Working It Read Free Page B

Rosé-swilling female just yearning to catch this catfish. I am not that woman. No yearning going on here.
    Somehow, I keep the conversation going for another hour before offering a flimsy excuse about needing to be up early for an important meeting.
    Ethan looks genuinely disappointed, which perplexes me. There has been no connection here. Zero. I haven’t even felt the tiniest jolt of sexual electricity flowing between us. Is it possible he has?
    “I am so glad we did this,” he says, smiling. “I really feel a connection.”
    He stares at me. I stare back.
    What is wrong with me? Why aren’t I racked with guilt or suffering the pin-pricks of embarrassment?
    “I brought you a little something,” he says, reaching into his jacket. “A first date gift.”
    “Oh, that’s okay.”
    “It’s just a little something I made for you.”
    Please, please tell me he didn’t knit me a paintball jersey.
    He pulls out a folded square of papers, unfolds them, and hands them to me.
    I take the papers and stare at the images of two mutant looking children, a boy and a girl. They have big brown eyes—like those Japanese cartoon characters—and pouty expressions. The girl has a sharply angled asymmetrical bob, curiously like my own.
    I look at him, frowning.
    “They’re our children.”
    “Excuse me?” Bile bubbles up my throat.
    “I morphed your profile picture with mine.” He grins. “This is what our children would look like.”
    “What? How?” I drop the papers onto the table. “Why would you…?”
    My mouth suddenly feels dry and my thoughts fuzzy, like someone shoved cotton in my head, like I drank too much cheap pink wine.
    “I developed a software program that analyzes the genetic history and images of two people and digitally recreates their offspring.”
    “Morphing?”
    “Technically, yes. But Morphenetics is far more complicated than the average morphing software, which merely takes two shapes and morphs them into one image, often accomplished by utilizing cross-fading film techniques.” He leans forward, resting his arms on the table. “Morphenetics analyzes multiple faces, scans them for commonalities, and comes up with a complex mathematical algorithm that results in the creation of a new face. It’s a sort of digital DNA. Just as geneticists have been able to analyze and isolate DNA to detect the probability of a person inheriting certain diseases, my program analyzes and isolates facial DNA to detect the probability of a person inheriting a particular hair color, eye shape, moles, dimples—”
    “Wait a minute.You said multiple images. How were you able to come up with this”—I point to the image of the wide-eyed mutant girl-child—“ this if you only used my profile photo?”
    “I didn’t only use your profile photo. I used several of your photos, as well as photos of your father and cousins.”
    C'est quoi ce bordel?
    “I only loaded one photo onto the dating site.”
    Ethan grins. “I was able to access your Facebook photo albums and downloaded images of your family. You don’t have many pictures of your family in your albums. I couldn’t find one of your mother.”
    Ma mère.
    An invisible band tightens around my chest, violently pushing the air from my lungs. Several seconds pass before I am able to inhale.
    I am not sure what pisses me off the most: that this freaky little catfish accessed my personal photo albums, that he mentioned my mother, or that he exercised tremendous presumption in assuming I would ever want to commingle our DNA—sexually or digitally!
    I open my mouth to speak, but close it again for fear I will lacerate him with the full force of my sharp tongue. I don’t care that his software is being used by law enforcement agencies all around the world to track missing and abducted children. I don’t care that he was punctual, effusive in his compliment of my appearance, and eager to meet again. My skin is crawling. He could have said he was a foot-fetishist or