Match Read online

  “What?” I asked, pausing and looking up at her.

  “I just came and you didn’t even enter me. What is with you? You’re like some kind of sex monster or something.”

  “You got the monster part right. Now get ready.”

  “Why?”

  “This is why, baby.”

  As her moans filled the tiny space, I leaned forward and got to work.

  ~

  Ten minutes later she stared up at me from a heap on the floor as I tapped away on my phone, her eyes half-open and her face sweaty and blotchy. My condom was on the floor, so I picked it up and tossed it in the trash.

  “Ugh, Penn.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That was…amazing. Ridiculous. Unreal.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  She sighed again. “And you’re already messaging another Spark girl right now, aren’t you?”

  “I mean…perhaps.”

  “Of course you are.”

  I almost felt bad for her, but then I remembered what a despicable bitch Nicole was, and I stopped.

  “You’re not going to call me after this, are you?”

  “Probably not,” I said as I adjusted my platinum cufflink. “Just being honest. But it’s not you. You’re wonderful. I’m fucked up beyond repair.”

  “And you’re just gonna go find a different girl tomorrow and do the same thing to her that you did tonight, right?”

  “Probably so.”

  “I figured.” She paused, staring at me. “So tell me, why do you hate women so much?”

  “What? I do not.”

  “You do.”

  “Please. Most of my executives are women. When it comes to getting shit done, they’re smarter and more capable than men, in my opinion. I don’t hate them.”

  “Yes you do. It’s not even so much what you say about them, but how you say it. Every time you look at me or talk to me, your eyes get all big, your teeth show, and it’s like you’re snarling. What made you hate females so much?”

  “Please stop,” I said, a little uncomfortable. “You don’t even know me.”

  “Yeah, but I know guys like you, and they’ve all been hurt. They’ve all been through the ringer.”

  “That’s my business.”

  She smiled a little, but it was sad. “You can’t just go through life treating people like this. What if you match with someone you actually like? What if you end up falling in love?”

  I frowned down at her. “I won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I happen to know that finding love in the digital age is as useless as searching for literary quality in fan fiction, and so I’ve stopped trying. I would know.”

  “How?”

  “My…line of work taught me. And also, I know how women are. I’ve had a brush with love, and she turned out to be a heartless, selfless, self-centered bitch who cared about nothing but her own feelings. Once was enough. I’m a one-and-done kinda dude.”

  She stared up at the ceiling. “But…what kind of life is that? Where’s the companionship? Who’s going to come over and bring your soup when you’re sick on a rainy Sunday? Don’t you want someone to take care of you? Sex is just sex. But what about love?”

  Take care, I thought. Nobody took care of Penn Sparks. Ever. For one moment I got lost down the path her words had laid: I saw myself at five, watching Nickelodeon alone while my mom went out with her latest guys, and then at eighteen, when I graduated high school and then drove home alone because my parents hadn’t shown up. Then, the awful night of Nicole’s departure played in my mind like a Saw movie. She didn’t even wait until morning to leave, and got up and dragged her luggage to the elevator right after dropping the bomb. From my childhood up to now, love in my life had never meant anything but an elegant, aching violence, a black rose wilting in a swirling storm. Why chase the violence again?

  Take Nicole, for example. I’d loved Nicole, truly loved her with all of my bones, ever since I’d met her at that boring art benefit in Southampton. We locked eyes, exchanged remarks about how stuffy the crowd was, and immediately agreed to sneak behind Tory Burch’s house and smoke a joint. And when she left, I was unmoored – she was my star and I was her revolving planet, and I just broke. I’d spent four days in bed before someone even broke into my apartment to see what the hell had happened.

  At the same time, though, I’d always known we weren’t exactly a match. Something about her was just too quiet and detached, like she hadn’t ever grown roots into me like I had into her. I always got the sense that no matter how hard I pushed her, she would never push back. It was too easy. Hell – even our first meeting had revolved around how bored she was with her life.

