Sex, Lies, And Online Dating

“Crap-ola!” she said and stepped up on the curb. She opened the door to Starbucks and moved inside. The smell of rich, dark coffee filled her head, and the low steady hum of voices coalesced with the sound of the coffee grinder and espresso machine. No matter what city Lucy might travel to, Starbucks always looked and smelled the same. Kind of like Barnes and Noble or Border’s. There was some comfort in that.

Lucy closed her umbrella, and her gaze took in the gold walls and the patrons sitting at brown tables and hard wooden chairs. No man in a red baseball hat. Hardluvnman was late.

Lucy shoved her umbrella in the stand by the door and moved to the counter. When he’d e-mailed her and asked her to meet him, he’d written that his real name was Quinn. Lucy preferred to think of him as hardluvnman. She didn’t want to think of him or any of these dates as real people. It was easier to kill them off that way.

She ordered her latte, sans whip, then took a seat at a small round table in the corner. She unbuttoned her blazer and smoothed the collar of her navy blue turtleneck.

She supposed it was a sad commentary on her love life that the only dates she’d had lately hadn’t even been real dates at all. The only reason she was subjecting herself to men like bigdaddy182 was that she needed research for her new mystery novel, dead.com.

Lucy raised the latte to her lips and took a cautious sip. She only needed one last victim for her book. Even if hardluvnman turned out to be a decent guy who didn’t need to die, Lucy was done with Internet coffee dates. She’d had enough of men who acted like it was her job to pursue them. Like she had to convince them to ask her out again. If this last date didn’t prove fortuitous, she’d figure something else out. Like taking all the lying, cheating, needy characteristics of all her former boyfriends and roll them into one. But she’d done that before, and she was afraid her readers might catch on to the fact that the victims in all her books were starting to resemble the same recycled losers.

No, it was time for new losers. She’d agreed to meet hardluvnman, as opposed to some of the other candidates, for several intriguing reasons. First, his photo on the dating site was so grainy that it was hard to determine what he actually looked like. It just gave an overall impression of a dark, intense broodiness that she found a little mysterious. Second, in his bio he stated he was a plumber who owned his own business. Which could be a lie but was probably the truth because, really, why would anyone lie about being a plumber? Third, instead of falling into the thirty-five-to-forty-year-old-never-been-married-or-divorced categories, hardluvnman had stated that he was a widower. Which could be the truth or a sleazy way to score sympathy points and trick women into bed. If the latter turned out to be the case, Lucy had her last victim. Voila!

The front door swung open, and a man with thinning red hair stepped inside. Lucy recognized him immediately. His name was Mike, aka klondikemike. He’d been her first coffee date, and the first murder victim. He moved toward a blonde woman standing next to a display of mugs, and together they walked to the counter. Mike did the up-and- down thing with his eyes and paid for the two cups of coffee and a bag of chocolate-covered coffee beans. As the two made their way to a table a few feet from Lucy, Mike’s gaze met hers, then slid guiltily away. He hadn’t e- mailed her again after their date, but she could have told him not to worry. She had no interest in a guy who talked nonstop while popping coffee beans like they were cross tops, and whom she’d left with a plastic bag over his head in Chapter One.

She brushed the red lipstick on the lip of her cup and glanced about at the other tables. She was surprised the recent murders in Boise hadn’t slowed down the dating scene. Surprised but relieved, as it suited her own purposes.

In the past few months, three men had been suffocated in their own homes. She’d actually met one of the victims, Lawrence Craig, aka luvstick, at Moxie Java and was still a little freaked out about it.

The police weren’t releasing much information, other than saying that all three deaths had been due to suffocation. They weren’t saying what form of suffocation, only that the perpetrator was believed to be a woman. The newspaper hadn’t stated how or where the killer met her victims; Maddie had speculated that the woman probably met them in bars. Lucy figured she was probably right. The fact that Lucy was writing about erotic asphyxiation and men were being suffocated was a huge coincidence, but there were a lot of different ways to die of suffocation. As many as the human brain could conjure, and the chances of life imitating art were too huge to ponder. And besides, she refused to confuse real life with fiction and become as crazy as Maddie.

