The Accidental Swipe, page 1
Copyright © 2022 by Yvonne M. Nelson
All rights reserved.
Published by One Creative Summer Press, PO Box 301, Paw Creek, NC 28130.
Cover by Amber Daulton/Satin Rose Designs
Interior formatting by Y. M. Nelson
This story is fiction. Any names, characters, businesses, places, or events are used fictitiously or are expressions of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to real people, living or dead, events or places is entirely coincidental.
License Notes
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. Reproducing, scanning, and distributing this book without permission constitutes theft of this author’s intellectual property. Please purchase additional copies through authorized retailers. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Print ISBN: 978-0-9987837-6-5
EBook ISBN: 978-0-9987837-5-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023910622
This book contains adult content and a few scenes and mentions that may trigger some people. For a list of these triggers go to:
https://ymnelson.com/books/trigger-warnings/#accidental
Also By Y. M. Nelson
The Owen & Makayla Trilogy
“The Owen & Makayla Trilogy, Vols 1-3”
Secret Second Chances, a novella (coming soon)
Accidental Lovers Series
The Accidental Swipe
The Accidental Proposal (coming soon)
The On Purpose Wedding (coming soon)
Standalone Novels
The One You Slept On (coming soon)
Short Stories
“Introverted”
(featured in North Carolina’s Emerging Writers: An Anthology of Fiction)
For all the online daters who came up empty, here’s some wish fulfillment for you.
And perhaps some encouragement as well.
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Playlist
Acknowledgments
About the Author
One
Fortune
Fortune had to own up to it. She was grocery-store stalking this guy, plain and simple. She’d been here at least three times this week, and she hoped he wasn’t catching on.
Well, stalking was a little harsh. More like ogling while buying unnecessary items. She picked up her third bag of fine-ground, expensive-as-diamonds coffee while she scanned the produce aisle in front of her just to get another glimpse of him.
Spotting him wearing that odd green apron and bright white name tag—“Graham R.,” and under it, “Store Manager”—in the produce section thrilled her. With skin a golden tan, a shade darker than the beige onions he was stacking, and a face so clean-shaven and smooth, she wanted to reach out and touch him to confirm that he was real and his jaw wasn’t, in fact, made of marble.
Fortune pushed the cart slowly down the juice aisle, and then the cereal aisle, and now she was rounding the corner to canned and dry goods, trying not to make any noise. Her list was completed, but her fill of seeing him stocking shelves wasn’t. As manager of the store, he rarely rolled up his sleeves to put cans of soup on high and low shelves, but when he did … Jiminy Christmas, what a sight. The bending, the reaching, the way the muscles in his arms and back and thighs worked? Delicious. Just one more peek around the corner of the aisle.
Sheesh. This was not healthy.
As she cautiously rounded the aisle, she saw him stacking boxes of rice. His feet stayed flat on the ground as he stretched to the back of the top shelf, pulling the boxes to the front. She always marveled at how some people were tall enough to reach the top store shelf, when at five foot four, she always had to ask for help. Maybe that’s how she could get his attention this time. But what would she pretend to reach for?
“How are you today? Can I help you find something?” His cheery voice broke through her reverie.
Yikes. He’d spotted her midogle. In fact, there might have been drool.
Eek. She couldn’t play this off with idle conversation, and she was too far away for her shelf idea to work. Fortune fidgeted, yanking the hem of her T-shirt down in the back, pulling it away from any visible bumps, then shook her head. Why was she even doing that? He had seen her enough times to know how fat she was. “Um …” She looked around. Just go, crazy woman. “No. I’m fine, thanks! Have a nice day!”
He looked at her with a half smile and a confused eyebrow furrow, then went back to his task, squatting next to boxes of jasmine and long grain.
She had been discovered. Her face hot with embarrassment, she scooted away from the aisle.
The grocery store outing had been a pleasant—minus the embarrassing bit at the end—pit stop on her way to her best friend Louis’s house, a small ranch on a square patch of yard in the middle of what Louis called “The Gayburbs” of Charlotte—a once-forgotten suburban neighborhood on the edge of town that had been taken over and revitalized by a few very prominent, openly gay couples in real estate.
Fortune stepped over the threshold, bags rustling even though she held them as still as possible. She always came in through the most awkward part of the house, the side door closest to his driveway. “I’m here!” she yelled, trying to mask the bag noise.
But he called her out on it. “Why did you go to the store? I told you I had everything.”
Fortune whipped around from closing the door to staring Louis in the face. “Guess I didn’t hear that part.”
All shuffling ceased. They locked in a death glare for a full minute. Fortune caved first. She could never win at the death glare, especially when he held a glass of her favorite pink Moscato. “Okay, okay. I wanted some of those mini chocolate chip cookies. You know I love how their bakery does those. So soft. So chewy.”
He looked in her bag, then back at her. “You don’t have any cookies in this bag.”
