Thank You, Next: A perfect, uplifting and funny romantic comedy

by Sophie Ranald

  ‘You do know that’s—’ he began.

  ‘A load of rubbish? So you said before. But I knew how you like your coffee, without having to ask, didn’t I?’

  Adam grinned and shook his head, but he accepted a perfect espresso from me gratefully, and I pushed open the door to the garden.

  ‘Let’s see how those fledglings are getting on, then,’ he said.

  We stood in the doorway and looked out at the garden. It wasn’t up to much, really – just a little square of paving stones with weeds growing up between some of them, a couple of wooden picnic tables, the giant barbecue under its canvas cover, and a few hanging baskets that Alice had planted with geraniums and pansies, a bit bedraggled-looking now that summer was coming to an end, and of course the bird table. But in the cool morning, with a bright bar of golden sunlight falling across it and birdsong filling the air, it felt almost magical.

  I could feel the warmth of Adam’s arm next to my shoulder, hear him breathing and smell the fragrant steam from his coffee and whatever shower gel he’d used – the scent was as fresh as a gin and tonic on a hot evening.

  As we watched, the male and female blackbirds fluttered down and started helping themselves to mealworms. The robin joined in, too, and a couple of fat pigeons pecked around below, snapping up any bits that got dropped.

  ‘Where are the babies, though?’ I fretted.

  ‘Maybe they’ll come,’ Adam said, ‘if we wait.’

  We waited, but there were no baby blackbirds. In the past few days, I’d found it harder and harder to tell which were the fledglings and which the parents, but I’d been watching them for long enough to just about know the difference, and I was sure that only the adults were there for breakfast.

  ‘What if something’s happened to them?’ I asked. ‘What if Frazzle…’

  ‘You’d have known,’ Adam said. ‘He’d have presented you with a body, wouldn’t he? Or have feathers in his whiskers or something.’

  I shuddered. ‘Yes, I suppose so. But then where are they?’

  Adam hesitated, then he said, ‘I expect they’ve gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘I was reading about it online. They stay with the parents for a couple of weeks after they learn to fly, and then they go off to find their own territory, and the adults start a new family.’

  ‘But…’ Absurdly, I felt tears stinging my eyes. ‘But what will they do, without us to look after them? What if, wherever they’ve gone, there’s no food for them?’

  ‘They’ll be okay,’ Adam said. ‘Their instinct will help them find a good place to live. At least, I hope so.’

  We looked at each other for a second. Adam’s face was as full of doubt as I knew mine was, and I felt a tear trickle down my cheek.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive.’ But he didn’t sound very sure.

  I dug in my pocket for a tissue. ‘I know I’m being ridiculous. I just hate thinking of them out there all alone in the world, with no one to look out for them.’

  ‘I get it.’ Adam cleared his throat. ‘I felt the same way about Freezer, our neighbours’ cat. I think I told you about him.’

  ‘White, with one blue eye and one green?’

  ‘Yeah. When Luke and Hannah moved, I knew he would be fine and safe, and they love him and Hannah would be home all day while she was on maternity leave. But I still thought, what if he missed me and didn’t understand why he never saw me any more.’

  I blew my nose, feeling the threat of tears growing closer, but I managed to force them away.

  ‘We’re a right pair of dicks, aren’t we?’ I said.

  ‘Yup.’ Adam was wearing his retro shades so I couldn’t see his eyes, but I was willing to bet he was struggling not to cry, too. That was what my intuition was telling me, anyway.

  ‘You really think the fledglings will be okay?’ I asked, briefly serious again.

  ‘Of course they will. So long as you keep that cat of yours in line.’

  ‘I do my best. But, you know…’

  ‘Cats gonna cat. And I have to get to work.’

  He handed me his empty coffee mug, thanked me, and – as he had before – shot out through the bar before I had a chance to properly say goodbye, or wish him a nice day or anything. As I pushed open the door to the kitchen, Jude came clattering down the stairs and enfolded me in a hug, kissing the top of my head and saying he’d see me later, and my working day began.

