Kissing Frogs

by Tori Turnbull

  “No.” Silence descended and dragged.

  Ding. What felt like two weeks later, the bell sounded. I leapt from my chair like a runner from the starting blocks, ticking no, no, no through all the questions about whether I would like to see him again and writing Deathly dull and, lest I forgot, Dead mother in the comments box as I walked to the next table and man.

  I cast a quick look back at Archie and watched him scribble something in the rude and disrespectful column. Creep. I hadn’t said half of the things I was thinking. No doubt he’d tell on me for asking the forbidden questions, too.

  “You’re not here.”

  I slumped back, shifting against the uncomfortably hard seat and frowned, looking around. Okay, I could be mistaken, but I was pretty sure here was exactly where I was. I gave a tentative smile. “Is this one of those ‘the universe is just a speck of dirt under the fingernail of a giant’ theory of existence questions, Shaun2!?”

  Ugly-faced Thor – his looks deteriorated when his snippy personality was added in – who hadn’t been talking to me at the bar earlier looked at me like I was an idiot. “You have to go to every other table. There isn’t time for you to go to every table. Didn’t you listen to the rules?”

  Nope. Huffing out a sigh, I moved to the next table. Who knew there were so many rules to speed dating?

  “Jeez, all boobs and no brain,” I heard him mutter behind me.

  “Hi, how’s it going?” Warm brown eyes shone as I tentatively pulled out the seat at the next table opposite a short, cuddly Jason Statham lookalike. From the lines fanning around his eyes, he seemed to be laughing at the whole speed-dating scenario and inviting me to join in.

  I liked him on sight. The tension gripping my chest eased and I smiled back. I dropped into the chair with far more speed then grace, tugging up my bodice as my boobs made yet another a bid for freedom.

  “Not great. I just got told off by Archie for asking what he did for a living, and by the blond twat at the table next to you for not rotating correctly.” I said it loud enough that Ugly-Face could hear, and once again caught furious scribbling in the rude box of someone’s card.

  My date laughed, a warm, rich sound. “Ah, you didn’t listen to the instructions either, huh? Barbie, the big-breasted American blonde” – he tipped his head to the right, indicating the woman who’d just rotated from his table and was currently getting friendly with Mark – “just kindly informed me that I’m not allowed to ask whether she’s marking me as a yes in the ‘would you like to see this person again?’ section.” He put on the worst American accent I’ve ever heard as he mimicked her, and I fell a little in love. Any man who didn’t like Barbie was my kind of man. “Apparently Natalia explained the rules quite clearly.”

  “Archie said I could ask him about his holidays or his hobbies. Only it seems his mother died, so he didn’t go on holiday, and his hobby is role play… The type where grown men dress up as dwarfs, or gnomes, or something. As if this isn’t awkward enough, what the hell can you ask?”

  “You’ve got me, Hate!” he said. “Though Barbie kindly informed me what I couldn’t ask before she left.” He lifted a hand and started ticking off the rules on his fingers. “No asking for a phone number.” He touched his little finger as he made the point before moving on to the next finger. “No asking whether someone is marking you ‘yes’, no talking about work – that includes how much money someone earns – and no asking someone out.” He frowned and lapsed into his natural Midlands accent. “I don’t really understand that. What’s the point of speed dating if you can’t ask someone out?”

  “You’ve got me, Damien666. Cool name, by the way.”

  “Thanks. You too, Hate!”

  “Yeah, it’s actually Kate.”

  He leant forward, elbows braced on the table. “Rumour has it you are allowed to ask about criminal records now. They didn’t used to let you, but apparently someone got attacked by their ‘date’, so now they do.”

  I choked, sending a fine mist of martini over Damien. “Sh-hit!” I coughed. Oh my God, that was embarrassing. My first good date and I’d just martini-spat on him. “I am so sorry.”

  He shrugged. “No problem.” He used his sleeve to wipe his face without making a big deal of it. He was getting closer to perfect with every action. “No doubt it absolves the organizers from liability, too.”

