Our Stop

by Laura Jane Williams

  Romeo had come upstairs to Daniel’s desk on his break, after Daniel had sent him a series of texts telling him what happened at the screening the night before.

  ‘You can’t send me a text like that and not have me stage an intervention, friend,’ he’d said, appearing by his side. ‘What do you mean you lost her? How many opportunities are you willing to blow?!’

  ‘You weren’t in the lobby when I needed you!’ Daniel said, by way of response.

  ‘I had to go pee! Even security men get bathroom breaks!’ Romeo had said, exasperated. Then: ‘I can’t believe you wandered off because her ex-boyfriend was there. You coward! You’re better than that, man! You said yourself he was with somebody else.’

  ‘Nah man, she didn’t need an audience for that, did she?’ Daniel said, still trying to unravel why he’d bolted that way. Romeo was right, though: how many chances did he want to blow? Maybe it was panic. He’d once heard that the only thing worse than harbouring a dream was having that dream come true, because then, what was left to want?

  He simply couldn’t explain why he hadn’t loitered and waited for the guy to leave. Nadia was interested. He could tell. They hadn’t been able to look away from each other – at least not until they were interrupted. His heart had quickened, his brain had gone blank, he’d not done much other than grin like an idiot at her, but she had grinned back, letting whatever energy between them exist to do just that. Exist. He hadn’t held his breath in front of her, he’d exhaled. It was what he had been looking for. Inexplicably, he’d willingly walked away.

  Daniel’s face was serious. ‘I agree. I think you’re right. I think I should write to her. I just – I needed you to tell me it was a good idea, that’s all. And you’re telling me it is, so. That’s decided then. I will write, and this time won’t leave her waiting for me. We just have to hope she understands it’s meant for her, is all.’

  Romeo offered him a hand to shake.

  ‘My man. Tell her straight up: We spoke at Secret Cinema the other night, me in a waistcoat and you looking beautiful. I knocked your phone out of your hand, and I’m an idiot for not putting my phone number in it first. You get my train – the 7.30, at Angel. I think we might have written to each other before …’

  Daniel nodded along with every word Romeo said.

  ‘Great,’ he said, still nodding, amazed at how right Romeo seemed to get everything. ‘Yes! Perfect.’

  He moved the mouse to his computer and typed in the URL for Missed Connections submissions.

  ‘Now,’ Daniel said, fingers poised over the keys, ‘repeat what you just said?’

  Romeo pulled up a chair and cracked his knuckles. ‘Okay, boss,’ he said. ‘Start with this: We spoke at Secret Cinema …’

  43

  Nadia

  Nadia held her phone in her hand as the bus trundled down to Angel, where she would hop off and get the tube, like she did every day. Her instinct was to text Emma, but Emma was so absent that she didn’t think she could stomach the three-day wait that had eased itself into all communication with her. Instead, she pulled up Instagram to look at the photo Naomi had posted from the night before, ‘liking’ it and leaving three flame emojis underneath as a comment. Nadia screenshotted it, thinking she might post it too. It was right after she’d talked with that gorgeous guy in the waistcoat, and she had the look of trouble in her eye. Good trouble. She looked bright and fresh-faced and fun.

  Nadia scrolled through the other photos that had loaded: a friend from school was on vacation with her husband in Sri Lanka. Her cousin’s baby had crawled for the first time. Several Instagrammers had new skirts and shirts and boots and were reminding her that it would soon be Black Friday, so click the link in bio for the full collection and don’t forget to use the discount code!!! She scrolled past them all.

  Nadia stopped as she saw Gaby’s latest picture, a close-up of her at Soho House, which was interesting to Nadia because she knew that Gaby didn’t have Soho House membership. Of course, Emma did, and it was Soho House she’d seen them stumble out of that night they’d kissed. If Nadia looked close enough at the photo, a selfie taken in what looked like the bathroom, she could see what had been cropped out: beside where Gaby’s own hair fell was shoulder-length honey-coloured hair – Emma’s.

