“Fine. Get me the details, and I’ll do this silly dating app piece. Pretty shitty to come off some major investigative journalism to writing a sappy ‘looking for love’ article, though.”
“That’s showbiz.”
Adriana groaned and left, resisting the urge to crumble up the paper in her hand and toss it. She could just quit, but where would she go? Options for shifters were limited. Her only other option would be to move into the human world of reporting, and that sounded like a death sentence at the hand of utter boredom.
Now, here she was, signed up on a meat market as an Omega. Her assignment was to do a piece with a positive spin on the benefits of Omegas seeking a mate online. Not only did she have no interest in finding a mate, but she had no respect for the Omegas of her species. They lacked ambition and drive; instead, they were perfectly happy to wait on some Alpha hand and foot and spit out large litters on demand. It was archaic and fueled by misogyny. Hiding her Beta tendencies to fool an Alpha was going to be a hard sell, but she loved a challenge. At least there was a little bit of intrigue to be had. Would an Alpha be able to see through her farce?
She sat down at her kitchen table and began flipping through the bios of Alphas on the site, making notes about a few of them as she went, simply swiping left on others. She spoke aloud to herself as she examined what there was to offer, sometimes even laughing at the absurdity of certain profiles.
“Too lazy to even finish their profile,” she muttered about a few.
Looking for a real woman.
“Cliché.”
“Gym rat,” she observed about far too many who looked like they spent their every waking hour lifting weights. Yeah, they were buff, but where were their necks? Did they have zero other interests?
“Incompatible,” she laughed, looking at profile after profile of men who were openly bitter about past relationships or overly misogynistic with their list of criteria for a mate.
She had already perused some of the female profiles in an attempt to determine the best way to set hers up. How could a man in this day and age only be interested in a woman “looking for a mate who wants to start immediately on a family and care for the household.”
It seemed foreign to her, but as she looked through the site a bit more, she found that it wasn’t so far off the mark, after all. There were plenty of men looking exactly for that type. She could understand it if it were still the eighteen hundreds when there were loads of shifter wars and it was important to keep up numbers, but this was 2020. Why did so many still subscribe to such an antiquated mindset?
Of course, her article would be more well-rounded if she did go out with a few of these types, but she just couldn’t wrap her head around it just yet. For now, she’d stick with someone she might have some common interest with. It couldn’t hurt to have a bit of fun while she was stuck in this nothing-burger of an assignment.
She swiped right on several choices she deemed possibilities. She’d chat with them a bit more if they responded in kind. One of them seemed particularly appealing. He was in shape, but not like the Dave Batista wannabes she had passed by. He said he owned a construction business and liked to work with his hands in his shop. There was something about his dark hair and eyes that drew her in, a mix of sex appeal and earthiness. She swiped right and called it a day, making a note of the half dozen men she’d shown interest in so far.
As the week unfolded, she began getting responses. Chats with two of them revealed that they were nothing like the men they tried to portray themselves as on the app. One was obviously a Catfish. She put a star by his name, interested in that facet of online dating for the article. She swiped right on a few more as the days passed, eventually making dates with several. By Saturday, she had her first date with one of them, a man who said he was a small business owner.
“Adriana?” he said as she stepped into the restaurant where they had agreed to meet for dinner.
She looked toward the man who stood up from the waiting area and smiled. “Carlos?”
“Yes. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“You as well. Should we get to our table then?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said, seeming a bit surprised that she had taken the lead right out of the gate.
She made a quick mental note to tone down her borderline Alpha behavior while posing as an Omega. Carlos was already a no go. He looked at least a decade older than his photo. She was guessing it was from when he was actually twenty-eight, the age he had listed on his bio. Carlos was definitely pushing forty.