  “Still, I’ll add it to my questions on hobbies and holidays, and the answer might fill in a couple of minutes.” I took another sip of my drink. “Have you got a criminal record, Damien?”

  “Nope, totally clean sheet.” He smiled. “You?”

  I thought it over. Lie or truth? I liked him, he didn’t seem like the judgmental type, and if this went as well as I hoped, I wouldn’t want to start anything on a lie, so I decided on truth. “Does a caution count?”

  “Hmm, I like bad girls.” Damien laughed, the skin around his warm brown eyes crinkling with amusement. “What was it for?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “We’ve got about four minutes left. Just hit the high points.”

  “There weren’t any. I pressed the emergency stop button on the escalator in the Underground station and tried to short-circuit some digital advertising posters.” I didn’t go into the fact they were posters advertising for a date with me.

  “And they called the police? I thought they’d just chuck you out for that.”

  “The woman who worked there was an unsympathetic cow.”

  “Well, Kate, I can tell there is more to this story. Now, I wouldn’t count a warning, especially not for something like that, but I’m verging on desperate. I haven’t had a date since I moved to London eight months ago.”

  “And you call that desperate? You could multiply it by two and it would still fall short of my last date.” I discounted the poster date, pub pick-up, and – of course – lunch with TJ and Mark.

  “Desperate times, huh? Word of advice from someone who understands desperation: don’t ask the criminal record question. Not unless you want your date to ask it back.”

  I pushed my empty glass out of the way and slumped against the table. “It’s hard work, this speed-dating thing. I thought short dates with a captive audience of equally desperate men would be easier than doing it the old-fashioned way.”

  “Me too.” He sighed mournfully.

  “I guess we just have to make the best of it.”

  “So,” Damien said, “what do you do to relax?”

  I gave up trying to impress and went for the truth. “Since I started dating, I drink.”

  His lips twitched, eyes shining with amusement. “My kind of woman. If only you were blonde and a foot shorter.”

  He’d subtly friend-zoned me. “And you didn’t have a Birmingham accent and were a foot taller with a full head of hair.”

  “Ah, the fun we could’ve had.” He laughed. “I guess we’ll just have to settle for being friends. You want another drink to help see you through this, Kate?”

  More than my next breath.

  Chapter 7

  They say dating is a numbers game. So, can I get your number?

  Five minutes later, I crossed the hall, weaving through the tables of seated male daters as they scribbled away at their feedback forms, exchanging nervously excited smiles with the other female daters as we all headed to our next date.

  Thankfully, this was an easy date for me. I didn’t have to worry about whether he thought I was attractive, or how to deflect questions about my criminal history, or think of questions to generate discussion. It was just Mark, and he’d already promised to write nice things about me.

  “Just skip us…” Barbie, the bitch who’d given my new BFF Damien666 a hard time earlier and had been fawning all over Mark for the last ten minutes, waved a scarlet-manicured hand at me in a shooing gesture and spoke without looking away from him.

  Who the hell did she think she was dismissing? “Move on, blondie. The rules apply to everyone,” I snapped. “You want mor
e time? Put him down for a real date. I paid for my ten minutes and I’m damn well going to have them.”

  Mark choked on a laugh. “I’ll see you later, Barbie. We don’t want to upset Natalia – or” – he checked out my wrinkled nametag, chuckling – “Hate! by ruining the flow of dates.”

  She leant towards him, touching his arm, and gave a tinkling laugh. “I’ll see you in the bar afterwards.” She held his gaze, then moved her hand from his arm to touch the low neckline of her dress.

  Ick. I rolled my eyes at her obvious manoeuvres, then hip-checked her from the chair and slumped down in front of Mark.

  “Enjoy your next date,” he told Barbie.

  She gave him a look of sympathy. “I wish I could say the same to you, Mark. Stay strong. Ten minutes isn’t that long.” Babs – the bitch – walked off, her heels clicking on the laminate flooring.

