When Polly Met Olly

by Zoe May

  We link arms and stagger across the bar – the shots having caught up with us – giggling away, when all of a sudden, I look over and see Olly eyeing me with a curious, unreadable look.

  ‘Oh shit,’ I mutter under my breath.

  ‘What?’ Gabe asks, before spotting Olly, who is now only three or four metres away. Somehow, we’ve ended up drunkenly dancing towards him. I force a polite smile.

  ‘Hello Polly,’ Olly says in an oddly distant voice, his eyes roaming from me to Gabe.

  ‘Hi, how are you?’ I ask, nervously, even though it was only a few hours ago that we said goodbye.

  ‘Good, and yourself?’ he asks the question with a raised eyebrow as though passing judgement on my inebriated state.

  ‘Great. Just having a few after work drinks,’ I say, with an awkward laugh.

  ‘Yep, after work drinks,’ Gabe chimes in. I shoot him a look and see his pupils are dilated to the point that his brown eyes appear almost black – the way they look whenever he gets drunk. The shots have clearly gone to both of our heads.

  ‘And are you a chartered surveyor too?’ Olly asks Gabe, with a sceptical tone.

  Sanjay is standing by watching the encounter with a completely bemused expression on his face. Please, please don’t say anything. Please don’t blow our cover, I silently urge him.

  ‘Oh yes. I’m a chartered surveyor. Yep!’ Gabe insists.

  I slip my arm under his, clamping him to my side in an attempt to lead him away from Olly.

  ‘We should go,’ I mutter.

  ‘So you work together then?’ Olly asks.

  What is up with him? Why can’t he just say hi and bye? What’s with all the questions?

  ‘Oh yes. Long day at the office. Just been chartering those surveys,’ Gabe comments, his lips twitching as Sanjay catches his eye.

  I glare at him. Chartering those surveys?! What the hell?!

  ‘Yep, long day!’ I mutter, pulling Gabe away before this gets any worse.

  ‘Right.’ Olly frowns. ‘I thought you worked on Staten Island. Long way to come for after work drinks?’ he says, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘Yes, well, we just love Milano’s! Anyway, got to go, bye!’ I pull Gabe away, who has now crumpled into laughter, and shuffle out of the bar, praying that I never see Olly Corrington again.

  ‘Wait!’ Olly says. He reaches forward and places his hand on my arm, before stepping forward into our path.

  Gabe giggles at my side but Olly ignores him, choosing instead to fix me with an oddly intense sobering look. His eyes are questioning, perplexed and vulnerable. There’s an openness in them now that we’re not in his office and he’s not trying to sell me something. Up close, his face is even more attractive than it looked from across his desk earlier. The crows’ feet around his eyes make him look sensitive and mature, almost thoughtful. His hand is still resting on my forearm and I’m acutely aware of his touch. I glance down at his fingers and he quickly lets his hands drop.

  ‘Who are you, Polly?’ he asks, his eyes boring into me. They’re so penetrating that I can’t bring myself to lie. I’m not Polly Wood, a chartered surveyor from Staten Island, that’s obvious to both of us, and yet I can’t tell him the truth: that I’m working for To the Moon & Back. I can’t betray Derek like that.

  ‘Umm…’ I squirm, breaking eye contact and glancing down.

  ‘You’re not a chartered surveyor, are you?’

  I can’t bring myself to look at him. I know I don’t have my wits about me right now to keep the act up.

  ‘Why did you lie when you came to see me today?’ Olly asks.

  I look back up and his eyes look darker, almost hurt. I want to answer but I’m not sure how to explain it. It’s clearly bothering him that I lied, and that makes me wonder whether that moment we had when we said goodbye at the lift was, in fact, genuine. If Olly wasn’t just a little bit interested in me, why would he care whether or not I’d lied?

  ‘Come on, babe.’ Gabe tugs on my arm and pulls me away.

  ‘Let’s go!’ Sanjay says, and before I know it, I’m being swept out of the bar. Gabe probably thinks he’s doing me a favour, saving me from an awkward situation with Olly, and in a way, he is, yet I can’t help feeling really guilty.

