‘What?’ I squeak. ‘Here? Here at your house?’
‘No, in the shed,’ Oliver says sarcastically.
‘Where is he going to sleep?’ I ask, but my brain figures that one out for me a split second after I answer the question. ‘You’re letting him sleep in my room, aren’t you?’
‘Well, you don’t actually sleep in it, do you?’ my mum reminds me. ‘You live in your own flat. I assumed you’d be sleeping there before the wedding. You’re only twenty minutes away on the train.’
‘It’s still my bedroom,’ I say. ‘My childhood bedroom. I don’t want him in there.’
And when I did want him in there, I wasn’t actually allowed to have him in there, even though we were in our twenties, my parents have always been old-fashioned like that. This has to be some kind of horrible prank.
My mum stands up and begins clearing the table.
‘It’s just for a few days,’ she says as she heads for the kitchen. ‘I’ll fetch the pudding.’
‘A few days?’ I reply. ‘He’s staying here for a few days?’
‘The lad fancied a break,’ my dad tells me. He leans in to speak quietly to me, while my mum is out of the room. ‘Come on, it’s a few days, you don’t live here, you know your mum really liked him – she’s just doing the lad a favour.’
I fold my arms and slump down into my chair. I can’t believe it. I really can’t believe it. This is classic Lloyd, muscling his way back into my life the first chance he gets. There is no way he just wants to watch Flora and Tommy get married – he never liked them and they never liked him. I get why my mum is saying that Lloyd can stay here, because she always had a huge soft spot for him, and obviously she was never privy to the reasons why we broke up. She just thought it was the distance. I didn’t have the heart to tell her how intense Lloyd turned out to be after he moved back to Somerset.
My mum is just being my usual lovely mum, but Flora is something else. Her inviting Lloyd is definitely some kind of payback for me refusing to slim into a dress for her. She has no reason to invite him otherwise.
I notice my phone vibrating on the table so I snatch it up, hoping it’s something that isn’t going to annoy me.
Oh, it’s a Matcher message from someone called Chad. I tune out from Oliver attempting to explain to my dad how the media pit Nicki Minaj and Cardi B against each other (my dad has no idea who either of these people are) and lose myself in my phone.
A few taps on my iPhone tell me that Chad was the person I matched with earlier, before I swiped away the last available man in my area. That makes Chad the last man standing. My last hope – well, my last chance to find someone in time for this wedding, at least, if I drop the melodramatics for a second.
‘I know the answer to your riddle,’ his message states simply.
OK, I know it makes me sound like a big nerd, having a riddle in my Matcher bio, but, well, I am a big nerd and it’s important to show people that right off the bat, right?
Hello
I begin my reply.
Go on…
Almost immediately those three little dots appear, to show me that Chad is typing.
The riddle at the end of my bio says:
Jake Gyllenhaal has a long one. Brad Pitt has a short one. Drake doesn’t have one. What is it?
Well, I love puzzles, and I thought that was kind of a fun question – and not an overly difficult one. People tend to ignore it, or just ask me what the answer is. No one has been all that impressed yet.
He types back:
The answer is… a surname haha. Cheeky though, I like it.
Oh, not only does he get it, but he thinks it’s funny too. He asks:
What’s a nice girl like you doing on an app like Matcher?
‘I knew you’d come around,’ my mum interrupts, pulling my eyes away from my phone for a second.
‘Huh?’ I reply, looking up just in time to see her placing a cheesecake on the table in front of us. A homemade passionfruit cheesecake, which is one of my favourite desserts. She really has brought out the big guns to try and offset the damage from the Lloyd crap bomb that’s been dropped on me.
‘You’re smiling,’ she tells me.
‘Oh, I’m just on Twitter,’ I insist.
I must be grinning like an idiot at my phone. I punch back to Chad:
A nice girl like me was just about to give up on Matcher for good. What’s a nice boy like you doing here?
He replies almost instantly.
Saving you.