  “Didn’t you notice?” she’d asked the night she left me. And I should have noticed. Helen Keller would’ve noticed how thoroughly Nicole had fallen out of love with me. Looking back, there were so many signs – as I went about building my empire, she’d sat there texting nonstop, disappearing for entire days, acting cagey and distracted and busy. How could I not have known? If you loved someone, your face lit on fire when you looked at them – and she looked at me like I was a glass of water on a windowsill. Why didn’t I do anything to save my relationship? The memories of the good times with her, even though they’d been rare – those memories were all I had now, and they would live in me forever. Our trips to the Finger Lakes, our weekends in the Hamptons where we’d sit and eat popcorn and watch the fireworks over the Atlantic – I would go to my grave with those memories flickering in my soul. That soulless bitch had made a home in me forever.

  But at the same time, love and hate were close friends, and my hatred for her today outweighed any romantic feelings I’d ever had – for anyone. Nobody left Penn Sparks and lived to speak about it. Nobody. The only person who had ever done it before was my mother, and look what’d happened to her. And besides – what kind of dumbass left a guy the day he became filthy rich?

  Actually, I’d wondered about that until my business manager saw the news about the breakup on the blogs and called to remind me that as one of the first people to loan me money before the app exploded, Nicole owned one percent of the company and was suddenly worth eleven million dollars. So the bitch left with my heart and my money. She was probably just waiting for the payout before she left. Typical. That’s what women did – leave me. My mother, my sister, Nicole, whoever the fuck else. But that shit was going to stop now. It had to stop it – I simply couldn’t take anymore. Soon there would be nothing left in me to leave.

  I said a little prayer that Nicole’s ring would turn her finger green and then turned to…this girl, whatever her name was. No more moping over Nicole. I’d been singing a sad song for long enough. I was ready for a new story. A fun one.

  “Thanks for the concern, but I’ll cross the Bridge of Love when I get to it. Or I’ll just burn it down and piss on its ashes, either one. Until then I’ve got a lot of vaginas to lick.”

  “Stop talking like that.”

  “Why?”

  A battle waged across her face. She stifled it and looked down. “Because it’s douche-y. It’s also turning me on again, despite all efforts on my behalf to hate you, and I’m supposed to be theatrically storming out right now.” She pulled up her bra and scoffed at me. “You know, you’re gonna meet your match one day. Trust me. You’ll meet a girl who gives it to you just as hard as you give it to her, and you’re gonna have no idea what to do with yourself. You might even fall in love.”

  My phone vibrated with a message from my app. I took it out with my free hand and smiled: it was a brunette named Emily, and she wanted to hang out tomorrow night.

  “Maybe so. But not before I give it to you hard first.”

  “What?”

  “You’re gorgeous and I want to make love to you again. Can I?”

  She hesitated for a moment, but when I reached down and started stroking my still-hard cock, she groaned in defeat and licked her lips a bit. As I crept towar
d her again, I smirked at my reflection in the mirror.

  I am going to inflict as much damage on the female gender as I possibly can, and I am going to emit gallons of semen doing it.

  A few minutes later I turned, headed for the front door, and said a silent prayer for my next victim. She was going to need it.

  Hannah Goncalves

  My twin sister Rachel was on the treadmill next to me on a late-night visit to the gym when she pulled out her phone, checked her Facebook, and saw that the love of her life had just gotten engaged.

  “What is it?” I asked as her face went ghost-white. She showed me her phone, and my blood boiled as I scanned the photos of him bending down on one knee in front of a younger, thinner, and – let’s face it – cuter version of my twin. And to top it all off, the girl’s name was Rachel, too. Was he specifically trying to add insult to injury, or something? Why couldn’t he have found an Annie or a Sara or a Tanisha? Why Rachel?

  “That DICK!” I shouted. Rachel immediately lost her balance, wobbled a little, and fell in a heap on the ground behind the treadmill.