  A million unkind thoughts crept into Nadia’s mind. Logically, rationally, she knew her friends had a secret that of course they’d eventually tell her. But right now she was locked out of the world they were creating, whatever world that was, and mostly Nadia didn’t give two hoots if they were dating or sleeping together or in love – she just wanted her buddies back. She wanted to be part of the gang again. She wanted to be happy for them, but being iced out was costing her her happiness, so it made it really hard to be excited for them. Nadia was angry, and resentful, at being put in this position. They didn’t need her permission to do whatever it was they were doing, that isn’t what she meant. But damn if her two best friends hadn’t come together to form something that meant now she felt left out. And it really wasn’t her place to sit them both down and say what she’d seen. She believed that implicitly. It was no big deal and a total game-changer both at the same time, and not just because they were both women. Her friends were gay – at least for each other. So what! But two friends becoming more meant the dynamics shifted, and it meant that Nadia sat on the 73 bus looking at Instagram and making the very conscious decision to keep on scrolling, without hitting like or commenting, like she would normally have done, eventually uploading the photo of her and Naomi from last night, captioning it, My ride or die and I, as a pair of Capulets last night, adding in three love hearts afterwards and hashtagging it #girlsnightout

  Reviewing her work, and with the bus sitting in traffic, Nadia clicked on the geo-tag she’d put on the event – the marker that said what her location had been. It pulled up all the other photos that people had uploaded at the same location, and because she was bored, and mad, and above all else, nosey, she scrolled through a bunch of strangers’ photos, stopping only when she recognized a set of arms.

  Waistcoat Guy! she thought. Gah!

  He was handsome, the only one in a bunch of friends not looking directly to the camera, but looking off, just slightly, to something out of frame. Everyone he was with was attractive, and Nadia recognized the friend he’d been talking with too.

  The photo had been uploaded by a girl called @SabrinasLife, and from following through on her handle and scrolling down on her profile, Nadia could ascertain that she was in a relationship – married to, it looked like – one of the other guys. Waistcoat Guy was peppered in the odd group photo on her grid, mostly at what looked like kids’ birthday parties in the suburbs, and holidays to places where the sea was so blue it was turquoise.

  Nadia scrolled back up to the top of @SabrinasLife’s page and looked at the photo from the night before again. She tapped on it, and up came everyone’s tagged usernames. She clicked on that. Suddenly, she had a full window into @DannyBoy101’s life.

  He didn’t post often, and he never used captions or hashtags. There was a photo of him in a navy suit, stood next to what Nadia presumed was his mum, and a photo of him in the downstairs of Sager + Wilde, drinking a pint with his face half obscured by the glass. He’d photographed his feet by some train tracks, wearing trainers and coloured socks, and in the summer he’d been with a handful of mates in Oxfordshire, walking in the country fields and drinking pints in a pub garden.

  He’d recently read Michelle Obama’s memoir and had also photographed something at the Wellcome Collection. There was an old record of Frank Sinatra’s and a photo of the TV with The Lust Villa on. Inexplicably, there was a photo of the paper on a coffee table too, one day back in the summer.

  This is my kinda guy, Nadia thought. I like how he sees the world.

  Nadia continued to think about him all day. She wondered how to go about it all – how to somehow bump into him again. She could just DM him on Instagram, but was that a bit desperate?
What if that was a total turn-off for him, being tracked down on social media? If the shoe was on the other foot, Nadia wasn’t sure how she’d respond. She’d discovered him in an innocent enough way, but explaining that, even to herself, sounded a bit too Fatal Attraction. She didn’t want him to think she’d boil bunnies to get his attention. He was cute, but not that cute.

  Emma had once taught her about ‘The Secret’. It was based on the Law of Attraction, and Emma had tried to tell her that if a person changed their thoughts, they could change their life. Emma had been utterly convinced that’s why she’d been given the restaurant review column in the paper – that she had visualized it, and made it come true. Nadia had written it off as mumbo-jumbo before, but in this new context – the context of desperately wanting a cute man she’d talked to for five minutes to cross her path again – she chose to believe. All day she told herself, I am going to see this man again. Soon. This week. She tried to picture it: bumping into him at the gym, or on the train to work. Maybe that was a hangover from when Train Guy wrote to her. She still half-heartedly thought there was something staggeringly romantic about meeting somebody on the underground: two people coming from different places, going to different places, chance putting them in the same place at the same time for mere minutes.