  I look over my shoulder to see him watching me, with that perplexed and uneasy expression.

  ‘I’m sorry…’ I utter, as Gabe pulls me through the door.

  Chapter 7

  You probably wouldn’t think it would be possible to edit a picture of a turnip for two hours but somehow, I’ve managed it. Alicia has decided she wants to use the turnip shot on the cover of her cookbook and apparently, it’s essential that I edit it to absolute perfection. And by absolute perfection, I mean follow a list of criteria outlining pixels, sizing, colour saturation, scale, brightness, and well, the list goes on. I know I took on this job for free for the experience and to get my work out there, but I didn’t anticipate it would involve quite so much effort.

  I’m at work and I’m meant to be messaging women on Match.com on behalf of Andy Graham, but Alicia’s demanding the image now and I can’t let her down. Apparently, the publisher has only just told her the book’s going to print and she needs it straight away. I’ve tilted the screen a little so that Derek can’t see that I’m working on a turnip when I should be turning Andy’s love life around. I’ll make it up later by working into the evening, even though I really should be going home to have an early night after staying out far too late with Gabe, Sanjay and Jim.

  As I tweak the colour saturation on the image, my mind starts to wander in its unfocused hungover state. The turnip takes me back to when I was a kid and my parents used to try to have Sunday afternoon family gardening sessions. It was their thing. They met through a volunteering project to turn a derelict plot of grass into an uplifting garden at a children’s hospital. My dad had just arrived in the UK and had got a job teaching at a school in Cornwall. He was trying to make new friends so took part in the gardening project, which my mum had organised. She’s loved gardening since she was a kid and apparently, she first took a shine to my dad while teaching him how to prune a rose bush. She was tickled by this New York guy who didn’t have a clue about horticulture and they bonded immediately, chatting away while clearing weeds and planting flowers. Ever since, gardening has been their thing and our garden back home looks like it belongs on the Chelsea Flower Show.

  I tried to get involved when I was a kid. My mum even gave me my own flower bed to look after during our family gardening sessions, but all the pansies I planted rapidly shrivelled up and died, only to be replaced by weeds. Despite my mum’s attempts to make me green-fingered, gardening just never appealed. I wasn’t naturally a country girl. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to live in New York. Ever since I was little and my dad told me stories about my late grandmother, who was a semi-famous artist and a social butterfly who’d spend all her time at parties, mingling with creatives and leading a wild and exciting life while living in a little Manhattan studio apartment. She was a bit wayward and apparently couldn’t even remember the name of my dad’s father – an English violinist who disappeared after a short fling. Even though she sounded a bit wild, I idolised the exciting vision of city life, while my dad had flat out rejected it. His childhood had been a bit chaotic and even though he loved my grandmother, despite her slightly unconventional ways, he fantasised about going to England and swapping Manhattan for a calmer life – a dream he eventually fulfilled.

  I never got to meet my grandmother and I think my dad told me about her as a cautionary tale, but I took it the opposite way. I began lusting after the exciting, wild, busy New York life he’d left behind, and I set about trying to learn everything I could about the place. I watched movies set there, read books, looked at thousands of pictures and covered my bedroom walls with posters. While my friends had boybands emblazoned on their bedroom walls, I had a huge poster above my bed of the Statue of Liberty, and I used to gaze up at it at n
ight and swear that I’d go there. I made a firm promise with myself that one day I’d live in New York. I even got a biro one time and drew a small stick figure that was meant to be me right in the statue’s crown. I’d heard that you could go inside and climb right up there. To my 12-year-old self, reaching the crown represented the ultimate New York experience, the pinnacle of my dreams. I don’t think my dad was overly happy about my wish to move back to the States – I think he’d have preferred me to embrace the country lifestyle – but he and my mum eventually accepted that America was where I wanted to live, just like my dad had wanted to make it to England.

  I have an urge pick up the phone and call home, but I glance at the time display in the corner of my monitor, it’s 4 a.m. there. My parents will be fast asleep, and I doubt they’d appreciate an early morning wake-up call.