Damn. What a charmer. He continues:
Sounds like I arrived just in time. Give me tonight to message you my A-game and, if you like what you read, let me take you on a date tomorrow evening. What do you say?
‘What are you looking at?’ my dad asks me suspiciously.
‘Me? Nothing,’ I insist.
‘Something on that phone has you grinning like the cat that got the cream,’ he replies.
I shrug my shoulders. I’m hardly going to tell my dad I’m flirting with someone on a dating app, am I?
‘Just memes,’ I say.
‘Not the foggiest what that means,’ he says, but I don’t think he cares.
My mum hands my dad a cup of tea, which he proceeds to put down on the dining table.
‘On the coaster, on the coaster,’ my mum insists.
‘Bloody women,’ my dad mutters under his breath – while doing as he is told, obviously.
Naturally, this statement triggers Oliver, who calls my dad out for his sexist statement.
My phone buzzes again.
Cara?
Chad prompts me.
Wow, a double message, he is keen. I reply:
Sounds like a plan
He replies:
Great. Let’s see if we can’t find you your happy-ever-after.
That’s a kind of cheesy thing to say but I allow myself a moment of optimism. I know that I haven’t exactly been winning the dating game recently but maybe it was all for a reason, all to get me to this point, so that the last man on Matcher could ask me on a date. Now I really do feel as if I’m in a romcom movie. And this little glimmer of hope couldn’t have come at a better time, could it? Desperately in need of a plus one and on the verge of giving up on men altogether. I don’t want to get ahead of myself but, for tonight, I will allow myself to have a little hope. The right man for me has to be out there somewhere. Maybe this is him?
4
Sometimes I feel like a shape-shifter.
To get ready for my date with Chad this Friday evening, I did a whole bunch of things to transform the way I look. I know what you’re probably thinking: how can you expect anyone to love you if you don’t love yourself? But I do love myself – I just love myself even more when I dress up a little.
The thing is, I really want tonight to go well, and if making an effort helps my cause, then great. I’m sure my brother would be horrified at me, saying that I’m changing my appearance for a man, but this isn’t a bad feminist manoeuvre. I would hold men to the same kind of standard – if you’re going on a date, you should make sure you look good. It’s an attractive quality in a person: having pride in your appearance. Not in a superficial ‘everyone should be a 10/10 babe’ kind of way, because Lord knows I’m not that, but I know that I look far more attractive in a long black dress, a pair of tights that smooth out my curves a little, with my hair straightened and my cheeks contoured – compared to a Victoria’s Secret tracksuit, a messy bun (that somehow never looks like the kind you see on Instagram) and a face with all the angles of a potato. I say all this but, don’t get me wrong, I am completely comfortable with the way I look. This is me and I don’t feel like I need to change my body for anything, not for a bloke or a for a bridesmaid dress, but I like to dress up a little when I can. I even enjoy the ritual of getting ready to go out. I find the step-by-step process almost puzzle-like.
I look myself up and down in the mirror on the back of the lift doors – although it’s too late to change a
nything now I’m at the bar. I wear a lot of black – I don’t know why, I just feel more comfortable in it. Tonight I’m wearing a floor-length black dress. Just a soft, strappy, summery dress I picked up in H&M. It looks dressy or casual, depending on what you wear it with. To dress it up a little, I gave my make-up more of a night-time vibe – well, that’s what the YouTube video tutorial told me to do. To be honest, I feel like I’ve just gone on a little too heavy with my contour. In the brightly lit lift, staring into the mirror, my cheek and nose shading especially seems really severe.
I grab a tissue from my bag and blot at my face, attempting to tone it down a bit. I should have stuck with what I knew: contouring for beginners – at least I knew it worked.
Despite being on top of an office building, the bar is only accessible via a glass lift, which runs up and down the side of the building.