  She wished she could tell Emma about it all. Especially when she walked into the gym space for her class that night, just as a friendly looking blond man left the changing rooms at the other side of the doors, and they both reached for the door handle at the same time.

  ‘Oh, pardon me, let me get that for you,’ the guy had said. He pulled the door open and let Nadia walk on ahead. She picked a spot towards the back of the room – over her dead body would she enter a middle row, let alone a front one – and threw down her water bottle and face towel. She stood to queue at the weights section to pick up her bar and a few dumbbells when they were called for, queuing behind the man who’d just held the door for her. He looked up and around at her.

  ‘Oh, hey again,’ he said.

  ‘Hey again,’ Nadia replied, slightly puzzled at his friendliness.

  ‘Can I pass you something?’ he said.

  Did he work here? she wondered.

  ‘Oh, you’re very kind. Yes. Sure. What about a pair of the sixes, and maybe of the eights as well.’

  The guy wore a gym vest and as he leaned across to pick up her weights his back muscles rippled and she stared too long. He caught her. He smirked.

  ‘There you go,’ he said, a pair in each hand.

  Nadia’s hands weren’t as big as his so he offered to follow her back to her mat. She walked ahead of him, self-consciously, wondering: was he flirting?

  ‘Thank you again,’ she said, and he put down her weights beside her water bottle and stood up, pulling himself up tall, shoulders back and neck elongated, and smiled broadly.

  ‘Any time,’ he said, winking at her. And then he was gone.

  Nadia had caught sight of herself in the studio mirror. She looked flushed and silly, and she was smiling. He walked in front of her to get to his own mat, smiling at her again, and Nadia felt self-conscious for the whole session.

  ‘Have a good one,’ he shouted across the room to her as she left, sweating and red-faced.

  Nadia had taken that class at least once a week for a year and never been hit on, but suddenly with the spring in her step of having flirted the night before, another man had flirted with her today. She wanted to tell Emma, ‘That was it! That was the law of attraction!’ She’d probably have been deeply suspicious of the guy helping her even two days ago. But with a different mindset came different reactions to the world. She believed romance was imminent, and so everything seemed more romantic.

  I’m going to see this guy again, she told herself, after she left the gym and walked halfway home before getting the bus, to get rid of her excess energy. I am. I am going to see Waistcoat Guy again.

  She had to tell somebody what was going through her mind, so she texted Naomi to see if she was about and arranged to call her when she got home, after her shower.

  ‘And I don’t mean to sound like a total stalker or anything, but … I found him on Instagram.’

  Nadia could hear Naomi raise her eyebrows. ‘You found the mystery man from last night on Instagram?’

  Nadia stretched out on her bed, wearing nothing but a towel. She’d got out of the shower almost an hour ago, but in between scrolling through @DannyBoy101’s Instagram (again), staring out of the window, and now talking to Naomi, she’d got no further than moisturizing her legs.

  ‘It was an accident! I was on the bus on the way to work, and I put up the photo of us, and tagged the location. And then I was bored, and so clicked the geo-tag thing, and it brought up all the photos of that night. And one of the top ones had him in it.’

  Naomi’s smirk was obvious even down the phone. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Sure.’

  ‘It’s true!’

  Nadia lazily lifted a leg in the air to examine it. She should have shaved them. They were overgrown and patchy: a crop of thick dark hair sprouted with impunity from behind her ankle.

  ‘I just – well, because he was wearing that stupid waistcoat thing, it caught my eye when I fell down the Insta-hole.’

  She stood up and made her way to stand in front of the mirror.

  ‘I saw his arms before I saw his face. His friend had tagged him in it. So I clicked on his handle. And then … I had a bit of a look.’