She blinked. Oh yeah, right. I left the cookies because I didn’t want Graham R. to see me with them. Then she sighed and handed Louis the bag and took the wine. “Okay, okay, okay! I wanted to get a glimpse of this guy. Store manager. He’s … good-looking.”
“Now, that I actually believe. Why can’t you just search for pics of hot guys on the internet like everyone else?” He took her superfluous groceries into the kitchen.
A massive kitchen island separated the living room from the dining room, and with Louis’s humongous wall-mounted flat screen, you could see what was playing from either room. Today’s feature: a Stranger Things binge-watch session.
Fortune followed him through a doorway and sat on Louis’s living room couch in front of the TV. She crossed her ankles on the bottom rung of his two-tiered coffee table and cradled her glass like it was a precious jewel. He brought in binge-watch survival provisions—popcorn, candy, and the opened wine bottle—and they hunkered down.
While the credits rolled on the fourth episode, Fortune mused about Graham R. “I think I’m going to ask him out. I got caught staring, and now he’s going to think something is up.” She’d kept her stalker sessions under wraps until today. Now that she’d been spotted, she might as well put everything out in the open. Plus, she couldn’t keep anything from her BFF Louis. Especially after a few drinks during a binge-watch weekend.
“Are you saying you like this guy? What is he? A forty-year-old bag boy?” Louis plopped on the sofa beside her with a fresh bowl of popcorn, two bottled waters, and a bag of mini candy bars. Only four episodes in, and they’d run out of the snacks and drinks they’d sat down with.
“Will you stop with the hate, please? And he’s the store manager, not that it matters.”
“It does! You’re an independent accomplished woman; he’s got to represent or get out of the way. Listen, if you’re that hard up, you should just find somebody on SwipeMatch. So, if it doesn’t work out, he won’t be staring death rays at you from aisle five every time you need a box of cereal.”
“Swipe what?”
“SwipeMatch.” He pulled out his phone and flipped through a couple of screens before finding the app, then handed her the phone. “It’s like Tinder for plus-size beauties like yourself.”
Her—a plus-size beauty? Hah. Plus-size yes, beauty no. She browsed through the screen. It looked a lot like Tinder, except the colors were pink and blue, and there were heart logos everywhere instead of the signature Tinder flame. She sighed. “I did the online dating thing five years ago. Remember my summer fiasco with that string of ODating4U.com guys? One guy had the nerve to—”
“Meet you at Capital Grille in a tank top and board shorts. Yes, I remember.” He shuddered. “Hideous.”
“Hey, why are you on SwipeMatch, anyway? BBWs aren’t your thing.”
“But I love a BBM every now and then.” Louis waggled his eyebrows and smiled. “Sometimes, my usual skinny nerdy type just won’t do it for me.”
“An equal opportunity plus-size
“Stop it now! You can modify your preferences, see?” He snatched the phone away and went to the profile settings screen. “Men Searching Men” was highlighted on his profile, but Fortune saw other selections: “Men Searching Women,” “Women Searching Men,” and almost ten others. With a couple of taps, he changed his preferences to “Men Searching Women” and went back to his potential matches.
Photo after photo of curvy women went across his screen as he swiped left for her to view. “Not much competition,” he said. “You’re more attractive than all of these women combined.”
“You’re supposed to say that. You’re my bestie.”
“Uh, no. As your bestie, I’m supposed to tell you the truth. Some of these women need a makeover. An Extreme Makeover.”
Sometimes Fortune wished the show still aired, because she would totally apply. She would lose seventy pounds, tighten the flab on the undersides of her arms, get a breast lift, get a full-body “facial,” and change her hair color. If she could go to work with hot pink highlights, she would, but for the office, she’d have to settle for a lighter red. She’d been rocking the short dark auburn curls for a few years now, while everyone else was doing streaks of white, purple, or green, even shaving one side of their heads while wearing hair extensions on the other side. She would save the wild colors for her nail polish instead.
Could she be—gasp—boring? No way. But how could anyone stand out on a dating app looking like she did? Ugh, online dating. She should have kept her mouth shut about her Graham crush. Now, Louis was going all in on finding her someone, and he wasn’t going to stop.
“Don’t make your straightness an excuse for a life of singledom, sweetie. You are painfully single, and you need to get over that with a quickness.” He wagged his finger in front of her like a mother warning her child of bad consequences to her actions. Louis was such a drama queen.
“I’m not painfully single. Just the regular variety.” What was painfully single anyway? She was too busy to date: work, book clubs, activity groups, volunteer projects. And then there were the weekends of endless binge-watch marathons. How could she keep up with discussions about Stranger Things if she didn’t use her whole weekend to catch up? Being single was not painful. It was exhausting, really.
“Do you want to stay that way all your life? Forget your life, my ball is only three months away. And that’s a date thing, sweetie. You can’t go stag like you did last year.”
