About this ebook
Being dumped is oddly freeing.
It wasn't as though Robin could have met anyone in the real world, anyway. To do that, he would have to leave his house. But uploading a picture to the dating app Let's Connect only to be let down is still disappointing. Robin has run out of excuses not to look outward, and for the first time in three years, he's seeing many of the things he's been hiding from—including his next-door neighbor, Sean.
The very same obstacle remains, however. Sean lives in the real world, and if Robin wants to get to know him better, to move beyond friendship to something more, he's going to have to step outside his front door.
Robin will have to go out.
Kelly Jensen
Born in Australia and raised everywhere else, Kelly Jensen now lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, daughter and herd of four cats. After disproving the theory that water only spins counter-clockwise around drains north of the equator, she turned her attention to more productive pursuits such as reading, writing about reading and writing stories of her own.
Other titles in Let's Go Out Series (3)
Let's Connect: Let's Connect, #1 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Let's Go Out: Let's Connect, #2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLet's Escape: Let's Connect, #2.5 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
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Titles in the series (3)
Let's Connect: Let's Connect, #1 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Let's Go Out: Let's Connect, #2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLet's Escape: Let's Connect, #2.5 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
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Let's Go Out - Kelly Jensen
About the Book
Being dumped is oddly freeing.
It wasn't as though Robin could have met Dan in the real world, anyway. To do that, Robin would have to leave his house. But uploading his picture to the dating app Let’s Connect, only to have Dan let him down, is still disappointing. Now Robin has run out of excuses not to look outward, and for the first time in three years, he's seeing many of the things he's been hiding from—including his next-door neighbor, Sean.
The very same obstacle remains, however. Sean lives in the real world too. And if Robin wants to get to know him better, to move beyond friendship to something more, he's going to have to step outside his front door.
Robin will have to go out.
Contents
About the Book
> Currently Offline
The Front Door
The Court of the Laughing Dragon
The Back Patio
The Marketplace
To the Sidewalk
Rear Window
Kerper Street
The Nether Plane
The House Next Door
The Coffee Shop (Not)
Castor Avenue
The Long Walk Home
The Shed
Out of the Woods
Right Here, Right Now
Robin’s Frittata Recipe
Dear Reader
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Titles by Kelly Jensen
> Currently Offline
Robin
49-year-old man
Philadelphia, PA, USA
Seeking men 40-60 within 20 miles of Philadelphia, PA
Heart Envelope
Story…
Relationship Status: Single
Have Kids: No
Want Kids: This is a complicated question.
Ethnicity: Nerd
Body type: Expert couch surfer.
Height: 1.8161m (This is not a test. Not really.)
Faith: I have some.
Smoker: No
Drinker: No
Favorite…
Song: Kashmir
Movie: The Dark Knight
Book: The Lost World (Professor Challenger FTW)
The most interesting thing about you…
My sock collection. I never throw away the lost socks, the laundry orphans, the singular but proud refugees who migrate from someone else’s basket to mine, the war veterans, the random keepers who only want a family and a home. I keep them all. I wear them, too. Matching them as closely as I can to another sock, forming new pairs, thus ensuring each and every sock in my possession has at least a chance of finding their happy ever after.
Your desert isle keepers are (you get two):
You. We’ll either a) kill each other (and let’s not talk about what we’d do with the body—we’ll assume there’s another food source on the island. Actually, wait, let’s talk about the body. I’d like to think I’d give you a decent burial. I’d compose a poem for your funeral. I’d be sorry I killed you.) or b) get to know each other really, really well. Where else would we find the time and space to talk? Not at a bar, that’s for sure. For the record? I prefer option b.
A perfect date is…
You’re probably expecting me to say Hawaii, and you’re probably expecting me to be wearing my mismatched socks and a soulful smile. Or maybe you’re thinking I’m a stay-at-home guy. That I’m going to offer to cook for you and invite you to watch a movie afterward. Only we’d never get to the movie because I’ve got condoms and lube in a drawer under the coffee table. Better yet, you’re imagining I’m a fancy-restaurant kind of guy. That I want to meet you somewhere that has a balcony from where we can watch the sun set and assess each other in the most flattering light.
I’m not a nightclub guy. I’m not the guy who will meet you outside a bar. I’m not going to suggest something different but cute, like going to the zoo or checking out the latest exhibit at the Franklin Institute.
Here’s where I’m going to be honest, and here’s where you’re going to decide whether or not we’ll connect. I’ve been hurt before. You have too. So, all we’re going to do is talk. Me at my place, you at yours. We’re going to attempt to connect, in the truest sense of the word. Maybe we’ll watch a movie together one night, me on my couch, you on yours. Let’s pick a language and practice speaking to each other using all the wrong words. Let’s play Scrabble online, using our own rules. All of your words have to be things in your house. Mine will be the same.
What do you want to do on our date?
The Front Door
At first, the new requests lighting up the Let’s Connect chat app were flattering. Now that Robin had replaced the small bird he’d been using as an avatar with an actual photo of himself, people wanted to talk to him! But as he scrolled through the shortish list, his spirits dipped, dragged along the floor, and finally slipped between the cracks. It wasn’t the sameness of the dating profiles attached to each request—though they were startlingly similar. It was that he’d been waiting eight hours for one particular person to comment.
A confirmed citizen of the digital world, Robin had learned not to read too much into online communication. Text didn’t always convey the same meaning as face-to-face conversation. Internet connections dropped. Phones broke. But, damn. It’d been eight hours since he’d uploaded the photo, and Dan had yet to respond.
Had Dan’s connection dropped? Was his phone broken? A foot of snow covered the ground outside. Dan couldn’t possibly have gone out, could he? Maybe he had, and had forgotten his phone?