  ‘What’s up?’ Derek looks over.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ I insist, quickly clicking away from the turnip picture.

  ‘Really? You looked miles away.

  ‘Oh, really!?’ I laugh, feeling a tiny bit homesick, although it’s probably just the effects of last night’s booze and a lack of sleep.

  ‘Hmm…’ Derek frowns. ‘Let me finish this and then we’ll head out to breakfast. Have you eaten yet?’

  ‘Um, no, I haven’t actually,’ I admit. I couldn’t face food this morning.

  ‘Well, let’s have a staff breakfast! It’ll be my first ever To the Moon & Back team outing!’ He smiles goofily, and I can’t help laughing.

  ‘Okay, cool, sounds good!’

  ‘Great, give me a second,’ Derek says as he finishes off filing some accounts he’s been grumbling about.

  I tilt my screen, making sure that Derek can’t see and quickly adjust the saturation on the turnip shot, cropping it to the exact dimensions Alicia’s asked for, before double-checking the list to make sure I’ve addressed all the other edits and then email it over, with a sense of relief. I click back onto Match, hoping that some messages might have arrived for Andy, but his inbox is empty.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Derek asks brightly as he pushes his chair back from his desk.

  A recommended match pops up on my screen of a stunning girl called Katarina, who’s probably way out of Andy’s league. ‘Yeah, sure.’

  I quickly save Katarina’s profile to Andy’s favourites before grabbing my handbag.

  ‘I know a great pancake place, fancy it?’ Derek asks as I pull on my coat.

  ‘Sure,’ I reply, smiling.

  I follow Derek out of the office. It’s funny. At my interview, I thought he was going to be a massive creep, but I was wrong about him. He dresses like a bit of a creep, that’s for sure, with his tacky shirts and aviator-style glasses and he certainly doesn’t have the most wholesome of pasts, having produced movies such as Forrest Hump and Indiana Bones and the Temple of Poon, but he’s sweet. He’s got a good heart and he seems like someone who’s turned their life around. He may have been sleazy once, but he’s married now, and he treats me with a vibe that’s paternal rather than pervy. He’s not the porn boss pest I feared he might be, instead he’s simply the owner of a struggling dating agency trying to make money to cover his wife’s medical bills. He’s the kind of boss who takes his new member of staff out for pancakes because they’re looking a bit down. He winds his scarf around his neck before locking the office up.

  Derek waxes lyrical about the pancake café as we walk down the block and cut down a few side streets. It’s a cold day and there’s a light spattering of snow. The icy flakes land on my cheeks, waking me up. Just as the cool air begins to pinch, we arrive outside a corny Fifties-style diner with a pleasingly tacky retro vibe.

  ‘Brilliant!’ I comment as I take it in.

  Derek smiles. ‘They do all-you-can-drink coffee here too,’ he tells me, as he holds open the door.

  We sit at a table by the window and a waitress, who’s even wearing a Fifties-style apron and name tag, hands us some laminated menus.

  Breakfast has never sounded so delicious. As I read the menu, I can’t decide between a stack of pancakes with grilled banana and blueberries and a classic stack with lemon and sugar. All the choices sound incredible. They certainly beat my usual breakfasts of black coffee and rice cakes.

  The waitress comes back over with two coffees and takes our order. I order the stacked pancakes with banana and blueberries. Derek opts for the same.

  ‘So…’ Derek takes a sip of coffee. ‘Tell me about your consultation with Elite Love Match. Let’s debrief. How did it go?’

  ‘It was okay,’ I say, even though I can’t stop picturing the expression on Olly’s face last night – the quizzical hurt look in his eyes when he asked me who I really was. It was such an awkward, uncomfortable moment. I take a sip of coffee and try to forget about it. I certainly won’t be telling Derek about that part of our encounter.

  ‘So, what was the office like? Fancy? As fancy as they make it out to be in the brochure?’ Derek asks, with a hint of trepidation.

  I nod, feeling a little bad for him. ‘It was really fancy.’