  She loosened her towel so she was naked and able to look at her reflection. She turned this way and that, examining herself, and then lifted an arm. She looked like Julia Roberts at the Notting Hill premiere: she’d forgotten to shave there, too. She wondered if she could pass it off as a political statement, not that anyone saw her armpits.

  ‘Well, you can’t message him,’ Naomi shrieked. ‘What would you say, “Hey! I eavesdropped on your private conversation and thought you were super emotionally mature and that’s my love language, and then you picked up my phone after knocking it out of my hand and it turns out you’re fit too. I tracked you down like Glenn Close to say: drink?”?’

  Nadia shrugged. ‘I mean … yes?’

  ‘Okay, no. No way. You are way above this. There must be another way! He was cute, darling, but not so cute that you have to act weird about it. What would you do if he messaged you on Instagram?’

  ‘I know,’ said Nadia. ‘I wondered the same thing. But also, hey! I literally cannot believe you are judging me right now. You don’t know what it’s like to be out there, single and looking! You’ve been with Callum for years. Don’t forget how rare it is to feel … the thing.’ Nadia lay back down on the bed. ‘I felt like I knew him! When he looked at me, it was like you or Emma or Gaby looking back. Dead familiar. Nice.’

  ‘Jesus. Calm down.’

  ‘Come on. I need your support here.’

  ‘Okay. So. You’re going to bump into him, this week. Just like that! As if by magic.’

  ‘No. Not by magic,’ Nadia admonished. ‘By the law of attraction!’

  ‘Great plan,’ said Naomi.

  Nadia replied, ‘Oh ye of little faith.’

  She was still dissatisfied with Naomi’s reaction after they’d said their goodbyes. Emma would have been much better at making her feel less crazy. She missed her. She played with her phone in her hands, turning it over and considering texting her. But to say what? Just hey?

  Hey friend – how you doing? she settled on, hitting ‘send’. She stared at the message, waiting to see if it was received, and then read. It wasn’t. Nothing appeared at the top of the screen to indicate that Emma was online and getting the texts. Nadia put her phone in a drawer and pulled on her pyjamas.

  ‘I’m going to see Waistcoat Guy again,’ she said aloud. ‘I just know it.’

  44

  Daniel

  Daniel was in a great mood – not only had he taken matters into his own hands with Nadia (again), but right before he’d left work, he’d had
an email to say that by this time next week, he’d officially be a home owner.

  ‘I did it,’ he told Romeo in the lobby on the way out. ‘The flat – it’s mine! We’re a go!’

  Romeo leapt up from where he sat behind the welcome desk.

  ‘That’s great, man – really, really well done!’

  ‘Thanks, dude.’

  Romeo looked wistful. ‘I hope me and Erika get to buy a place someday,’ he said. ‘That would be pretty sweet.’

  Daniel raised his eyebrows in shock. ‘Moving in together? I didn’t know it had got that serious!’

  Since the summer Romeo had been seeing Erika, a woman he’d met at a sourdough-bread-making class, and Daniel knew Romeo had fallen hard, but he didn’t know he was already planning a future with her.

  ‘I think it’s the real deal,’ said Romeo. ‘I could definitely put a ring on it. Not like, tomorrow, but for sure she’s a lifer.’

  ‘Well, damn, that’s great,’ Daniel said. ‘I tell you what – bring her to the house-warming party. You’ll love all my uni mates, and I can’t wait to meet her.’

  Romeo held out a fist.

  ‘Done and done,’ he said. ‘You’ve got yourself a date.’ He lowered his voice a little, for comedic effect. ‘Speaking of which – any word on when your note might run?’

  ‘No,’ Daniel said, slipping on his gloves as he felt a freezing November wind gust through the open door. ‘I’ve never known, though. They just sort of run it when they run it. It’s out of my hands now,’ he added, holding up his gloved hands in surrender.

  ‘Well,’ said Romeo. ‘The flat, the girl, it’s all coming up, Weissman.’

  ‘It’s all coming up Romeo and Weissman,’ Daniel corrected him.