When the doors open I step out into the long, dimly lit corridor that leads to Thin Aire, a super-cool bar in Leeds city centre. I’m not really one for wild nights out – well, I don’t really have any proper friends here in the city, and my old school friends back home have all sort of outgrown me. But, since I’ve been playing the dating game, I’ve been to a few different places for dates. I haven’t been here before though and I can’t quite help but feel as if I don't belong here which only adds to my nerves.
Thin Aire is a rooftop bar overlooking the River Aire. It sits unbelievably pretty at the top of an eighty-metre-tall office block, and it’s almost entirely made of glass. The floor-to-ceiling, wrap-around glass windows allow for a panoramic view of the city. In fact, I can literally see my house from here.
‘Hello,’ a hostess greets me cheerily. I thought my contour was severe, but the hostess has me beat. I suppose it’s just what is trendy at the moment, isn’t it? My mum often runs a thumb over one of my eyebrows and laughs to herself about how big eyebrows are these days, but she’s from a different time, a time when it was cool to pluck your eyebrows into non-existence. After years of painful plucking, my mum couldn’t have big brows if she wanted to, not without getting them tattooed on. At least by embracing the trend I have lots to play with but, should smaller brows come back into fashion, I’ll be in trouble. I’m too lazy to keep on top of the plucking as it is. I am so lazy, in fact, that when I was getting ready for this date tonight, I realised I was cutting it fine and abandoned shaving my legs. The problem was I’d already done a third of the job. That’s why I’m wearing tights, even though it’s summer. Thankfully it’s a little cooler this evening.
‘Are you meeting someone for drinks?’ the hostess asks me.
‘Erm, yes, but I think I might be the first one here,’ I reply.
‘Table for two?’
She gives me a knowing smile. She must see people on dates all the time. Can she tell by my nervous disposition that that’s why I’m here?
‘Yes,’ I confirm, this time with a little more confidence. I’m not really a shy person but this just feels so awkward.
‘OK, come with me. I have a table for two free on the terrace.’
I follow the hostess out onto the wrap-around roof terrace. As soon as I step out onto the fake-grass flooring I feel the cool breeze creep over my skin and it feels glorious. I take a seat at my table and order myself a cocktail – something called a War of the Roses, picked in a bit of a hurry without really looking at the ingredients. A waitress brings it out to me and I still can’t tell you what is in it, but it’s delicious. Now all I need to do is wait.
I can’t help but think about my disastrous date with Matt the other night. You know, it might be my worst date yet. Maybe. The competition is stiff. Sure, turning up to a first date and finding out it’s actually a babysitting gig isn’t ideal, but is it as bad as Aaron, who was a solid decade older than the photo he was using on his Matcher profile? Or what about Felix, who seemed great at first, looking pretty dapper in a sharp black suit… but then it turned out that he was only wearing a suit because he’d met me immediately after his dad’s wake, at which he got absolutely hammered…
I’m not saying that there is something wrong with all men, and that I am absolutely perfect on a date, far from it. My first date with a guy called Chris took a horrible turn when I jokily mentioned that ‘coffee was my crack’ – my fun way of saying that I’m low-key addicted to it. When I asked what Chris’s crack was, he told me that until recently it was, well, crack. Crack-crack. Needless to say, Chris wasn’t impressed with my joke, which meant that I felt obliged to spend the rest of the night listening to him talk about being a recovering drug addict. I sure do know how to pick them.
I’d be tempted to say I have high hopes for Chad though, except while I’ve been thinking about my recent dating history, aimlessly scrolling through my phone and sipping away at my second anonymous drink, I’ve realised that Chad is forty-five minutes late. I thought it kind of poor form when I realised he was fifteen minutes late. By thirty minutes I started to panic but now that we’re at forty-five…
‘How’s it going?’ a man asks me.