  But the whole time, as I chopped and stirred and sat with Alice over coffee to plan the following week’s menu, my thoughts kept returning to Adam. I reminded myself that I had a boyfriend. I wasn’t sure whether I had a type, unlike Dani, who’d said that Fabian was totally hers, but I was fairly sure I didn’t fancy Adam. So there was nothing to worry about – no need for Jude to feel jealous or insecure.

  Adam and I could be friends. I could offer him some sort of time-share in Frazzle, to make up for the cat he used to fuss and feed, and maybe when – if – Jude and I ever went on holiday together, Adam could stay in my flat and keep Frazz company. Although, I realised, if he had the kind of job that involved working lunches at the Chiltern Firehouse, he probably lived in such luxury at his own apartment that my poky studio would seem a hovel in comparison.

  Anyway, I felt there had been something there – a connection, a meeting of minds. I hoped that now the baby birds had embarked on their independent lives, in the manner of millennial boomerang children who finally get turfed out of the family home in their thirties, Adam might still pop in in the mornings on his way to the station to see what exciting bird-feeder action I had to share. Maybe Mr and Mrs Blackbird would raise another family for us to watch and stress over.

  But, at the Dungeons & Dragons game that evening, Adam didn’t mention the birds, or Freezer the cat, or give any indication that anything at all had passed between us. He greeted me with just the same awkward semi-formality as everyone else, accepted a mint julep, which Freddie had discovered was his favourite cocktail, arranged his screen and notepads and coloured pens on the table, and said, ‘Right, shall we get started?’

  In the game, our party had reached the castle where the young girl was being held prisoner, but had no way of gaining entrance. The previous week had ended with us trying to buy our way in by bribing one of the shifty guards who patrolled the perimeter.

  Adam rolled the dice. ‘The guard accepts your bribe, and you return under cover of darkness to gain entrance to Castle Drakeford. The night is stormy, with gusts of wind ruffling your cloaks and whistling through the battlements above your heads. The sky is overcast, but occasionally scudding clouds part to reveal a sliver of moon, thin as the blade of a sickle. You can hear the hoot of an owl swooping overhead, and there are other creatures hunting in the darkness above you, too. You think they may be bats – at least, you hope that is what they are.’

  I shivered and took a gulp of my red wine. Around me, Freddie, Archie, Nat, Tim and Lara’s faces were still and intent. The candles on the table flickered. The pub was full, but the tables around us were silent as they, too, listened to Adam’s voice.

  Over the past few weeks, the Dungeons & Dragons game had become quite the spectator sport, with a huge waiting list of people who wanted to join as soon as one of our characters came to a sticky end. But so far we had all survived, and Adam had refused numerous requests to start games with other groups – planning our adventure was taking up almost all his spare time, he said. I wondered what he did with the rest of it – aside from saving local wildlife – if he had very much time outside his impressive-sounding job at the hedge fund.

  ‘The guard greets you with a grunt, carefully unhooking a heavy bunch of keys from his belt,’ he carried on. ‘The clink of metal on metal resounds in the still night air, and you hope that it will not alert other guards to your presence. He fits a key into the iron lock, and you hear the grinding of the mechanism within as he slowly turns it. The door swings open with a creak, and beyond you see only darkness.
’

  ‘We should kill the guard,’ Dun said, with a coldness that I couldn’t imagine being there if he was still cheerful, smiley Archie. ‘Now that he’s let us in. It’s too risky. He knows that we’re here; he could tell anyone and we’d be screwed.’

  ‘It’s a good point,’ said Hesketh. ‘Secrecy is the only defence we have once we’re in there.’

  ‘I cannot countenance the murder of an innocent man,’ said Lorien.

  ‘But he’s one of Brandrel’s men,’ I pointed out. ‘That’s not exactly innocent, is it? He’ll have been pillaging all over the place most of his life.’

  Adam watched in silence as we argued the toss. Once we’d made a decision, a couple of rolls of the dice would determine what happened next – whether we succeeded in doing away with the guard; whether, if we decided not to try, he alerted his colleagues to our presence; whether they found us in the darkness underneath the castle.