  “She’s wrong.” I turned to him. “Ten minutes can feel like forever. You should be glad you’re a man and didn’t have to date Archie.”

  “You’re not having a good time?” He sounded genuinely surprised.

  “They should rename this speed hating.” With the exception of Damien666. “At least then people would know what they were getting into. You don’t know how relieved I am to be here for the next ten minutes.”

  He laughed. “If I’d known you were so keen to date me that you’d chase off the competition, I’d have arranged something much more enjoyable for us both.”

  “I’m not in the mood for your jokes.” I knew I wasn’t in his league, like Barbie was.

  “It wasn’t a joke.” I didn’t acknowledge his comment, just picked the olive out of my martini and waited for him to change the topic. “Things aren’t going well?” he asked.

  I glanced up from my drink, sighing. “His mother died.”

  “Whose?” He looked around, confused.

  “I already told you that bit.” I was pouring my heart out here and he wasn’t even listening. “Keep up.”

  “Right. A death in the family. I can see why that might make things difficult… Remind me who we’re talking about, here?”

  “Archie!” I gave up. It was taking too much effort. “You seem to be enjoying yourself, and so do your dates.” I couldn’t help that my tone was envious; things weren’t going as well for me. So far, the best date I’d had had friend-zoned me, Archie had been horrendous, and Ugly-Face Thor, who wasn’t even a date, was mean.

  “I am.” He squeezed my fingers sympathetically, leaving his hand covering mine on the table. “It’s not every day a guy gets to go on a date with a beautiful woman. No you don’t,” he said swiftly, his hand tightening on mine. “I can see from your face you’re going to say something I don’t want to hear.”

  I gave up trying to tug my hand back. “Whatever.”

  “We could always blow this joint and go get dinner.”

  “So, you can hold the fact I failed over my head and put the video ads up? No thanks.” I heard laughter from a couple of tables over. Ugly-Face seemed to be having a great time with his latest date. “Git.”

  “KT.”

  “What? He was mean to me first.” Mark did the irritating eyebrow-raise thing. “He said I was all boobs and no brain.”

  “Honey, those boobs would be hard to top, no matter the size of your IQ. They’re pretty spectacular, but anyone who knows you knows you have a brain too. You’re an accountant.” He huffed out a sound of amusement. “I certainly didn’t see that coming when we were kids.” He shook his head. “Didn’t you want to be a model or actress or singer?”

  I smiled at the memory. “A country singer.”

  “What happened?”

  “Unfortunately, there isn’t much call for country singers in the UK. Plus, I had to grow up, find somewhere to live and a way to pay my bills.”

  “Do you gig at night or on a weekend?”

  “No. Can we talk about something else?” It was depressing to think about all things I wanted to be and do. Unsurprisingly, being an un-datable accountant had never been on the things-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up list.

  He sighed, shaking his head. “Come on, then, let’s make the most of our remaining minutes together. Ask me your best speed-dating question.”

  “If you could only have one type of sex for the rest of your life, what would it be?”

  Bugger. It.

  Not again.

  It just popped out my mouth without conscious thought.

  Didn’t I know any other questions?

  His eyebrow hitched and his eyes lit, the only sign that he’d heard me. To his credit, he didn’t say I couldn’t ask the question and gave the answer some thought. “Six, sixteen, twenty-three–”

  “What?” It sounded like he was ordering off a takeaway menu. The only sexual number I knew was sixty-nine.

  “Have you ever read the Kama Sutra?” Oh. Wow… I was so googling those numbers when I got home later.

  The silence stretched as I tried to guess what positions the numbers correlated to, images filling my mind. I felt hot. Very hot.

  “You okay there, KT? You’re looking a little flushed.” I snapped back to the present at his smug tone. It was Mark. I was imagining naked Mark doing a sixteen… on me! Even though I had no idea what a sixteen was. What the heck was wrong with me? Surely, I wasn’t so desperate that I was getting hot for Mark?

  I blinked, and my mind flashed back to my kitchen: a drip of water ran down his chest, snaking over the ridged muscle of his abs… My eyes popped open.

