Part 11 of a serial, "Sex Love Enlightenment." Previously: Billy can't choose between the three women he's dating, so I bow out. Then I email one of the women, Sally Burton.Click here for past installments.
Sally and I are at my kitchen table, eating buffalo chilli and drinking red wine. We like each other immediately. She's almost as tall as I, (Billy had said he only dates tall women) and she has natural red hair, a runner's body and a great sense of humor.
She'd called right after receiving my email and said, "I told you we'd have things in common. I didn't expect it would be a guy from match!" She tells me she's not interested in Billy and has been composing a kiss-off email in her mind.
We compare our stories of Billy, filling in the gaps, alternately laughing and wincing. He'd taken Sally to a concert in Denver long before he asked me to say yes or no. "The concert was okay," she says, "but I thought he was dull."
"So did I! He was boring on the phone. But when we met in person, the chemistry took over."
She says she never felt any chemistry, and she did not have a date with Billy on the morning he left my bed at 9 a.m. Whomever he saw, it must have been a washout, because he called me three times after that. He did take Sally to a festival movie that night, then called me at 11:30 and asked to come sleep over, knowing he'd just made a date with her for breakfast the following morning. He was planning to repeat his morning exit-from-the-bed.
Did he tell you he was sleeping with me? I ask.
"Duh...no." Sally says, "But I had a creepy feeling about him, and I kept him at arms length--literally. I didn't want him to touch or kiss me." She says Billy urged her to come visit him in Lone tree, just as he'd urged me and probably urged Kitten Rourke. (Number 3)
"When I walked away from our last breakfast," Sally says, "I thought, fat chance I'm driving to Lone tree. I think match is full of guys like that - double D's --deceitful and dysfunctional." We discuss whether she should send that email she's been composing or just go silent - not reply to Billy's calls or emails.
"Part of me wants to let him know he can't get away with this shit," Sally says. "You know, he made me wear Kitten's name tag at the festival? He'd bought one pass for himself and one for his dates, and they all had to wear Kitten's tag because she'd gone with him the first night."
I can't believe she's a lawyer, with that name, I say. Let's google her.
Sally takes out the laptop she'd brought along and types in "Kitten Rourke." (not her real name, which is even more preposterous, trust me) Up pops a website with pictures of her all over it.
"Oh....my...God!" Sally says. "I can't compete with that! I mean, my body's in good shape but she looks like a porn star." (Interesting, isn't it? A moment before, Sally had said she wasn't interested in Billy and now she blurts that she can't compete.)
In the pictures, Kitten is tall and slender with the face of a classic American beauty and long blonde hair that's spiky on top. The skimpy dress she's wearing shows boobs like Dolly Parton's, and a tattoo of a snake runs around her bicep, biting its tail.
We click on her bio, which says she graduated from Harvard, then got a joint degree from Harvard Business School and Law School, started her own venture capital business, retiring in her thirties because she'd made millions. Then she became a free-lance adventurer, going on dangerous missions and writing a series of books about them: "Adventures of the Cat." She sailed in races and did long distance ocean swims between the islands in Hawaii.
"This sounds way fishy," I say. If she's for real, what's she doing on match? And why is she dating Billy? She should know lots of brilliant rich guys."
Sally says that Billy told her Kitten was moving from San Francisco to Boulder and had gone on match so she would have men to date when she arrived. Kitten told Billy that she'd received a thousand replies.
"I don't doubt that," I say. "This is every man's fantasy: a sexy bombshell who's smart and rich."
"And available," Sally says.
I can understand why Billy didn't want to let go of this fish.
I look up Kitten's books on the net -- they're issued by a publisher I've never heard of. Probably self published -- the sample chapters are amateurish.
The following day, I call the Harvard registrar, expecting to poke another hole in this balloon. I say I'm writing an article and want to confirm that Kitten Rourke graduated from Harvard College and obtained a joint degree from Harvard Business and Harvard Law School. An hour later, the registrar emails me: "The person in question attended Harvard College and did obtain a JD/MBA."
Damn. If everything she claimed was true, why was she advertising on match.com? It didn't compute. But then, neither did my trolling on the site.
That night in my house, though, before we've even found out that Kitten did go to Harvard, Sally and I hit the dark chocolate gelato for comfort. We wonder if we should warn Kitten about Billy. We'd like to post a Beware notice on match.com, but they don't let you post reviews of your dates. They should. We could contact Kitten through her website, but then she might tell Billy....
"I'm going to send that email to him," Sally says, typing it on her laptop. The final line is: "Please do NOT call or email me again."
She pushes Send. "There. That feels really good."
We relish the poetic justice: He plays the two of us off against each other, then we both dump him and become fast friends.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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This blog is based on a true story, but names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.