorry.” Dan cleared his throat. “I’m an
xious.”

  Harold’s smile was generous. The kindness of his face had been a deciding factor in Dan accepting the date. He and Harold hadn’t been chatting for long. Two weeks, if they counted today. And their sporadic exchanges hadn’t lit a fire inside Dan. He hadn’t come out tonight expecting to fall in love. Or even to have sex. But the reality of Harold’s face was... There had to be a more considerate word than disappointing.

  After running through his mental thesaurus, Dan concluded there wasn’t.

  “It’s all good,” Harold said. “I’m a bit anxious as well.” He darted a glance toward his recently abandoned stall. “As you can probably tell.”

  Please let us not discuss his irritable—

  “IBS,” Harold was saying. “I’ve been taking something for it, but it’s not working. Believe me, this is not how I wanted our date to start.”

  Dan huffed out a short laugh. “Oh, I can imagine.” Really? “What does your doctor say?” Again, really? Who are you and what have you done with Dan?

  “This is the third drug I’ve tried, and none of them deal with the spasticity of my colon. We’re going to do more tests.”

  That’s great. Just great.

  “Oh, well, Um... Good luck with that.” It was like talking to a stranger, which felt weird until Dan acknowledged he was talking to a stranger, albeit one he’d spent two weeks chatting with online. “Um”—use your words—“I don’t think this is going to work out.”

  Maybe not those words.

  Harold’s face performed a classic fall.

  “I’m sorry,” Dan hurtled on. “It’s me, not you. I don’t think I’m ready.” The fact he’d never be ready to stand in a funky cloud discussing spastic colons with anyone aside, he wasn’t ready for this. For face-to-face conversation.

  “I see.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Features twisting somewhere between pain and disappointment, the middle setting an expression Dan would not soon forget, Harold nodded. “Okay. It was nice to meet you?”

  “Likewise.” Tucking his chin to his chest, Dan turned for the door. It was time to go, before this got any more awkward or depressing. He should leave. But... Quickly, he turned back. “Thanks for taking a chance on me. I hope your next date turns out better.”

  The memory of Harold’s sad smile that Dan took with him was hardly any better. But, hey, he’d saved both of them the expense of dinner, right? And the conversation that would have happened afterward, when one or the other of them, fueled by too much wine, made a clumsy pass.

  Dan squeezed his eyes shut, ran into a wall, and swallowed a loud expletive. When he opened his eyes, he was facing another mirror. This one mounted on the wall facing the hostess station. In it, approximately seventy-eight eyeballs were pointed in his direction. Like, the entire restaurant. He lifted his hand—still wrapped in a tie—in a feeble wave.

  “Sorry.”

  Oh, for God’s sake.

  Turning a final time, Dan sought the front door and fled the restaurant.

  An hour later, dressed in pilled gray sweatpants and a Penn State sweatshirt, feet cozied inside thick wooly socks and propped up on the coffee table, Dan opened his laptop across his thighs and logged on to Let’s Connect. A greasy feeling circled his empty stomach as he navigated to his connections and deleted HairyGuy aka Harold. That he should have been warned by Harold’s choice of username had come up—in conversation with himself and Trevor, upon whom responsibility for this travesty ultimately rested. Trevor had been the one to encourage Dan to try a dating app.

  As he hooked his fingers on the top of the screen, ready to shut the laptop, he noted a new connection request. The greasy feeling became an uncomfortable burn. What if that was Harold trying to reconnect? No. He wouldn’t, would he? Dan had pretty much dumped him in a bathroom. Not that they’d actually been dating—though the site did suggest their online conversation counted.

  Shaking off a swirl of confused thought, Dan shut the laptop and cast it aside. He turned on the TV, lowered the volume, and picked up his phone to send a quick text to his best friend and soul mate, the guy he should be dating, but had missed out on by several years.

  Dan: You round?

  Three dots instantly danced beneath Dan’s message.

  Trev: Totally square, man. Always.

  Dan’s grin felt good, as though universal balance had been restored.

  Dan: You are.

  Trev: Are you home already?

  Dan: We met in a bathroom.

  Trev: …

  Dan: Not on purpose. He was dealing with a spastic colon, which I had to hear about, and smell, while we made intros. So not ready for that level of intimacy.

  Trev: Wow. Srsly?

  Dan: You’d think I was making this up. Unfortunately, I am not.

  The three dots danced and disappeared a couple of times, indicating Trevor was searching for an appropriate reply. Or simply typing one word and laughing. Dan lifted his gaze to the TV and watched a commercial for gutter guards. Feeling vulnerable and disappointed, he was on the verge of making an appointment for his free estimate when his phone buzzed in his hand. He woke the screen.