  ‘I could cast a spell of silence on him,’ Annella said. Under her blunt dark fringe, Nat’s eyes were bright. ‘It would render him speechless for twenty-four hours, by which time we’d be safely inside. If it works.’

  ‘I say we do that,’ I said.

  ‘Agreed,’ said Annella.

  ‘I still think it would be safer…’ Dun began, but he was outvoted.

  ‘Very well.’ Adam rolled the dice. ‘An eight. Annella’s spell is successful.’

  ‘We’d better get our skates on, then,’ Freddie said, then segued back into being Hesketh. ‘I mean, we should make haste, and explore as much of this dungeon as we can whilst we have the cover of darkness and secrecy.’

  ‘We could split up,’ suggested Lorien. ‘Half of us go to the heart of the castle to find and rescue Zarah and the rest explore a bit and look for treasure.’

  ‘What? Have you never seen a horror movie, ever? Split up? That’s crazy talk.’

  ‘It does make sense though. When the guard gets his speech back he’ll sing like a canary, and if we’re in two parties at least that reduces their chances of finding all of us.’

  ‘We might not have the same fighting power in smaller groups but we could move more quickly and more silently.’

  ‘And if we split our skills appropriately we’d all be safe enough.’

  ‘So long as we agree that if we find treasure, we’ll share it equally.’

  ‘Equal won’t mean a row of beans if we’re all dead.’

  We argued a bit, drinking our wine and eating the sausages, buns and potato wedges that Robbie had sent us from the kitchen. I knew that if I was me, I’d want our party to stick together. Cautious, risk-averse Zoë would look for safety in numbers. But I wasn’t me. I was Galena, who barely knew what fear meant.

  As we ate and drank and talked, I watched Adam’s face, looking for a hint of what he thought was the right or wrong course of action. But he was impassive, glancing down occasionally at his maps and notes, then looking back at us, half-smiling. His smile was strangely sweet and gentle, at odds with the sharp angles of his face, exaggerated by the candlelight. If Adam was a Dungeons & Dragons character, I thought, he’d be a wizard – wise and kind and a bit mysterious, able to weave magic through the words he spoke.

  As Adam described the scene inside the imaginary castle, I could hear – almost like it was in my imagination and the game was real – the background noise of the pub, the clink of glasses and the hum of conversation and laughter. I could smell the food on our table, and taste the red wine in my glass. It was like I was in two places at once, and the bridge between them – the portal, as I guessed Adam might say – was the click of the dice on the wooden table as it decided the outcome of the battle that followed.

  ‘Without Annella, you are unable to use magic against the undead warriors,’ Adam said softly. ‘Your swords are mere earthly metal, while theirs are forged from materials harder than steel. It is only your skill and courage that allows you to prevail, but at grievous cost. Dun and Hesketh are both wounded, Dun seriously. Lorien must try to tend to their wounds, while performing rites over the fallen ghoul soldiers that will allow them to return at last to the realm of the dead.

  ‘Next week, we’ll see whether the two of you survive, and how Galena and the others get on in their search for Zarah.’

  He stopped and smiled, the spell of his voice broken. I felt like I’d been holding my breath for a long time, and I think the others did too – all at once, we started laughing and chatting, the tension Adam had created dissipating as we returned to reality.

  I hurried to the bar and asked Alice to make him a cocktail, and brought it back to him, hoping that he would stay and chat. He took his time sliding his notes and maps together behind the screen, carefully slotting the multifaceted dice into their places in the box and tidying his coloured felt-tip pens away into their case, seemingly oblivious of Alice tidying up around him, the lights in the bar having been turned up, and the last of the punters finishing their drinks and heading out into the night.

  I left him to it, giving Alice a hand with the last tasks of the night, feeling the excitement of having been in that other world for three hours gradually seep away and be replaced by tiredness. I was leaning up against the bar, yawning hugely, glancing at my phone, when Adam came up to me, all his stuff now stashed away in his laptop bag.

  ‘Zoë?’

  ‘Mmmhmm.’

  ‘Mind if I ask you something?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Does the Ginger Cat do private hire? Like, for parties and stuff?’

