Chapter Three
The following day, Sammie found she was inundated with even more messages from the site, mostly from a bunch of guys she had no real desire to talk to. Although they were technically “matches” because they ticked the boxes on a certain number of categories, just either reading their messages or glancing through their profiles told her mostly everything she needed to know about them. Besides, there was no way she could literally reply to everyone, keep up a conversation and be expected to remember things about them if she was chatting to thirty different guys at once. She needed a shortlist for a reason and right now, Frank was still at the top of that shortlist.
She went through and deleted a bunch of guys, and messages. Once she’d done that, she replied to the guys that she was interested in – the ones she’d already made a start on the previous evening and sent messages to. Three of those had now replied to her again, and opened up a conversation. She replied back to all three and waited, still logged in to the site for a little while, but none of them were online so she didn’t get a message back straight away, then she had to go to work so she couldn’t stick around and wait anyway.
She didn’t log on while she was at work. Although she could have probably checked it on her phone if she’d wanted to, she told herself she wasn’t desperate and that it would make no difference if she waited till she got back.
When she did finally check her messages, later that evening at around 7 when she was eating her dinner, she discovered that two of her shortlist had replied, and she had a further seven messages off guys who weren’t on the shortlist. She went through them and decided whether they should be added or not.
It was a not.
She got back to the other two instead, and was slightly sad to see that Frank hadn’t gotten in touch with her yet. She wondered what the time was in Texas and what he was doing right at that moment.
She kept her laptop out on the desk, with the website loaded up, so that she would be able to hear a “ping” if anyone messaged her, then carried about the rest of her life, tidying up her plates and cutlery from dinner before slipping into her art overalls and standing at the easel to work on one of her paintings, some music on in the background she could sing along and rock out to a bit.
She kept going like that for a couple of hours and nothing happened; no new messages came through. Then, at about half nine in the evening, just as she was taking a break from painting to grab herself a beer, there was a loud pinging sound from her laptop.
She cracked open the beer, took a sip, then wandered over and leaned down a bit so she could see.
The name “Frank” was flashing up.
She immediately felt a bit of a rush, a thrill of excitement charging through her, and she pulled out the chair so she could sit down and reply, taking another sip of beer before putting it down beside her.
“Hey, are you online? Wanna chat?” His message had said.
She smiled and bit her lip slightly as she replied: “Yes and yes! Hi!”
“Hey!”
“How are you?”
“I’m good! How are you? What have you been up to today?”
And just like that, they were talking, once again in real time.
She wasn’t sure what it was about the other guys on the website, but it seemed as though they were fairly incapable of being online at the same time as she was, so that all their messages came through a good few hours after she’d sent them. Because of that, it was difficult to get a proper conversation and chat going, and that was definitely one thing that worked in Frank’s favor – he was online a lot, and available to talk.
He was easy to chat to too, and she soon found that the hours were passing and it was marching on for midnight. She hadn’t even finished her beer – she’d just been too engrossed in her chat with Frank.
This time, they’d got onto the topic of video games. It started off with movies, and Resident Evil came up, which then brought them to the concept of movies getting made that were based on video games.
Sammie got the impression he had initially assumed she wouldn’t know much about that type of area, which she gently mocked him for and jokingly accused him of being sexist, then soon made him fully aware of just how much she did know, assuring him she was a full-time nerd and a very capable gamer.
They then chatted about different consoles, comparing their favorites and discussing the differences between console and desktop gaming, as well as sharing what specific game titles they both liked to play.
***
Frank was impressed. Undoubtedly.
And the more he talked to this Sammie, the more he got the impression that there was something very different and special about her, and that perhaps the two of them could make a go of things together.
It wasn’t just that they liked the same TV shows, films, music, books and video games. A tick in the box of just one of those would have been great. Having a tick in the box for all of them was amazing and incredible and he couldn’t believe his luck. But still, that kind of stuff was important but it wasn’t essential. He could have settled for much less in terms of relatable interests. It wasn’t just that though, there was something more, and it wasn’t the way she looked – which was obviously gorgeous – it was something in her personality.
She was just so easy to talk to. She seemed friendly and affable and laid back, and she frequently made him laugh or smile, and that was only on written chat. He could only imagine how much more fun they would have together in real life.
After only two evenings of chatting with her, he was already beginning to feel rather smitten and had all but ruled out speaking to anyone else on the website, deciding to focus all his energies into Sammie.
A couple of the other girls had replied to them, but they didn’t capture his interest and imagination as much as Sammie did.
By the time she had to go to bed on that second night (and Frank cursed the time difference out loud), he was already suggesting that they take their chatting elsewhere away from the website.
“Do you have Skype?” he asked. “It would be so much fun to video chat sometime, then I can actually see you and hear you talk! I bet you have a great accent!”
***
Sammie was a little nervous of video chat. Seeing each other and hearing each other all at once felt like a bit too much, at least for now. She didn’t want to rush into things, although she was very keen to hear Frank’s accent.
“I really want to hear your accent too!” she replied, steering the conversation slightly away from Skype. “Maybe we can send voice notes first, then video chat soon!”
“Aw OK, that sounds like fun.”
She couldn’t tell whether he was disappointed or not, or whether he felt like she was putting him off Skype or didn’t want to do it for some reason, so she decided to try and reassure him and just tell the truth.
“I do want to Skype you…but I’m just a bit self-conscious about you seeing my face AND hearing my voice. Let’s start with voices first.”
There was a pause, during which Sammie worried she’d upset him, but then another message came through:
“Haha, okay, that’s fair enough. Same time tomorrow then? We can send voice clips. What’s your Facebook?”
The two of them swapped Facebook details so they could send voice messages to each other via Messenger, then said goodnight and she logged off for the evening, ready to go to bed.
She didn’t even look at the other messages that had come through from the other potential matches, although she did check them in the morning and reply to one or two of them. By this point though, she had all but given up on the other guys, focusing nearly entirely on Frank.
She also found there was a Facebook friend request waiting for her on her phone.
She accepted it, and spent the bus journey into work scrawling through Frank’s Facebook; reading his old posts, looking at old pictures of him and seeing who some of his other friends were. Definitely not many women. A few men, but it was a relatively quiet account that he didn’t seem to post on very often, apart from sharing memes and funny videos occasionally.
The pictures section was here favorite. He’d only posted three pictures on the dating account, which she had looked at many times; now she had a whole host of others to ogle at. He was very handsome indeed with his dark hair, deep blue green (or was it hazel grey) eyes and slightly swarthy looks. His eyes really were a mystery; they seemed to look a slightly different color in each photo, but always dreamy, glimmering and beautiful. She felt like she could get lost in them.
The bus jolted and she snapped back to reality, realizing she had almost missed her stop and rushing to get off.
That was the problem with having Frank on Facebook. He was constantly on her phone, and she couldn’t get away from him. Not that she wanted to; but it did prove to be a massive distraction at work. She wasn’t supposed to be on her phone while she was on duty in the gallery, but she felt it there, in her pocket, as if it was burning a hole through the fabric, screaming at her to look at it.
A few times, when it was quiet and no one was walking through her section; she did take it out and have a sneaky pic. She even saved some of the photographs onto her phone so she could have them for easy access.
She learnt one or two things out about Frank that she didn’t know from their conversations either; such as the fact that he wasn’t a Texas native but was originally born in New York, and moved out to Texas just over a year ago. There were some pictures of the house just after he moved in, but the account was apparently a very new one, and didn’t go back much further than that so was still fairly limited about the amount of info she could find out, soon discovering she had looked at every single post and picture on the account and had exhausted all her sources.