  ~

  Ten minutes later I sat in the gym’s café next to Rachel with a bag full of ice resting on her ankle, which had been provided by an overly friendly barista.

  “I just don’t get it,” she said as I stalked her ex’s profile album for the tenth time in five minutes. “I do not get it. He’s already given me more to drink about than any other guy I’ve ever known, and now this? I can’t believe I let him do this to me.”

  “Well, you did meet him on a dating app. As they come, so they will go.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It means this generation is making men into a bunch of deplorable sluts.”

  “Explain?”

  “Okay,” I began. “Cavemen had to date one of the cave chicks from their social circle, right? That was like five or six cave chicks, max – that was their dating pool. But today, a guy can download an app and literally have instant access to thousands of single girls within a few-mile radius. You match with them and start flirting with them and getting to know them, fully aware that all along, they’re doing the same thing with eighty other girls at the same time. Dating today is like The Bachelor, where a dude gets to be with a billion girls at once, except we don’t even know we’re on a show. And then he finally asks you to be official, but in the back of your mind you still know he can secretly download the app again at any time and have dozens of girls to cheat with, if he wants. And we’re expected to swoon? When a relationship’s beginning is that slutty, how is the ending supposed to be anything other than an Amtrak wreck?”

  “Okay, chill, Dr. Laura,” she said after a few moments of silence. “I just don’t get why he has to marry this stranger. What does she have that I don’t? Clearly not my name.”

  “Tits, maybe,” I said with a little grin, hoping to lift the mood. She scowled at me.

  “Shut up. You’re not helping. And I wouldn’t speak about boobs when yours are the size of a preteen boy’s.”

  “We’re twins – you just insulted yourself. And what am I supposed to say? That guy was a dick, and he chose someone else. I’m glad you’re not with him. He had weird feet, and he smelled like Old Spice.”

  “What’s wrong with Old Spice?”

  “If you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you.”

  “Ugh, stop reaching for fake reasons to hate him. He was perfect and you know it. And why am I even asking you about this, anyway?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you’re chronically single, and you treat guys like shit under your shoe.”

  “What? I just had a boyfriend, and I treated him fine.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Hannah, you told him he needed a back brace.”

  “So what? Scoliosis is a seriously undiagnosed condition in this country! I was worried for him!”

  “My point exactly.”

  “Okay, Smirky McSmirkerson. What are you getting at here?”

  Suddenly she got that look that said I’m about to tell you something about you that everyone knows but you. As my fraternal twin (I was twelve minutes older and never let her forget it, even though she had a matronly air that made her seem senior to me), her features looked just like mine, and we had the same brown eyes that were almost black. But whereas my hair was the faded-blonde color of spring sunshine, a relic from our Barcelonan grandmother, hers was a cacophonous shade of orange that made Parent Trap-era Lindsay Lohan’s look subtle. The differences compounded from there. While Rachel usually found herself lost in love’s tender embrace, I enjoyed being on my own – something our mother, the staunchest Republican there ever was, never let me live down. “Hannah,” she’d say as she fussed with my hair in the morning, “Benny Harris is single, his mom told me at the salon. Why don’t you ask him out for coffee?” “Hannah,” she’d announce as we drove to the carpet store, “that new wine bar on Seventh is always so crowded with young men. Why don’t you drop by sometime?” To her, a husband was the best accomplishment a woman could ever hope to achieve for herself, and I was practically an alien from Planet Lesbos with my total inability to see the paramount importance of wedded bliss.