  ‘Yeah. I mean, like, in theory we do. But the last one was a while back, when Maurice and Wesley got married.’

  I couldn’t help smiling remembering that day: the pub newly reopened, rainbow bunting strung across the ceiling, Maurice and Wesley glowing with happiness with carnations in their buttonholes. And then I remembered, too, how my own heart had ached when I saw Alice and Joe together, how it had seemed like everyone in the world could be happy, could have someone for their own, except for me.

  But now I had Jude. I didn’t have to be lonely, ever again. So why did it feel as if I was?

  Adam’s voice jerked me out of my thoughts. ‘My friend’s been travelling with her other half. She’s been in Australia for almost a year and now they’re back, and I wanted to organise something. Like a welcome-home thing. Josh and me organised a surprise birthday party for her a while back, and she loved it. So I thought it would be kind of traditional, you know?’

  It had never occurred to me that Adam might have friends. I mean, obviously he had a life outside of the world of the game, and a job and everything, but he’d never struck me as a person who’d book out an entire pub for a party. I didn’t have that many friends myself, I thought.

  ‘You’ll need to ask Alice. She’s in charge of that kind of thing. Well, she’s in charge of everything really. But I’m sure it will be fine. She’ll give you a price per head or a minimum spend or whatever.’

  ‘Great.’ Adam hesitated, and then he went on, ‘Could we do, like, an Australian theme? With the food and stuff?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. Shrimp on the barbie, and…’ That was pretty much the extent of my knowledge.

  ‘Lamingtons?’ Adam suggested.

  ‘Shrimp on the barbie and Lamingtons. Whatever those are. Got you.’

  Our eyes met and we laughed.

  ‘Pies and gravy?’ Adam suggested. ‘That’s a thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ve got no idea. I’ll have to google. But we’ll come up with something, don’t worry.’

  ‘Great,’ Adam said again.

  There was a pause, and I thought he might be about to say something else – I even saw him take a deep breath like he was going to. But he just said he’d see me next week, slung his bag over his shoulder and strolled out into the night, and I had a final check of the kitchen and went upstairs to the flat to find Jude.

  He was on the sofa, slouched down low so his hips were right on the edge of the cushions and his chin on his c
hest, his long legs stretched out in front of him, reading a book called Engines of Privilege. Frazzle was on the bed, one eye open, waiting to see if there was any chance of a last and final snack before bed.

  ‘Hey, beautiful,’ Jude said, not raising his eyes from the page. ‘Okay day?’

  ‘Yeah, it was good,’ I replied brightly. ‘How was yours?’

  ‘Bloody knackering. I was just about to call it a night.’

  I thought longingly of bed – and sleep. But I’d promised Dani – and, more importantly, myself – that I was going to do this. One last throw of the dice: the idea made me think of Adam, his long fingers dropping the many-sided dice on the table, determining our fate. If he was rolling now, would it be a one, a twenty, or something in between?

  But this wasn’t up to Adam or a dice. It was up to me.

  ‘I’m just going to jump in the shower,’ I said. ‘How about lighting some candles?’

  ‘Candles?’ Jude looked at me blankly, like I’d suggested summoning a string quartet to entertain us for what was left of the evening.

  ‘Sure. You know, ambience.’

  ‘And a fire hazard,’ Jude grumbled, but he got up from the sofa and I heard him rummaging around on a shelf looking for matches as I closed the bathroom door behind me, having snatched up the ASOS carrier bag I’d stashed behind the door that morning.

  Ten minutes later, I was standing in front of the slightly fogged-up bathroom mirror, looking at my reflection with a mixture of wonder and embarrassment. I was a bralette and boy shorts kind of person. I’d hardly ever in my life owned anything you could describe as lingerie. Perhaps I could have started off slowly, with something tasteful in oyster-coloured silk, but I’d decided that if I was going to do this thing, I was going to do it properly.

  The result was a black, multi-strapped bra (although whether it was actually worthy of the name – given its cups comprised three strips of elastic that criss-crossed my breasts, meeting in the middle and just about covering my nipples but leaving nothing else to the imagination – was another matter), and a matching thong that left my nether regions similarly exposed.