Alexandre’s date withdraws sexual consent

Alexandre’s date withdraws sexual consent during an encounter organized through an app designed to document agreement. The scene makes revocability more than a safeguard written into a digital contract: after the date rejects a kind of kissing the app never specified, she cancels her consent and leaves. Alexandre accepts her decision, but his disappointment and the evening’s meticulous preparations expose how little a prior checklist can guarantee about desire as it unfolds.

The App and the Terms of Agreement

After swimming alone for an hour in the pool of his temporary Manhattan residence, Alexandre feels calm and wants sex. He connects to a new application intended to arrange and validate sexual encounters through informed, unequivocal consent. At the end of the process, the two participants are to establish an encrypted contract stored by the company; the app also states that either person can change their mind at any time.

Alexandre specifies that he wants to use a condom and permits explicit language, while refusing sadomasochistic practices and the exchange of photos or videos. His first proposed partner, a 25-year-old entrepreneur he met at a party, shares his preferences except that she does not allow explicit language. Worried that words he might use during sex could violate her limit, he abandons that proposal and sends another to a young analyst at a New York investment fund. Her profile accepts explicit language and the other practices he had initially excluded, including bondage and sodomy. The app reports that she has accepted his request.

The exchange establishes consent in advance as a set of distinct permissions, not as a single, unlimited yes. But the system’s precision also has a visible limit: it has not specified whether kissing with the tongue is acceptable. That unlisted act becomes the point at which the encounter’s agreed terms fail to predict the date’s immediate preference.

Preparation and the In-Person Encounter

Alexandre invites the analyst to his apartment, where he expects no more than two sexual encounters because the day has exhausted him. He tidies the room, sets out two condoms, showers, shaves his chest, and applies an expensive body cream he bought in SoHo. He notices a single dark hair on the white marble sink, removes it with a tissue, and flushes it. After disinfecting his hands, he waits for her with his phone in his shirt pocket. The sequence gives the evening the character of a carefully inspected presentation: cleanliness, grooming, provisions, and digital permission are all arranged in advance.

His date arrives in sportswear, confident in manner, and they sit in the living room. She begins talking about domestic politics and her hatred of Donald Trump; Alexandre wants to have sex rather than talk. She describes a reported instruction to deny wrongdoing in sexual-assault cases, but their conversation does not bring them closer. He approaches, lets down her ponytail, and kisses her, putting his tongue in her mouth. She immediately pulls back and tells him she does not like kissing with the tongue.

Alexandre registers that the app had not said whether tongue kissing was permitted. He considers what other acts she might accept, given that she had checked the option for all sexual practices, but the possibilities now seem to him to be narrowing. He gives her a few kisses on the lips without enthusiasm. The gap is not between a clear prior refusal and a deliberate violation of a stated rule: the specific boundary had not been entered in the app. Instead, her physical withdrawal and spoken dislike supply information that the checklist did not contain, and the encounter changes at that moment.

Cancellation and Departure

When the date says she is thirsty, Alexandre goes to the refrigerator for rosé and coconut water, the latter consistent with her profile identifying her as vegan. He places cherry tomatoes, olives, sausage, and a knife on a tray. While he is in the kitchen, his phone vibrates: she has cancelled her consent with a click. The narrative connects the timing to the failed kiss without claiming certainty about her reason.

Back in the living room, he finds her seated on the sofa with her handbag on her knees. She says she is sorry and too tired. Alexandre tells her he understands. She looks at the sausage and starts to cry; she explains that work is pressuring her, that missing her Kundalini yoga class has added to the day, and that she should go home. She apologizes again. The explanation belongs to the date’s account of her state; the cancellation itself does not require her to prove a reason. She leaves, and the door closes behind her.

The app’s provision that consent may be withdrawn at any time is therefore not merely theoretical: the date invokes it during the evening, before sex takes place. Alexandre does not try to override the cancellation or prevent her departure. The scene nevertheless records his frustration alongside her change of mind, making the practical force of revocability coexist with the awkwardness, disappointment, and emotional uncertainty of an encounter that cannot be resolved by the app’s earlier approval.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

Once she is gone, Alexandre lies on the sofa, pours himself wine, eats a slice of sausage, and removes her from his contacts. He then posts a photograph of himself being applauded by investors, tagged with expressions of success, happiness, gratitude, and positivity. The polished public image follows an evening in which the anticipated intimacy has collapsed; the contrast makes the post read as a performance of well-being rather than a record of what has just happened.

Yasmina Vasseur adds a yellow heart to the photograph. Alexandre interprets the color as a sign that she wants to remain friends, notes that he has not heard from her since the trial, and blocks her account without looking at it. He takes a sedative, curls up, and searches for sleep. The date’s departure thus precedes another refusal of connection, this time one Alexandre imposes himself, and the episode closes on his isolation rather than on the successful transaction the app appeared to promise.

The scene’s central contrast is between formal authorization and lived encounter. The app records preferences, provides an encrypted contract, and explicitly preserves the right to change one’s mind; it cannot anticipate every gesture or turn consent into a guarantee of desire. The date’s withdrawal is decisive, while Alexandre’s preparations and his disappointment show the limits of treating intimacy as something that can be fully specified in advance. The episode also links this failed encounter to the book’s wider concern with performance: the carefully groomed body, the app’s selectable terms, and the triumphant social-media post all offer controlled versions of the self, while the evening leaves Alexandre alone with a less manageable reality.