Jules was handsome, charismatic, a natural attention magnet. People flocked to him, drawn in by his charming personality, his confidence, his easy, casual demeanor. Or, well, they would, he was pretty sure, if he didn't live out in Bumfuck Nowhere, where the most interaction he got (outside of his best friend and arguing with his parents about the environment) was conversing with passing tumbleweeds.

So he did the next best thing, which was install Tinder and set his search radius to as wide as possible. The result? Mostly disappointment. But also the occasional hookup. Followed by disappointment. A lot of his matches close enough for hooking up were people not quite as at peace with themselves as Jules was, and honestly, he wanted to have a good time, not be a therapist.

"This is the worst," he complained to the walls of his room, swiping through a frankly depressing series of profiles. "Look at this photo angle. Dude looks like he has a septuple chin. Why do so many people not have a good sense of photography? How hard is it to not take a photo from above? Is it really that hard? Also, what is this this girl's foundation? Do people not know their own skin tone?"

The walls, of course, had no answers, but Jules felt better anyway.

And then, his phone pinged with a new match, and he almost dropped the stupid thing. "Oh my goth," he whispered, staring at the screen. This was, by far, the profile he'd been the most interested in—and the only one that wasn't, like, ninety miles away. "Oh my stars. My heart. My everything. Okay. Be cool Julien. Be cool. Chill. Frosty."

"Howdy," he typed, instantly regretting it. "Please don't unmatch me. It's just, you know, I have the cowboy thing going? And, I mean, I thought that would be appropriate. And cool. It probably wasn't very cool. But it was thematically accurate. I think. Also, hi. Please don't unmatch me. Wait, I already said that."