Read Chapter 14: The Dating App

The sticky notes had become a language of their own. Jazz found one stuck to the kettle that read *Boiler man comes Friday. Hot water dies at 9am. Stock up on grievances.* She’d laughed—actually laughed—and written beneath it: *Already stocked. Running out of space on the fridge.*

It was almost civil now. Almost easy. The smoke smell had faded to a faint ghost of scorched laminate, and the fabric softener Tom insisted on using now clung to the sofa cushions like a cheap perfume. Jazz had stopped complaining about it. She’d stopped complaining about a lot of things.

So when her phone buzzed at noon with a text from her sister Amara—*I found someone. He's a graphic designer. His name is Leo. He's 6'2" and he reads books. Say yes, he's not a serial killer (probably)*—Jazz stared at the screen for a full thirty seconds.

She hadn't been on a date in fifteen months. Her last relationship had ended with her ex telling her she was "too focused on work to be present." She'd proved him right by launching a startup two weeks later. But Amara's persistence was a known quantity in the Okafor family, a force like gravity. If Jazz said no, Amara would call their mother, and their mother would call Jazz, and the conversation would last forty-five minutes and cover Jazz's life choices, her unmarried state, and the state of her uterus in that order.

Tom was hunched over his laptop at the kitchen counter, his bandaged right hand resting on the table while his left pecked at the keyboard with a slowness that made Jazz wince every time she saw it. He’d refused to take a day off. She’d stopped nagging.

"Your sister?" he asked without looking up.

"How did you—"

"The face you're making. It's the same face you make when she sends you voice notes."

Jazz looked at the phone, then at him. "She wants to set me up."

Tom's typing paused for a fraction of a second. "With who?"

"Some graphic designer. Leo." She said the name like she was testing its weight. "He's 6'2" and reads books."

"Neither of those things are personality traits."

Jazz snorted. "I know. But you try telling my mother that." She locked her phone and slid it into her pocket. "I don't have time for this. We've got the incubator pitch in three weeks."

Tom swiveled on his stool, wincing as his knuckles brushed the counter. "You should go."

"Excuse me?"

"The date." He shrugged with one shoulder, the other still angled toward his screen. "If it's terrible, you get a free meal and a story. If it's good..." He let the sentence hang, unfinished.

Jazz studied his face. There was something careful about his tone, like he was holding a glass that might slip. "And if I go, you'll have the flat to yourself. No deadlines. No nagging about the bug in the checkout flow."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to." She grabbed her jacket from the hook by the door. "I'm going to say yes. Not because of you. Because Amara will literally fly here from Manchester to interrogate me if I don't."

Tom raised his bandaged hand in a mock salute. "Enjoy your mediocre graphic designer."

"Enjoy your lonely evening of code and cold pizza."

She was halfway out the door when Tom called after her. "Jazz?"

She turned.

"If it goes well," he said, his voice quieter, "don't come back too late. The locks on this door are ancient."

She didn't know what to do with that, so she slammed the door a little harder than necessary.

---

The date was at a wine bar in Shoreditch that was trying too hard to look industrial-rustic: exposed brick, Edison bulbs, a menu that described a cheese plate as a "curated dairy journey." Leo was, in fact, 6'2" and did, in fact, read books—he told her about a biography of a Victorian cartographer for twenty minutes without asking a single question about her.

By the time the bill arrived, Jazz knew three things about Leo: he'd run a half-marathon in October, he thought "the algorithm was ruining culture," and he'd never once considered what it might feel like to build something from nothing and watch people actually use it.

She paid for her own glass of wine and left at nine, citing an early meeting.

The flat was dark when she got back. Tom's laptop was closed on the kitchen counter. His mug sat in the sink, rinsed. And Tom himself was sitting on the sofa, one leg folded under him, scrolling through his phone with his left thumb.

"You're back early," he said, not looking up.

"The date was a conversation with a Wikipedia article." Jazz dropped her keys in the bowl by the door. "What's your excuse for looking like you haven't moved since I left?"

Tom's jaw tightened. He locked his phone and set it face-down on the armrest. "I matched with someone."

Jazz blinked. "You—what?"

"There's an app. It's not a big deal. Her name’s Chloe. She's a product manager at a fintech startup." He said it fast, like ripping off a bandage. "I was bored. You were out. The code wasn't running."

"So you went on Bumble and found a product manager named Chloe."

"Something like that."

Jazz crossed her arms. "Did you have a nice time?"

"Nice enough." Tom's voice was flat, deliberately empty. "She asked me a lot of questions about the startup. Turns out her company almost built a retention-tracking tool similar to our pivot idea and shelved it. Small world."

"Small world," Jazz repeated. Something hot and tight coiled in her chest. She didn't know what it was—anger? He'd spent the evening doing exactly what she'd done, except he'd done it while she was out, which somehow felt different. More deliberate. "Well. I'm glad you found someone to discuss work with. Your date sounds very productive."

Tom uncrossed his legs, leaned forward. "And yours sounds like a biography of a Victorian who mapped the Thames."

"His name was John. The cartographer. And yes, he was fascinating."

"You said you left at nine."

"The wine was bad."

"The wine was bad." Tom stood, and for a moment they were close enough that Jazz could smell the fabric softener on his hoodie mixed with something else—coffee, maybe, or the stale air of an evening spent alone. "You're welcome to go back out, you know. It's only nine-thirty. The night is young."

"Why, does Chloe have a friend for me?"

"I don't know her friends."

"Then why do you care when I come home?"

The question hung between them, sharp and sudden. Tom's jaw worked. He looked at the ceiling, then back at her, and something in his expression cracked open, just a little.

"I don't," he said finally. "I just—" He stopped. Exhaled. "I didn't want the whole evening to be about the flat being quiet."

Jazz felt her chest loosen, just a fraction. "Did you actually talk to her? Chloe?"

"An hour. She talked about yoga and her ex-boyfriend. I talked about a SQL query that was running too slow."

"That's a date?"

"That's my version of a date." He laughed, a dry quick sound. "Yours wasn't better."

"Mine was worse." Jazz sat down on the arm of the sofa, watching him. "You didn't have to match with anyone just because I went out."

Tom's eyes met hers. "I didn't do it because of you."

"Sure you didn't."

"I didn't." But his voice had gone softer, less certain. "I did it because—" He stopped again, then looked away. "Forget it. The point is, we both had terrible dates. We're even. Can we go back to pretending we're functional human beings?"

Jazz studied him. The bandage on his hand. The slight stoop in his shoulder from hours of typing one-handed. The way he hadn't once mentioned the date as a good thing, just a thing that happened.

"Yeah," she said quietly. "We can pretend."

But she stayed on the arm of the sofa a full minute longer than she meant to, and Tom didn't move either.

---

The next morning, Jazz woke to a sticky note on her door.

*Chloe unmatched me at 11 PM. She said I "seemed distracted but wouldn't say by what." I blamed the SQL query. Do you think she's right?*

Jazz stared at the note for a long moment. Then she peeled it off, wrote beneath it in her small, tidy script: *Probably. But so am I.* And she stuck it to his door, one floor up from where she knew he'd find it before he made his tea.