  Bloody hell! I was that desperate. “Is it hot in here? I’m hot.” I took a large gulp of my drink, feeling flushed, then sat in the silence, growing increasingly uncomfortable until he took pity on me.

  “Tell me who you think’s going to win X Factor this year.”

  I talked him through the competitors, dismissing the pretty little boy who couldn’t sing and the ubiquitous person with a sob story (although they’d thankfully cut back on that in recent years), warming up to this whole dating thing. It’d been a while, that was all, but it was just like riding a bike: a little bit uncomfortable at first, but once you picked up speed, it was fine. “What made you come back to England?”

  “I just wanted to see you, I guess.”

  I huffed out a laugh. “Yeah, right.”

  He smiled. “I finished up working in Wall Street shortly before the latest market crash. I travelled for a while. Did some charity work.”

  I snorted. The Mark I knew of old didn’t do charity… he tortured young girls (me) and spent hours in his room playing on his computer.

  “Then decided I had the money to follow my dream to write a novel, and I could do that closer to home and” – he paused – “close to you.” He shrugged at my look of disbelief. “Perhaps I consider you my muse. Are you going to admit you’re starting to like my being here?”

  What was his game here? Head tipped to one side, I checked him for signs of deceit. I didn’t see any, so spoke the truth, cautiously. “Maybe you’re starting to grow on me.” He gave a smug smile. He was cocky enough without me adding fuel to the fire. I added, “A little bit.” He laughed. “If I am your muse, does that mean you’ve put me in your book?”

  “You’ll just have to wait and see.”

  Ding. I glanced around in surprise as the bell sounded.

  “There. That wasn’t so bad, was it? We had plenty to talk about,” he stated with satisfaction.

  “I did with you,” I agreed. “You’re easy to talk to. I know you. I’m not trying to impress you. But how do you think of questions to ask other people?”

  “I just ask them what I want to know. Unlike you, I actually like people. I like dating.” I stared at him blankly. “That said, even I would work up to the sex question. I don’t want to cramp your style, but it’s probably second- or third-date territory. Here, I think you probably need this more than I do.”

  I started down at the printed list of ten questions. “Where did you get this?”

  “
Natalia gave it to me when we were chatting before things started. Usually she likes to give them to everyone, but her co-host has them and she’s stuck in the Underground due to some sort of tube failure, so we’re having to run without them tonight.”

  “You aren’t,” I muttered.

  He shrugged. “She gave me hers. I’m giving it to you.”

  “Thanks. It might not be much consolation, seeing as you lost your extended date with Barbie the big-boobed blonde, but you’ve been my second-best date tonight.”

  “Second?”

  Natalia clapped her hands like a teacher getting the attention of a primary school class. “Time for break, everyone. This will allow you to mingle with each other, maybe chat with a few of the people you won’t have time to date tonight.” Her pitch rose, with false joviality. “Don’t forget: if at the end of the night there’s anyone you didn’t manage to date tonight, but who you’d like to see again, note it in the comments section of your card.”

  I signalled to Kanchan, who was closer to the bar, to get the drink order in.

  A few minutes later, we made it through the milling people to the bar. “Did you manage to get me a drink?” I said as soon as I reached her.

  “Are you going to introduce me to the hottie?”

  “Wha…? Who…?” I followed her line of sight. “Oh. Kanchan, this is my–”

  “Friend,” Mark cut in, whilst I tried to remember what I was and wasn’t allowed to call him.

  “I was going to say handyman, but as you say, Kanchan, this is Mark. He’s a friend of the family.”

  “A handyman? Now, that I can believe.” She gave him a playful look, her body vibrating with energy. She was wearing her best dating outfit, her petite frame wrapped in a red body-con dress that brought out the tan of her skin and made her shoulder-length black hair shine with vitality. “Have you worked on fixing Kate’s spin cycle yet? She’s been a little out of sorts lately.”

  “Kanchan! He’s just doing a bit of DIY around the flat.”