  The world at large didn’t know what to do with me, either. I was always too tall, too blonde, too forward, too smart, too outspoken, too this, too that. For all the advancements society had made, humanity as a whole still wanted its females to engage in a relentless race to the middle. We were expected to look pretty, but not too pretty – those girls were called slutty and distracting and silly. We were expected to be smart, but not too smart – that would threaten the men in the room, whom everyone knew were supposed to take the intellect crown. We were supposed to be confident, but not too confident – that would just make us butch and undesirable. We were supposed to suck dick like professionals and take it in the ass whenever our husbands wanted it, serving as the wicked dominatrix of our marital bedrooms, but while out in public we were expected to act as chaste and sexless as Mother Teresa, because obviously any woman who dared to enjoy the act of sex was an evil, disease-ridden whore who needed to be shunned immediately. We were expected to stand back and speak softly and scoot aside for men on the subway and generally become beige, boring place-fillers for the males of the world while they swanned around, taking up all the oxygen.

  And the prospect of a female president? Fuck that! Any woman who dared to stand on a podium and display passion about the plight of our nation, just like any male politician, was clearly just a shrill, hateful, feminist cunt. And all this hatred just went on to fuel the hatred women felt for each other, too, because with limited spots to fill in the middle, the competition was heightened all the time. Women were expected to be decorations, but they couldn’t even be glittery decorations – and I was a woman that glittered. Where was my place? What was I supposed to do?

  “Okay, Han,” my sister said. “I hate to say it, but you’re a man hater, and it’s not exactly doing you any favors. Guys don’t like that. Actually, it repulses them.”

  I leaned back and stared at her with wide eyes. “Okay, I do not hate men.”

  “Your first boyfriend broke up with you because you made him cry. At his family reunion. On his birthday weekend.”

  “Oh, come on. It’s not my fault he said that me being in heels made him uncomfortable. I can’t help being tall.”

  “So did you really have to call him a ‘needle-dicked human-shaped sack of shit-turds who was supremely threatened by your very existence’ in front of his family?”

  “But…”

  “And what about that French guy who worked at that bar down the street from us?”

  “I was so sweet to him!”

  “Sweet? You said he had ‘shoulder cellulite,’ whatever that means.”

  “I was simply suggesting that he jog with me, because I needed a partner. Running alone in Central Park is highly dangerous, you know.”

  “See, that’s
the thing. It’s okay to think those things. You just don’t say them out loud, especially if you’re with a hot French bartender or a nice, normal guy with a family lake house Upstate, and you want to keep him around. It’s like, you know how you” – she raised her voice a little for a moment – “AREN’T SUPPOSED TO TEXT PEOPLE USING ALL CAPS BECAUSE IT MAKES YOU LOOK CRAZY AND AGGRESSIVE? That’s what you’re doing. You’ve got caps lock on permanently, except in real life. You’re living with your caps lock on. Just cool it for a second.”

  “But I’m a-”

  “A feminist, I know, and that’s fine. Be a feminist all you want. I’m a feminist, too. It’s just that being so negative and aggressive while simultaneously trying to go out and find a decent guy are…well, they’re not two goals that can coexist, to be honest. Like, I’ve seen the memes you post on Pinterest. ‘Boys suck, kill all boys, burn their pickup trucks, trash their bachelor pads, feminism forever!!!’ But then you also have an album about your future wedding.”

  “Hey, I thought I deleted that album! Shit.”

  “Whatever. I don’t care. All I’m saying is that you should calm down. All that bra-burning is great, but mark my words, any straight guy in a three-state radius is going to run in the other direction as soon as he sees that shit. It just doesn’t work the way you think it works.”

  “It does work! I can say what I want!”

  “Oh, really, then? How’s your dating life going?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Okay, fine, I’m a bit single.”

  “A bit single? Last night I walked in on you watching The Bachelor and sniffling into a bowl of ice cream.”

  “First of all, I happen to be highly moved by manufactured reality show drama. Second of all, fine. So I’m a lot single. Shut up.”

  She threw up her hands. “Just trying to help. It’s one or the other: being a dick, or getting dick. Pick one.”

  “But I love being a dick.”

  “Do you love it more than actual dick?”

  “Ugh. I don’t know! Let me hate men in peace!”