By the number of couples in Starbucks, men didn’t seem worried about meeting women in coffee bars. Probably because like Lucy, they’d met these women via dating sites and had been exchanging e-mails. And out of all the places to meet, Starbucks was safe.

Before Lucy had decided to online date in the name of research, she’d always thought online dating was…well, desperate somehow and more than a little lazy. While Lucy could certainly understand why women sought men online, she could not understand the reverse. Why would any reasonably attractive man, who had a job, his own neatly brushed teeth, and did not live with his mother have to search for a date online? Wasn’t picking up women in bars and restaurants or even in the vegetable aisle at Albertson’s in a man’s job description?

A month after her first online date, what she discovered was that the men online-like bigdaddy182 and klondikemike-expected her to pursue them. They also seemed to fall into two categories: those in want of killing, and those so boring she’d wanted to kill herself.

Oh, she was sure that out there somewhere were some great online guys. Nice men who just wanted to meet nice women and didn’t meet a lot in their everyday lives, great guys who didn’t hang out in bars or veggie aisles. She just hadn’t met any of them. In fact, she hadn’t met any great guys, online or otherwise, in a very long time. Her last boyfriend had been a charming alcoholic who’d been off the wagon more than he’d been on. The last time she’d had to bail him out of jail, she’d finally had to admit that her friends were right. She was an issues junkie with rescue fantasies. But not anymore. She was tired of trying to rescue assorted lame asses who didn’t appreciate her.

Lucy pushed back the sleeve of her jacket and looked at her watch. Ten after seven. Ten minutes late. She’d give hardluvnman another five, and then she was leaving.

She’d learned her lessons about dysfunctional men. She wanted a nice, normal guy who didn’t drink too much, wasn’t into extremes of any kind, and didn’t have mommy/ daddy issues. A man who wasn’t a compulsive liar or serial cheater. Who wasn’t emotionally retarded or physically repugnant. She didn’t think it was too much to ask that he have sufficient verbal skills, either. A mature man who knew that grunting an answer did not pass for conversation.

Lucy took a drink of her coffee as the door to Starbucks swung open. She glanced up from the bottom of her cup to the man filling up the doorway as if he’d been blown in from a “mad, bad and dangerous to know” convention. The bill of his red ball cap was pulled low on his forehead and cast a shadow over his eyes and nose. His tanned cheeks were flushed from the cold, and the ends of his black hair curled up like fish hooks around the edge of the hat. Rain soaked the wide shoulders of his black leather bomber’s jacket. The jacket’s zipper lay open, and Lucy’s gaze slid down a bright strip of white T-shirt to the worn waistband of faded Levi’s. As he stood there, his gaze moving from table to table, he shoved his fingers into the front pockets of the worn denim, his thumbs pointing to his button fly.

Mr. hardluvnman had finally arrived.

Like his photo on the Internet site, Lucy could not see him clearly, but she knew the second his gaze focused on her. She could feel it pinning her to her chair. She slowly lowered her cup as he pulled his hands from his pockets and moved toward her. He walked from his hips, all long and lean, with a purpose to each step. He navigated his way through chairs and coffee drinkers but kept his gaze on her until he stood across the small table.

The shadow of his cap rested just above the deep bow of his top lip. He raised a hand and slowly pushed up the brim of his cap with one finger. By degrees, the shadow slid up the bridge of his nose and past thick black brows. He looked down through eyes the color of a smoldering Colombian blend.

Lucy was a writer. She worked with words. She filled each of her books with a hundred thousand of them. But only two words came to mind. Holy crap! Not eloquent, but fitting.

“Are you Lucy?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. His voice was deep, testosterone rough. “My dog got into the garbage just as I was leaving, and I had to clean up after her.”