Attempt 27 at a Tinder Date

The bass is heavy in whatever song is echoing through the club. It feels like it’s vibrating Aidan’s red blood cells, it’s so loud.

‘Can we go somewhere else?’ he yells.

‘What did you say?’ his date yells back. Aidan thinks her name is Samantha, or Simone, but he’s already forgotten from the one conversation they had on a dating app today, and he doesn’t want to pull out his phone and check. She might notice, and he’s not quick-thinking enough to pull off any sort of lie.

He gestures towards the door, and Samantha-Simone nods in agreement. They make their way through a heaving mass of sweaty bodies, narrowly avoiding getting splashes of drinks on them from cups that people are holding just a little too loosely, and eventually emerge into the cool night air.

‘This is a relief,’ Aidan laughs, leaning on the wall outside the club. Samatha-Simone shrugs.

‘I like the noise,’ she says, and turns to look over into the club. As she does, Aidan happens to glance at the side of her face, closer than they’ve been all evening, and –

Scales?

He blinks. Nope, they’re still there. They hadn’t been visible on her photos, since they’re just behind her ear, and she didn’t mention that in between the pictures of her rock climbing and talking about how her perfect Sunday would be ‘having a lie-in and a boozy brunch with my gals xx’.

Samantha-Simone turns back, catches him looking. ‘What?’ she asks, touching behind her ear with a tinge of self-consciousness, ‘Do I have something on my face?’

He’s not sure if it’s insensitive, but he asks anyway, ‘Scales?’

Eloquent.

It somehow puts her at ease though, anyway. ‘Oh yes,’ Samatha-Simone says, ‘My father was a lizard creature. I’m half-reptilian.’

Aidan doesn’t know what to say to that, and she doesn’t seem phased, pulling out a bottle of water from her purse (at least he thinks it’s water. Could be some sort of lizard juice? Or tequila?) and looking out to the street.

She was so confident about admitting it, that’s the thing that gets to Aidan. She just said it, like it was nothing, like she wasn’t worried about how he’d react, like it was something completely natural and not a huge secret, not something she needs to hide, not like –
Aidan’s going to do something impulsive.

‘Hey,’ he says. Great opener, but anyway. He’ll keep on going.

She turns, and some of his confidence falls away, but he presses on.

‘I’m-’ and then Aidan pauses. The words are a bit too difficult, so he relies on that old adage: show, don’t tell.

There’s no one around on the street – which is a relief, since he’s not quite up to showing off to everyone. He stands up and away from the wall, and for the first time in several hours, lets his wings unfurl.

Samantha-Simone gasps, but it feels more like delight than anything.

‘A nightingale?’ she asks, and he nods.

‘Can I touch them?’

‘Sure.’

Aidan’s never shown anyone before, and it hits him just as she starts to coo over how soft the feathers are. Twenty-five years of keeping them hidden, scrunched up uncomfortably against his back for hours at a time, of never letting anyone close enough to unfurl-

There’s something both deeply upsetting and oddly freeing about letting a stranger see this deepest part of him, a part that was buried in shame but now moves idly against the brickwork of a pulsating, glimmering nightclub.

‘They’re gorgeous! You should wear them out more,’ Samantha-Simone says, and he grimaces, folds the wings back in. That’s enough for today.

‘Maybe,’ he says, and that feels good enough.

She smiles and looks down at her phone, her emerald-green nails tapping rhythmically against the screen (and maybe the fact that she’s part-reptile is making more and more sense).

He’s looking down the street at a car with the lights still on and wondering if he should tell the bouncer in case the owner is inside, when he hears, ‘Look, this has been fun, but I think I’m going to get going.’

He looks over, offers an eloquent, ‘Oh?’

‘Yeah,’ she tucks her phone in her little snakeskin purse (how had he not known?), ‘Your wings are great, but I’m looking for someone a bit more energetic. Toodles!’

And with that, Samantha-Simone bounces her way down the street and presumably out of his life, high heels clacking against the pavement with the same sense of rhythm she’d brought to typing. A woman of beats, it seemed.

So Aidan got rejected. By the first person he’d ever shown his deepest secret to.

Somehow, he doesn’t mind.

They weren’t a good match. The nightclub was probably somewhere on the list of Aidan’s Top Ten Worst Places To Exist In, so if that was the kind of place she wanted to frequent, a relationship would never have lasted long.

No, he’s okay with this. And there’s just a glimmer of- pride? He’s proud of himself. He did something difficult tonight.

Aidan lets the wings expand, just a touch. The roughness of the bricks is a nice texture against the feathers, and there’s a seed of a thought, a little sparkly bit of hope that goes What if you could tell other people? Someday?

Someday, indeed. Aidan retracts the wings and starts to walk towards the station. As he does, he takes a moment to pull out his phone, flicks to the dating app, and has to let out a laugh.

Her name is Siobhan.