Chapter 5: The Dating App Wasteland
The pink curtains glowed faintly with the streetlight’s sodium burn, a soft prison.A week. Seven days of showers that couldn’t scrub the memory from her skin, of lectures she floated through like a ghost, of her own bed feeling too large and too empty. The vanilla body wash in the air was a sick joke now, a child’s scent on a body that knew better.
Mary sat cross-legged on the rumpled duvet, the laptop’s fan whirring a desperate song against her thighs. Her fingers, stubby and bitten, hovered over the trackpad. The screen cast a cold pallor on her plain face, highlighting the desperate longing in her eyes that the camera never seemed to capture.She’d spent hours crafting profiles. ‘Curious girl next door.’ ‘Looking for experience, no drama.’ ‘Oral enthusiast.’ Each one was a piece of bait tossed into a black, stagnant pond.She refreshed the page.Nothing. A pit opened in her stomach, cold and familiar.Another profile.Different app. A photo she’d taken in her bathroom mirror, her towel wrapped high under her armpits, a hint of cleavage, a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. Bio: ‘I’m shy but I want to learn.Be gentle?’ She cringed as she posted it.It sounded pathetic. It was pathetic.The first response came within minutes. Her heart leapt, a stupid, traitorous bird in her chest.She clicked the notification.
The message was just a screenshot of her profile picture.Someone had drawn a crude arrow pointing to her face and written, ‘LOL.Gentle? I’d need a bag over that first. Pass.’
The air left her lungs in a slow, painful leak.She stared until the pixels blurred.Refresh.Another match. This one was a guy named Tyler, blurry gym selfie, smile too white.He messaged first. ‘Hey.’
Her fingers trembled as she typed back.‘Hi.’
‘You DTF?’
She swallowed. ‘Maybe.What are you looking for?’
The reply was instantaneous.‘A mouth. A pair of tits.Not a relationship. You fat?’
The word sat there on the screen, pixelated and brutal.She typed, deleted, typed again.‘I’m thick. Does it matter?’
Three blinking dots.Then: ‘Yeah it matters.I don’t fuck land whales. Lose 50lbs and get back to me.’
Blocked.
A sound escaped her, something between a gasp and a sob.She slammed the laptop shut so hard the screen blinked to black. The silence in the room was deafening, a roar in her ears. The coziness of the space felt like a mockery now. She looked at the soft toys in the corner and wanted to set them on fire.Her sweatpants were loose, cotton. She shoved her hand down the front, past the elastic waistband. Her fingers found her clit, already hard and throbbing with a humiliating, persistent need.She rubbed, hard, circular swipes that were more punishment than pleasure. The images in her head weren’t of Tyler or his gym body. They were of the dark theater, of faceless shapes, of being chosen not for her face but for her function. Of the silent, grateful release of the man in the last row.She was dry. The friction hurt, a stinging scrape. She spat on her fingers, shoved them back in, and fucked herself with two fingers, curling them up hard inside.It felt clinical, empty. Her breath came in ragged hitches, but no heat gathered, no peak approached. It was just a mechanical motion, a fruitless digging at an itch she couldn’t locate.
“Fuck,” she hissed at the empty room.“Fucking come on.”
She thought of the words on the screen. Land whale.Used blow-up doll.A mouth.A pair of tits. The shame curdled, mixing with the slick now beginning to gather on her fingers.It transformed. The humiliation began to burn, a low, dangerous ember in her gut.She imagined showing them.Showing Tyler. Opening her mouth wide.Letting him see what a land whale could do.
Her other hand fumbled for the laptop, opened it again.The glow re-ignited her face. She went back to the app, but not to her profile.She went to the search function. Her fingers flew over the keys, typing not a person, but a place.A different kind of place.
She found it.A forum.Threads with titles that made her face flush hot. ‘Discreet Gloryhole Reviews – Downtown.’ ‘Need to Drain – Safe Spot?’ ‘Anonymous BLOWJOB – No Questions.’
Her heart hammered against her ribs.This wasn’t about matching. This wasn’t about her face, or her body, or her bio.This was a queue.A service. A transaction.She clicked a thread. Photos of a nondescript door in a back alley, a small hole cut into the plywood.Reports.‘Unloaded so deep she gagged. Good girl.’ ‘Took two loads back to back, no fuss.’ ‘Just what I needed. No talking, just sucking.’
Her fingers, slick with her own frustration, dove back into her sweatpants.This time, the image was clear.Not a face.Not a name. A wooden partition.A anonymous, veined cock sliding through a hole.Her lips parting. Her only value being the wet, willing cavern of her mouth.The complete and total reduction to a thing.
She rubbed her clit in furious circles, her hips lifting off the bed. The orgasm built not as a wave of pleasure, but as a sudden, violent detonation. It tore through her, wracking her body, a silent scream tightening her throat.Her back arched, her toes curled. It was sharp, vicious, and over in seconds, leaving her trembling and hollowed out.Spent.
She lay there, panting, the forum still glowing on the screen. The cruel messages, the rejections, they didn’t matter here. Here, she wasn’t a ‘maybe.’ She was a solution.A destination.With a calm that felt alien, she bookmarked the page. She took a screenshot of the address. Then she closed the laptop, plunging the room back into the soft, treacherous glow of the streetlights.
The taste of strangers came back to her then, not as a memory of shame, but as a promise.A blueprint.She knew what she had to do. The hollowness had a shape now, and she knew exactly how to fill it. Tomorrow. She would go tomorrow.