We conversed easily and without any uncomfortable pauses for twenty minutes or so. I discovered that he was thirty-one, single, and lived nearby. He was almost impossibly straight—the button-down shirt, the assumed camaraderie with the bartender, the fervent support of a soccer team I didn’t even know Toronto had—but no immediate red flags presented themselves. He seemed to be a kind, soft-spoken man who felt at home in this bar and presumably every other place he’d ever been. The yelling of drunk people and clattering of various lawn games made it hard to hear each other, and although I liked having to press my face near his ear to speak, I wanted to talk more intimately and in private.
“Are you allowed to ditch your interns?” I asked. It was unusual of me to “put myself out there” like this, but I had already noticed myself trotting out reliable flirt techniques: an exaggeratedly girlish version of my regular laugh, insults that were really compliments, some slutty straw work I was not proud of. It didn’t feel like a risk to show this man interest; for reasons unclear （to me at least）， he was visibly interested already.
“Technically no,” he said. “Although I do hate it here. Do you need to get back to your group at some point?”
I looked back at my booth, where Nathan was chatting happily with another table, presumably about seitan. “Not really.”
“Great,” he said. “Would you like to come home with me?”
Simon had biked there. He fiddled with a U-lock while I sent Nathan a text saying I’d had to leave due to an unspecified emergency I heavily implied was diarrhea. His bike freed, Simon offered to walk beside me, then said, “Wait, no,” taking off his sweater and bunching it over his pannier rack to form a crappy cushion: “Get on.”
I rolled my eyes—the whole thing seeming kind of Aladdin. But I did get on, and we coasted down Dovercourt and the autumn wind whipped my hair back, and I thought that if this was how Princess Jasmine felt, she was probably having a pretty good time. Then I opened my mouth wide and a bug flew into it.
When we stepped inside his apartment, I yelped.
“You have to tell me what’s going on with curtains,” I said. “I’ve been going on all these dates and no men have them? What is that? Do you hate sleep? Privacy? I recently gave a blow job in full view of some teens jumping on a trampoline.”
“Jesus.”
“The man had no curtains!” I said. “There was literally no other option.”
“Guess you could have not given the blow job,” he said, taking off his coat and hanging it on a neat row of hooks by the door. “I moved in here somewhat short notice, and there were these terrible plastic blinds, so I took those down and haven’t replaced them yet. I’m going to.”
“When did you move in?”
“Four months ago.”
I walked past him into the living room; it was midcentury modern, like everyone else’s. Something smelled good, either his apartment or him. I peeked into the bedroom to make sure there were sheets on the bed （not always a guarantee, Tinder had taught me）。 Not only were there sheets, the bed was made.
His closet didn’t have a door, and I could see a row of crisp blue collared shirts, exactly like the one he was wearing now. I wondered what this meant about his personality, if he was risk averse or wealthy or had merely found out Uniqlo was going to stop making a particularly well-loved style of oxford. This Snoop’s Math was one of the best parts of being single, and the reason I rarely invited anyone back to my place. I wanted to nose around the other person’s home, drawing conclusions from their drinking vessels, tchotchke placement, toilet paper ply; the idea of someone doing this to me made my blood run cold.
I wandered back into the living room, where Simon was rummaging in his cupboards.
“Snack situation dire, I’m sorry to say,” he said. “Want a beer?”
I nodded. His fridge was clean and sparse and sad: a few Modelos, some Polaroid film, three kinds of hot sauce, and dog food.
“Do you not eat at home?” I asked.
“Not often.”
“Do you have a dog?”
“I did, yeah.”
Simon and his girlfriend of four years had broken up last spring. To deal with the loneliness he had adopted an ancient Chihuahua called Bartholomew who died more or less instantly thereafter. Simon had spent the summer grieving the ex and the animal, and now he was in therapy, excavating what he wanted from life, his shortcomings as a person, the ways he’d failed and been failed in his relationship.
This was more information than I’d wanted, about the dog or his emotional history. He looked away wistfully, and it seemed like he might cry. I really, really didn’t want him to.
“All I’m hearing is that dog food’s been in there for three months at least,” I said.
Simon pursed his lips in mock-annoyance. “Do you want this beer or not?”
I took it and thanked him, leaning over to awkwardly clink the base of my beer with his. He was farther away than anticipated, and the amount of effort expended to reach him was made immediately pathetic by the dull thud of glass barely tapped against glass.
“What about you?” he asked. “When was your last relationship?”
I paused for a moment, then said it had been a while since I’d seen anyone. Even so, my love life wasn’t that interesting. Nothing major to report.
“Really?” he asked. “No big loves? No ‘one that got away’？”
“Nope.” I shrugged. “Not a relationship person, I guess.” I told him I’d recently deleted Tinder for the fourth time and hoped it would stick.
Simon had not ventured onto the apps. He had been casually seeing a friend of a friend, and their time together seemed to be running its course. She had been asking, with increased frequency, for him to slap her in the face while they had sex.
“I want to give her what she wants, obviously,” he said. “But it feels a bit . . . soon maybe? I’m trying to figure out how to do it in a respectful way.”
I told him that might be missing the point. There was an unpleasant moment in which Simon was obviously thinking over how to say something, and then he came out with it: “I don’t know if it’s a good idea to sleep together.”
“You don’t have to slap me,” I said. “I mean, you could. I’ve never tried that, but I’m sure it’s, like, a step up from hair pulling, which at this point in the discourse is basically kissing, right?”
“It’s not that,” he said.
I was starting to feel embarrassed. He was the one who invited me here! What had he thought was going to happen? I recalled a phrase I had been shocked to learn was common parlance in Australia: “I’m not here to fuck spiders.” I had first heard of this saying from a bisexual polyamorist from Melbourne, with whom I’d shared a drink and a conversation about whether I’d be an appropriate participant in the threesome she and her husband were hoping to arrange. We did not have the threesome, in the end, but it’s always fun to learn something new about language.
It occurred to me that I had read the entire situation wrong. Maybe this man did not find me incredibly compelling, as his behavior, speech, and body language had suggested. Maybe he was only trying to avoid a lawsuit for 6Bites. Maybe he was “too nice,” and this kind of misunderstanding happened to him all the time, his friends always warning him to stop inviting strange women back to his place for a long talk and no sex over one beer. Maybe he had a bad penis. Maybe he was gay. I was about to make my excuses to the overly polite homosexual company man with the busted dick when he put his hand on my leg and my brain stopped working.