  Trev: I typed out and deleted about six tasteless jokes. I mean, gay guys aren’t afraid to talk about their asses, but he could have at least waited for the coffee course. It’s probably for the best. You wouldn’t want to go there after a conversation like that.

  Reasonably sure he knew what Trevor meant by go there, Dan responded with a Yeah, no.

  Trev: Who’s next on the list?

  Dan: I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m going to take a break from it all, I think.

  Trev: Nooo. Don’t do that. You need to get back up on your horse.

  Dan: There is no horse, only a sad and divorced fifty-year-old who is quite happy alone.

  Liar.

  Well, the sad and divorced parts were true.

  Trev: We talked this through. It’s time. You need to start dating again. Spending every night watching Fast and Furious movies and playing Watch Dogs is NOT GOOD FOR YOUR MENTAL HEALTH.

  Dan: You’re here with me at least half of the time. Maybe more.

  Trevor had a boyfriend, but their relationship spanned the continental United States, with Trevor being located in Philly and his other half outside of Oakland, CA.

  Trev: I’m an amazing friend.

  Dan: You are.

  Trev: Take the rest of the night off. Go raid a gang hideout in WD and sleep the sleep of the righteous. Start fresh tomorrow.

  Dan: Yeah.

  After sending a sign off full of random emojis, Dan put the phone aside. The PlayStation controllers were plugged into a charger on the TV console, which suddenly seemed too far away. Like, would need to pack a lunch and wear sensible shoes distance. Sighing, flopping his head into the cushy part of the couch behind him, Dan closed his eyes and played games in his head instead. Games where he’d have woken up to the lying, cheating, and bastardry two months earlier than he had. Then he might not have had to go through his divorce alone.

  Trevor had been away—invited to lecture for a semester on the opposite coast—and Dan had been bored enough to wake up to the fact he was married in name only. The desiccated condoms he’d found under the bed only confirmed it.

  What Dan could never decide was whether the demise of his marriage had been his fault or not. If he’d been more present, would he and Chris still be together? Thoughts like that always brought up deeper and more disappointed chains, though, the links of which he’d told himself to let go time and time again. Dan had met Trevor only hours before he’d met Chris. If they hadn’t gone out that night, all of them…

  Stop. Just stop.

  He and Trevor were meant to be friends. That was how things had worked out.

  Dan opened his eyes, levered his lean frame off the couch, and retrieved a controller from the charging station. Trevor was right. Trevor was always right. Dispensing
some virtual albeit questionable justice might be exactly what he needed.

  For tonight.

  Second Date

  Dan propped his feet on the coffee table. Instead of reaching for the remote or PlayStation controller, he picked up his phone, ready to get his second date postmortem with Trevor out of the way. It would be short and sweet. Dan had spent forty-five minutes freezing his ass off outside a bar on Germantown Avenue, waiting for no one to arrive. Yes, he’d texted his prospective date. No, he hadn’t wanted to wait inside. The place hadn’t been crowded enough for him to drink alone and not be noticed.

  Stupid, maybe, but it was what it was.

  Before confessing all to Trevor, Dan checked Let’s Connect one last time to see if BilliardBalls (what was with these names?) had sent him a message. According to the app, their connection no longer existed.

  Great. Terrific. Fan-fucking-tastic.

  The guy had probably seen him outside the bar and decided not to meet up. Had it been the lack of tie? The enticing aroma of old books? Then, instead of sending a polite Hey, this isn’t going to work out, he’d deleted their connection and disappeared.

  Who did that?

  If Dan could summon the whatever to turn a guy down in a restaurant bathroom, BilliardBalls could have...

  Eh, whatever.

  He texted his woes to Trevor, who did not respond.

  Where was he? Trevor never went out; he didn’t need to.

  Oh... Was he currently sexting or whatnot with his boyfriend?

  Dan closed his eyes. When a porn reel of Trevor and Kevin—who would forever remain blurry-faced because, for some reason, Trevor had never shared a picture of him—started up, he opened them again. Nope. Not going there. Never.

  He was watching an infomercial for wool dryer balls (and about to order one) when his phone buzzed.

  He’d downloaded the Let’s Connect mobile app before his date, and the chat bubble had a new notification. Dan opened his inbox.

  Robin wants to connect.

  Robin? The image of a small, red-breasted bird popped into his head, no doubt prompted by the similar avian set as Robin’s avatar. Interesting choice. Most users went with, you know, a headshot. Sometimes they posted a ripped (or unfortunately flabby) torso. Dick picks were discouraged, but the odd one slipped past. Birds? Nope.