with the man of my dreams, with nothing but the peaceful sound of the ocean filling my ears and the delicious smell of strawberries filling my nostrils, I sigh and smile to myself. I am so disgustingly happy.
Unable to resist him a second longer, I climb on top of Nick, leaning forwards to kiss him passionately. He places his hands on my hips before running them slowly up my body. I part our lips, but only so I can moan softly at his touch.
‘I love you, Nick,’ I tell him.
‘I love you too, Ruby,’ he replies. ‘Ruby…Ruby…Ruby…’
Nick’s voice grows louder, louder still and then more aggressive. It sounds like he’s pissed off, come to think of it.
‘Ruby,’ he shouts. ‘Wake up.’
I jolt awake suddenly, sitting upright.
‘What the hell?’ he asks, angrily.
I glance around for a second, taking in my surroundings… I’m not in Hawaii at all, I’m in my living room. I’m not wearing a bikini, I’m in my underwear. I’m not lying on a beach, I’m on top of Ben, a guy I’ve been seeing for a couple of weeks. Oh, and Nick isn’t my husband, he’s my flatmate. My boring, stuck up, joyless flatmate that I can’t stand. And I was just having a sex dream about him – eww! I feel my cheeks flush with shame – not because he’s caught me semi-naked with a bloke, but because I was dreaming about him. That I was in love with him, that I’d married him… I was about to have sex with him!
‘What time is it?’ I ask him, rubbing my tired eyes, only to cover my hands in black eye make-up.
‘It’s 7am,’ he tells me, his eyes shooting laser beams of judgement at me as he glares. Luckily for me I’m used to Nick looking down his nose at me, and anyway, the sheer volume of body glitter I’m wearing can easily deflect even the strongest laser.
‘What day is it?’ I ask.
Nick shakes his head and sighs.
‘Friday. It’s Friday, Ruby.’
‘Oh fuck, I’m at work in an hour,’ I reply as I massage my temples, my hangover from last night now in full force.
As Nick stands over me, eating a bowl of Weetabix like he does every morning after he gets back from the gym, about to head out to his proper serious job, I can feel him judging me. It’s not my fault he doesn’t know how to have fun, is it?
‘So this is your online dating weirdo, how are things going?’ he asks, nodding towards the heavily tattooed, muscular man that I’m using as a bed. I take a moment too long to answer. ‘That badly?’
‘All good,’ I reply, unconvincingly. I’ve been dating Ben for about three weeks now, and things aren’t exactly going that well. Last night was our third date, and despite every girly magazine I could get my hands on assuring me that date three was when the magic happened, the magic did not happen last night. Still, from the way Nick is looking at me right now, I doubt he believes that. In Nick’s head I’m his hoe-bag flatmate who seemingly ploughs through internet dates, when in reality that’s not the case – I wish I were getting even one per cent of the action Nick thought I was.
Nick fakes a gasp.
‘Are you telling me that you hooked up with a guy you met via your phone and it’s not a fairy tale romance?’ he asks sarcastically.
I cast my mind back to our date last night. As much as I don’t want to give Nick the satisfaction of being right, the need to tell someone feels greater.
‘Things have been going well, it’s just…I met up with him yesterday and he told me he was taking me to a family party,’ I start.
‘Weird,’ Nick chimes in. ‘You’ve only been on a couple of dates with him, kid.’
‘I know, and weirder still: what he didn’t tell me was that it was a wake.’
‘A wake?’ Nick echoes loudly in disbelief, and in a much higher pitch than his voice usually is.
‘I’m awake, I’m awake,’ Ben says, panicked as he jumps to his feet. He does so without having realised I was on top of him, causing me to fall back onto the sofa. As he glances between an angry-looking Nick, and me in my underwear, he puts two and two together – coming up with wrong answer.
‘Look, calm down, nothing happened, OK? I didn’t sleep with your girlfriend,’ Ben babbles, stressing it in such a way that makes it sound like this is an excuse he has to make often.
‘Oh, charming,’ I say, annoyed that Ben thinks I’m the kind of girl who would have a boyfriend and still date around, but he isn’t listening.
‘She’s not my girlfriend, she’s my roommate,’ Nick corrects him.
I watch as Ben expresses visible relief.
‘Well, in that case, good to meet you, I’m Jonathan,’ he chirps, offering Nick a hand to shake. Nick doesn’t oblige.
‘Your name is Jonathan? I’ve spent three dates calling you Ben,’ I blurt out.
‘Yeah, I thought that was like a cute nickname or something,’ he laughs.
I giggle, puzzled, but what I see as a hilarious story for my blog, Nick is unimpressed by.
‘I just don’t get you, Ruby Wood,’ Nick says angrily, pointlessly using my full name like a pissed-off parent. ‘What are you doing with your life?’
‘What are you, my fucking dad? Why can’t you just be cool?’ I ask him, sounding like a teenager whose dad just confiscated her cigarettes – incidentally, something Nick has done with me before. In the end it was just easier to quit smoking than it was to put up with his complaints and his borderline OCD smell-removal techniques.
‘I’ve got to get to work,’ Nick tells us. He heads to the kitchen, rinses his bowl and spoon, places them in the dishwasher and then leaves without so much as a ‘see you later’.
Jonathan – not Ben – and I are sitting on the sofa next to each other awkwardly.
‘So your roommate seems fun,’ Jonathan says sarcastically.
‘He really is like my dad or my granddad or something,’ I reply, irritated, still sounding like a teenager.
‘You should move out,’ he tells me, like maybe that hadn’t crossed my mind.
‘There’s no way I can find a flat this central for this cheap,’ I tell him honestly. ‘Nick comes from a super-rich family, but he won’t take any money off them, so he reckons he can’t afford to move either. If either of us should move out, it should be him, don’t you think?’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ Jonathan replies, followed by an awkward silence.
I wonder how I managed to call him by the wrong name for so long. I suppose that’s app dating for you, it’s like fishing with multiple lines. I guess as I reeled this one in, I mixed up his name with a different fish.
‘Listen, Ruby, we’ve had
