Forward Slash by Mark Edwards, Louise Voss

worked for. She picked up her phone and called the direct number listed for him on their site, which – unsurprisingly at 5.12 a.m. – went straight through to voicemail: ‘
Hi, this is Shaun Blackman, leave me a message, but please be aware that I’m away on annual leave until July the thirtieth so won’t be able to—’
Amy hung up.
    So she had to rule out Shaun Notthesheep. He couldn’t be the hot date. He’d been tweeting from Toronto all weekend, where he’d met ‘an awesome babe’.
    Still, at least that was one less guy to worry about.
    Finally, she Googled Daniel Bentick. There were lots of results, as always, but none of them actually seemed to relate to the man she was looking for. She checked Facebook and looked through the profile pictures. He wasn’t on there. Just her luck to be trying to track one of the few people on the planet without a Facebook account. He wasn’t on Twitter either, nor LinkedIn. She scoured a few other social-networking sites but there was no trace of him.
    She spent ten minutes clicking through Google’s search results, but it was as if Daniel Bentick didn’t exist – except on CupidsWeb.
    She got up and paced the room, patting Boris as he trotted up to her.
    ‘What to do?’ she said, looking out at the garden, thinking the lawn needed mowing, adding it to yet another list in her head, filing it away for later. She felt calm, almost able to ignore the unease gnawing at her gut. Every few seconds, when she wasn’t absorbed in something else, she felt the urge to check her phone for a message from Becky.
    An idea came to her. Sitting back at the laptop, she logged on to CupidsWeb again, checked when DannyBoy had last been online (last week – good, so his membership was probably still current) and spent the next thirty minutes setting up a profile for herself and paying for the minimum membership package – one month. Annoyingly, although you could browse profiles and see when potential matches had emailed you, you couldn’t read the message or send your own message without taking out membership. She felt butterflies as she did it. She needed to use her real picture just in case she had to meet up with Daniel Bentick. But she used a fake name: Sarah Jones. A hard name to check up on. She wrote a description of herself, mixing up real things that she liked, such as dogs and indie music, plus some stuff she thought might appeal to Daniel – the same things he had listed as liking: theatre and scuba diving. She even found a photo of herself on a dive she and Nathan once went on in Kefalonia, cropped Nathan out, and added it to her profile pictures.
    Then she clicked on to DannyBoy’s profile. She hit Private Message and pondered for a short while before typing:
    Hi
    I’ve just been checking out your profile. I love diving and theatre too. My diving photo was taken in Greece – my first ever. Didn’t see many fish, though, but I definitely got the diving bug! Where’s the best place you’ve been diving?
    You look really hot in your pic. Seems like we live quite near each other too. Send me a message if you want to connect.
    Sarah x
    She hesitated for just a moment – was she doing the right thing? – then hit Send.

8
Him
    Thinking about Katherine gives me a strange taste in my mouth – metallic, like blood, and my head throbs when I picture her. She makes me want to defile someone.
    She thought she was so special but she was ordinary in every way, from her shoulder-length hair to her size-twelve body, from her average wage to her median IQ. True, her appetites were stronger than most women’s – to an unseemly degree. Cock-hungry, mum would have said. A slut. I’ve trawled the profiles of so many just like her.
    All of which made it infuriating when I realized she was going to be a problem. That she could spoil things by poking her pointy nose in where it wasn’t wanted and asking for it to be bitten off.
    I decided I had to remove the risk and deal with