And there it was. It was always about Louis, even her single life. Why did he care if she took someone to one of his drag-queen shows? “You know straight men don’t go to drag balls. Especially straight Black men.”
“First off, it’s not that kind of ball. It’s the annual ALZ fundraiser gala for UICC.” Louis had been development director at United in Care Charities for over four years. UICC promoted several causes, and Louis worked a little on some of them, but his focus was on Alzheimer’s awareness and cure research. He threw himself into preparations for the Alzheimer’s gala so completely every year, the annual fundraiser was now unofficially nicknamed Louis’s Gala.
“Wow, that came around fast. I thought I’d volunteer this time around.”
“Sorry, sweetie. We’ve got all the volunteers we need this year. Special guest this year is that hunk of manliness Javier Firestone from that reality show—” Louis pointed to the TV, which was not playing the show he was talking about, and then to her.
She pointed back at him with recognition, as if she’d picked up the rest of his thought and agreed. They had been friends so long they could draw and decipher thought from each other’s brains like Dumbledore and the Pensieve. She sighed. “Yep! Oh well.”
“And secondly, there are all kinds of men on SwipeMatch. Who’s to say you’ll end up with a Black guy?”
“I’m a Black woman in the South. Odds are—”
“Is this Graham guy Black?”
“No.” She envisioned Graham at the onion bin again. He could have been Mediterranean, but he was not a Black man. And that had been one of the things she’d noticed the least about him until Louis had brought it up.
“I know you, Ms. Rainbow Bright. Your eyes don’t see skin color after they’ve spotted ‘hot’ and ‘hunky.’ Come on, let’s help get you a profile.”
Louis and his stupid ball. She would rather go alone than be stuck with some sex-crazed Neanderthal from the internet. But if he said she needed a date, it was out of love and understanding. He knew she was uncomfortable in places where there were crowds where you had to make small talk. While she could function at an activity-based event where everyone knew everyone else (like last week’s college reunion cookout), or where everyone was a stranger and not expected to interact (yesterday’s seminar on caring for aging parents she’d attended for work), she was horrible at mingle-and-network shindigs without a buffer. Fortune had almost cried last year when she’d left the charity ball early. She’d wondered if he’d noticed; now she realized he had.
“I drank too much of that Moscato. I’m going to have to sleep over tonight,” Fortune declared.
“You know where the linen closet and the spare bedroom are.”
“I love you, Louis.”
“I love you, too, but you’re not getting out of creating this profile. Please tell me you have a better photo than this DMV-looking thing here.”
She leaned across his shoulder to see what he was seeing and laughed. It was a frantically taken headshot she’d done for work. She hated photos, especially ones where she was wearing boring work clothes. But Louis had kept at her to send him a photo so he could attach it to her contact info in his phone. His threats of taking one of her while she was midchew at his house finally had gotten to her, and she’d sent him the work photo. “I’ll find something. Let’s finish the binge-fest first, shall we?”
Her and Louis’s TV binge-fests were never long enough. They always watched a few shows, talked about their lives, and got sidetracked until after midnight when one of them would get up and say, We have got to do this more often, and leave.
But this time, she was staying over, and Louis was needling her with questions to add information to her profile.
“Is this the best you can do for a photo?” He was looking at the snapshots she’d just added to her online album and shared with him.
“What do you want from me? I hate taking pictures.” What was Louis even thinking? She’d say no to the SwipeMatch profile and go to the ball alone. She was a big girl. “I can go to a charity fundraiser by myself. I promise I won’t be like last year.”
“You’re just anxious about meeting someone new. Now”—he settled into an armchair across from his sofa and began typing furiously on his phone with his thumbs—“what do you do again?”
“I’m a burlesque dancer.” She blew a raspberry and crossed her eyes.
Louis played along with her sarcasm. “No need to get them salivating now. They can find out about the burlesque part after they meet you.”
“I’m a seminar creator; you know that. It’s boring to anyone who doesn’t do it. Do we have to write anything for that?”
“No, we don’t. There’s no spot just for a job. It’s just a big box that says, ‘Write something here.’”
Fortune hopped off the couch and started pacing in front of him. “Let’s be more creative than that.” She went to the kitchen and came back with another bottle of Moscato. “This is going to require a little thinking juice.” She poured each of them another glass and continued pacing.
“Okay, Peggy Olsen,” she quipped, nicknaming him for the Mad Men character. “Take this dictation. ‘I’m the cute girl. That’s my iceberg description. My friends know that I’m also a TV nerd, a baseball fan, a volunteer, a spontaneous baker, and a good-hearted person. What else would my boyfriend know about me? That’s for you to potentially find out.’” She took a bow and then a big gulp of her drink.
Louis finished the dictation, dropped the phone in his lap, and started clapping. “All right, Mr. Draper! Reel them in with that creative bravado!”