Or the roof of his shop or whatever had fallen in.
Or he’d been caught out during the snow and now had hypothermia.
Or…
Maybe this was what ghosting felt like.
With an imaginary rope tying anxious knots in his gut, Robin flipped back to his profile on the app to check out his picture. Small, at first, then full size.
He looked okay. He’d thought about taking his glasses off, but figured that since he quite literally could not see his hand in front of his face without them—not to count the fingers, anyway—he should leave them on. His eyes didn’t appear too myopic behind the lenses. Or weirdly small. The brown of his irises showed well. It was a nice color, wasn’t it?
Robin flashed back to the time he’d wanted green eyes, because green eyes were different. Exciting? He’d ordered colored contacts and gone out to face the world through a haze of green—not that the contacts colored his vision, just his perception. Feeling new, or reinvented, he’d met someone and gone home with him, only to be booted to the curb before the wet spot had dried in the sheets they’d tangled together.
But, hey, he’d managed to have sex with someone real. That should have counted as a win.
The jury was still out. So were the lenses, which remained boxed and stacked in the darkest corner of a cupboard in the bathroom.
Eyes refocused on his photo, Robin brushed a hand over the top of his head. His hair was necessarily short (the explanation for which he probably wouldn’t be getting into), his beard neat, both liberally sprinkled with gray. He was forty-nine and lucky to have any brown left at all.
Was it his nose? At eight, his mother had assured him that God had given him the nose he’d needed to hold his glasses in place. Neither the size of his schnoz nor the weight of his new glasses had seemed particularly holy.
At eighteen, Robin had still been growing into his nose.
At twenty-eight, he’d felt he had. Or, at the very least, that the angularity of the beak in the middle of his face matched the gawkiness of the rest of his frame.
At thirty-eight, Robin had wondered, briefly, whether the date who’d booted him to the curb had lied about liking his nose.
At forty-nine, he barely thought about it—or he hadn’t until now.
His phone trilled a bright cadence of notes, snapping Robin back to the present. He checked the new notification and nearly dropped the phone. Dan had finally messaged him—which of course meant Robin had to spend the next sixty seconds thinking about anything else and failing.
The rope in Robin’s gut rolled and tightened, pulling all of his intestines into a confused bundle as he swiped down and read the text.
Dan: So, guess what? You look like you. I didn’t have a complete mental picture, not a physical one, anyway. But your photo totally matched who I thought I was talking to. I’m going to say that’s a win. I’m also going to say that I get being shy. Honestly, I do. But this picture is going to make a huge difference to your profile. I bet you’ve already had a bunch of new connection requests.
Text didn’t always convey the same meaning as face-to-face conversation but Dan’s tone was pretty clear. That last line? Not actually in bold text, but Robin had a hard time seeing anything before it, because that last line meant whatever they’d been building together was about to come down.
The rope inside Robin’s gut fell loose, leaving him disconcerted and slightly nauseated. But he managed a response.
Robin: Uploading an actual picture of myself turned out to be a low-key event.
Sort of, except for the almost panic attack.
Robin: I spent all night tossing and turning—
A fact he apparently had to share with Dan?
Robin: —and then I posted it and the world didn’t explode. Funny about that. And, yes, I did get new connection requests today. Guess I’m not paper bag material after all.
Dan wanted to know whether he truly thought he was, and Robin had to admit he didn’t, not really, but it was a thing people said, wasn’t it? When they didn’t know what else to say. When they’d figured out a conversation was going one way, even though they’d hoped it might go another.
Robin’s conversation with Dan went the one way.
Dan was kind, as he always was, but he had a confession to make. One Robin had been expecting ever since the first mention of Dan’s BFF, Trevor, during an early chat. Last night, while Robin took and retook his picture, trying to find an expression that said approachable but not needy, Dan and Trevor had figured out their differences.
Now they were together.
Robin tried to be gracious about it. He kept his replies upbeat, his tone light. But inside, his loosed innards were withering and dying. Nausea was no longer a concern. Instead, the fatigue that shrouded the end of anxious episodes descended, wrapping his shoulders in a heavy embrace. The phone in his palm turned into a ten-pound weight. The light cascading through the window became a flash of horror in a dark world.
Dan ended the chat with his cellphone number and an invitation to coffee.
Every instinct Robin had urged him to ignore both. It would be easier to become the ghost.
Then he made himself switch from the Let’s Connect app to his phone’s text app. Whether it was a desire to put a mark on Dan’s phone that might send a prick of guilt in Dan’s direction every time he saw it, a need to preserve what had started to feel like a friendship, a jibe at himself, or a call to action no one but Robin might understand, he entered Dan’s number and typed:
This is me being brave. Now I need to go sleep it off.
EnvelopeThe sun interrupted Robin’s backward slump into naptime. He’d lifted his feet from the floor with the intent of nestling his toes into the blanket bunched at the far end of the couch. He’d tilted his head toward his favorite pillow.
The sun, careless of his plans for an afternoon nap, hit him full in the face.
Robin squinted toward the window. Stupidly, he’d drawn the curtains back to peer out at the snow, and now the sun had moved far enough west to peek out from behind the houses on the opposite side of the street.
Uttering a cross between a sigh and a moan, Robin pushed up off the couch, slid his feet into slippers, and went to close the curtains. Before dragging them across the window, though, he peered out. Cold radiated from the glass, reflecting the snow blanketing his small front yard. Higher piles of snow to either side hid the shrubs marking the borders between his house and his neighbors’. The walk was clear, and beyond the three steps leading down to the street, the snow had been pushed away from the sidewalk to form a long battlement between him and Kerper Street.
Being a Sunday afternoon,