  ‘How fancy are we talking?’ Derek asks.

  I fill him in on what the building was like, from the slick reception area to the spacious open plan office with Olly’s private office attached. I feel a bit bad describing to Derek just how swanky Elite Love Match was but he did ask me to go there so I could give him an honest report on what it was like. Nevertheless, he looks a bit deflated.

  Fortunately, the waitress arrives with our pancakes, which are so hot and fresh that they’re steaming. My stomach rumbles. The pancakes look plump and fluffy, the golden syrup glistens and the banana slices and blueberries look bright and fresh. This is probably the most colourful, delicious-looking meal I’ve eaten in months – not just photographed or seen on a picture I’m editing on my computer screen. It’s been ages since I went to a café or a restaurant for a proper sit-down meal. I simply haven’t been able to justify the expense when all my money’s been going on photography supplies and getting by.

  I reach for the sugar bowl and dust some sugar over my food. I feel ravenous. Derek’s plate is piled high with fluffy pancakes and looks equally delicious. We both tuck in, making the odd enthusiastic comment about the food in between mouthfuls.

  ‘So, Olly has a slick swanky office,’ Derek says eventually, pausing from demolishing his pancake stack to reach for his coffee.

  ‘Yeah, it’s slick but it’s completely lacking in…’ I pause, brandishing my fork around as I search for the right word. ‘Soul,’ I land upon. ‘His whole business is completely lacking in soul.’

  Derek raises an eyebrow. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s formulaic. And kind of intimidating.’ I think back to sitting opposite Olly and the serious way he quizzed me about my criteria and income, like some kind of job interview. ‘It wasn’t welcoming,’ I tell Derek. ‘To the Moon & Back is better. It may be smaller, but it’s friendly and cosy. It feels more genuine.’

  Derek nods as he chews on a mouthful of pancake, but he doesn’t seem particularly convinced. I get the feeling he just thinks I’m trying to make him feel better when that really isn’t the case. The more I think about it, the more I can totally see why high-flying people like Brandon would choose Derek’s dating agency over somewhere like Elite Love Match. It seemed a mystery to me at first that they’d opt for Derek’s strange tarot lounge set up, but if Elite Love Match is the competition, it makes total sense. I’d do exactly the same. I try to explain what I mean.

  ‘You have a personal approach. To the Moon & Back is a friendly dating agency, that’s your USP over Olly Corrigan,’ I explain, saying Olly’s name with a sneer.

  Derek still looks unconvinced. ‘Friendliness? That’s our USP?’ He picks up a small jug of maple syrup and drizzles some more over his pancakes.

  ‘Yes! The personal touch. Trust me, you don’t need flashy offices.’

  ‘Hmm…’ Derek sets down the jug and cuts a corner off one of his pl
ump-looking pancakes. ‘And what did you make of Olly? Was he as charming as the press always make out?’

  ‘Erm…’ I look down at my pancake stack, and carefully cut a bite as I try to answer in a way that doesn’t totally give away how completely intense, charged, flirty and magnetic my encounter with Olly was. Even now, a day later, I’m still struggling to find the right words to describe him.

  ‘He’s alright.’ I shrug. ‘He doesn’t have anything that we don’t have,’ I tell Derek, even though I’m not entirely sure that’s true. Olly is a ridiculously charming businessman after all. He’s probably in some swanky corporate meeting right now while Derek and I are sitting here gorging on pancakes.

  ‘Just alright?’ Derek asks, seemingly unconvinced.

  ‘Yeah, just alright,’ I lie again, taking a sip of my coffee.

  ‘Hmm…’ Derek murmurs. ‘But everyone seems to love him. The press has been singing his praises non-stop from the second his agency’s doors opened.’

  ‘Well, he probably just charmed them. He has that slick charm, I guess, but he’s not very warm,’ I tell Derek.

  ‘Okay…’ Derek muses. ‘So, you think we should be warm?’

  ‘Exactly. While he’s being all cold and slick, we’ll be warm. We’ll be the friendly personal agency to his corporate love machine,’ I say.