‘Erm… Chad?’ I ask, although it certainly doesn’t look like Chad. From what I could gather from his photos, Chad was a skinny dude. There is no way this guy standing in front of me is the guy I saw in Chad’s photos. This guy is tall… really tall, like 6’ 2” or 6’ 3”. He’s wearing black trousers and a white shirt with, not one, but two buttons undone. He looks impossibly cool in that way you can't replicate. Some people are cool, some people are trying to be cool, and some people are just uncool. That’s it. And I'm in the third category. As far as I can tell, his chest doesn’t have a hair on it – unless he shaves it as I do my legs, which is only as far as the eye can see. He’s alarmingly buff – the kind of buff you only get from spending too much time in the gym. Gyms are these things I’ve seen in Instagram photos where people go to exercise. This guy must practically live there.
‘Not Chad,’ he says with a friendly but awkward laugh. He runs a hand through his longish, messy brown hair, which hangs down behind his ears. I can see his dimples as he smiles, through his stubbly beard. His brown eyes are almost impossibly dark, although that could just be because it’s so dimly lit here. He’s got a real Jason Momoa vibe about him. He’s also definitely not Chad, so God knows why he’s talking to me.
‘I just thought I’d come over and say hi,’ he explains. ‘Can I sit?’
He places a hand on the back of the chair next to me as he waits for the go-ahead to join me.
‘Look, no offence,’ I start, wracking my brain for the right words, because I’m not used to having to tell men to take a hike. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not interested. I’m waiting for my date, so…’
The last thing I need is for Chad, the last man on Matcher, to arrive and find me being chatted up by another man.
‘Look… he’s stood you up,’ the man tells me bluntly.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I reply. ‘If this is some kind of excuse to talk to me…’
‘Whoa, OK, hang on a minute,’ the man starts, chuckling to himself as he pulls out the chair next to me and sits down. ‘Do you think this is a chat-up line?’
I glance down at the seat I had asked him not to sit in, then back up to meet his gaze.
‘I’m not trying to pull you,’ he insists. ‘I… I felt sorry for you.’
I feel my face tighten with confusion.
‘You’ve been here a while now, you keep looking at the door, you look anxious as hell. You’re waiting for someone – probably a date.’
Right on cue, I notice the door open in my peripheral vision so I snap my neck in its direction, to see if it’s Chad walking through it. It’s just a gaggle of girls on a night out.
‘He’s not coming,’ the man tells me softly. ‘Has he messaged you?’
I’ve been keeping a keen eye on my phone and nothing has come through. I thought about messaging him, to see if he had been held up, but it’s drummed into us not to seem too keen, lest we spook the
men, so I decided to wait a little longer.
‘Well, no,’ I say. ‘But—’
‘So, unless the dude is dead in a ditch somewhere, he could have messaged you, right?’
I frown. This is stupid. And I’m not about to listen to some bloke who has been spying on me and has just stuck his nose into my business.
‘I haven’t been stood up,’ I insist as I load up Matcher. I’m a grown adult, not a game-playing teenager. I’ll just send Chad a message, make sure everything is OK. I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for him not showing up.
‘Oh.’
‘Oh?’
I feel my cheeks warming – boiling even. There’s no chance I’m not bright red right now, so no way I can style this out. I may as well be honest.
‘I guess I have been stood up,’ I admit. ‘He’s unmatched me… Unless, do you think he turned up, took one look at me and bailed?’
‘Absolutely not,’ the man insists. ‘You look great. It’s his loss. He sounds like a moron.’
I smile.
‘Why are you being nice to me?’ I can’t help but ask.
‘I am nice,’ he replies with a chuckle. ‘I was over there having a drink with my mates, you caught my eye, I twigged what was going on and thought I’d come and talk to you. To cheer you up or save you the embarrassment of sitting here alone. I’m almost offended you think I have some kind of ulterior motive.’
I feel bad, and kind of embarrassed for assuming he was hitting on me, when all he was really doing was taking pity on a girl alone in a bar.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ I insist. ‘I’ve met a lot of creepy men recently.’
I sigh heavily. I can’t believe I allowed myself to feel hopeful about tonight, about Chad. But these bloody men are all the bloody same.
The Plus One Pact Page 3