At First Sight

by Hannah Sunderland

  ‘I can’t think of a better way to go.’

  I shuffled a little closer to the table, my knee bumping his and making me all flustered. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’ I giggled girlishly and then shook my head at myself. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s only a knee. I’ve got another one,’ he quipped.

  I shuffled backwards again and pulled the crust away from the remaining half of my sandwich, placing it down on the greaseproof wrapping.

  ‘So, erm … are you on your lunch break?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I, err, I actually quit my job at Aldi yesterday.’ He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand and a spark of something filled his eyes for a moment as he stared forward out of the window at the brick wall across the street. He looked intense, as if he’d remembered something imperative that he should have done, which had completely slipped his mind until now.

  ‘Congratulations. Were you there long?’

  ‘A few years longer than I should have been,’ he answered as he looked back at me, the intensity beginning to filter away.

  ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘You’ve the panicked look of someone trying to get the most out of their lunch hour.’

  ‘Well deduced,’ I replied. ‘Yeah, it’s not that I’m desperate to get away, I think I’m one of the very few people who actually enjoy their job. But I’m a messy eater, you see, and so I have to factor in clean-up time.’ Why did I just say that? I was making myself sound like I had the motor functions of a toddler.

  He chuckled. ‘Well, I haven’t had to duck and cover for a second time yet, so I think you’ll be back in time.’ He looked into my eyes, his grin pulling wide again, and something about it sent a lead weight toppling into my stomach.

  My own face pulled into a smile and I worried that I had red pepper in my teeth, but he didn’t look disgusted so I guessed I was all right, or maybe he just had a kink for women who wore their food instead of ate it. If he did then who was I – his dream, food-clad woman – to kink-shame him?

  I moved my legs nervously, my toe hitting something hard under the table that rocked backwards and forwards in an attempt to stay upright, making a hollow sound against the aged oak floorboards as it moved.

  I looked down under the table and found a brown paper bag with the logo of the fancy liquor shop in the old Victorian arcade around the corner. I looked back up to find him looking mildly embarrassed.

  ‘A breaking up with your work present to yourself?’ I asked, trying to lighten the sudden shift in mood.

  His smile was soon back in place. ‘Something like that, yeah.’

  ‘So, what are you doing here? I think I’ve managed to deduce that you’re not a native Brummie.’

  ‘Really?’ He raised his eyebrows in mock admiration, his accent thickening comically. ‘Well, I’ll be damned. What a keen ear yer have.’

  We both laughed.

  I was shocked at how well this was going. Was I successfully hitting on a man, a very good-looking, nice-seeming, sane-appearing, charming, stomach-butterfly-inducing man? And to top it all off, he was Irish and everyone knew that an Irish accent made a person about eighty per cent more attractive.

  Maybe this was my meet-cute. Maybe this was the moment I met the man I was going to marry and we’d look back in ten years with our children around us and we’d both thank that couple for taking up the last empty table.

  ‘So, err, I moved away from home at eighteen and then to London for a while before eventually ending up here.’

  ‘Was the call of Birmingham just too much to resist?’ I asked sarcastically.

  ‘Hey, don’t talk yourself down. This place is all right, once yer get past the funny accent.’

  ‘You’re one to talk.’ I chuckled and when my laughter died down, I became aware that he was staring at me, his mouth curled up in a crooked smile. It made my insides turn to putty. God damn it, he was pretty. But the longer he looked, the more I began to worry that he was staring at something I’d unwittingly adhered to my face. I raised a hand and patted my cheeks worriedly.

  ‘What?’ I asked, feeling myself blush.

  ‘Nothin’.’ He inhaled a deep breath and looked back down at the surface of his tea. ‘You’ve a lovely smile, is all.’

  My heart felt tight, like it might burst. Was I having a heart attack or indigestion? Or was I simply not used to these feelings? The minutes ticked by and, gradually, our time ran out. How dare my job interfere with this moment where everything was seeming to fall into place.

  I was cutting it fine, with a five- or six-minute walk back to the office and only four to spare. I could jog, I supposed. I hated being late. It filled me with an unspeakable anxiety left over from when I turned up late for school and ended up having to stand at the front of assembly facing the whole school until it was over.

  ‘I just realised that I’ve been so busy talking that I haven’t even asked your name,’ I said, leaning in a little.

  He looked up from his tea, stroking the rim of the cup with his index finger. ‘Charlie.’

  ‘Nell.’

  His eyes softened. ‘Nice to meet you, Nell.’

  Ask for his number. Just do it. You’ve been speaking to him for ages now – just ask for his number. If he wasn’t single then he wouldn’t have kept the conversation up and if he wasn’t interested then he’d have left ages ago. It’s not like his cold tea was keeping him here.

  ‘Well, Charlie,’ I said, testing this new name out on my tongue to see how it felt. It felt pretty right to me. ‘I’d better be getting back to work.’

  He held out his hand and I don’t know if it was just wishful thinking, but I think I saw a hint of disappointment in his kind eyes.

  ‘It’s been really nice talking to you,’ I added. Ask for his number! If you only listen to the voices inside your head just once in your whole, entire existence then let it be now. Let this be the moment! I reached out and took his hand, shaking it slowly, lingering as our skin touched for the first time. Maybe there would be other times too? But only if I stopped being a coward and asked for his number.

  ‘You too, Nell. I think I needed a chat with someone like you today.’

  ‘Me too,’ I replied.

  He loosened his grip on my hand and I felt my stomach lurch as our hands parted ways.

  ‘It’s been great to meet you,’ I said, realising that I was stalling while I worked up the guts to ask.

  Do it!

  I stood up and pulled my bag strap over my shoulder. Gathered my rubbish and empty mug.

  DO IT!

  ‘You too,’ he replied.

  Do it, you loser!

  I exhaled loudly, the words on my tongue but unwilling to fall out of my mouth. I was scared. I was a stupid scared little coward. I wasn’t used to this. It had been so long since I’d asked someone out and, even then, I’d got a friend to do it for me.

  I sighed at myself and dithered a little on the balls of my feet. ‘Well … see ya.’ I lifted my rubbish-filled hand in a small wave and turned away.

  I tugged open the door, more furious with myself than I had ever been before. I’d been so confident up until that last second. Shit! What was wrong with me? You couldn’t shut me up when it came to my lifelong bout of verbal diarrhoea, but when the moment was right, when the words really mattered, I became mute.

  The soles of my trainers slapped against the pavement angrily as I stormed past people who eyed me with suspicion.

  I was almost back at the office, the dismal grey building looming over me like a dystopian skyline, when I stopped, the momentum of my angry walk making me sway as I halted. You would never guess, from the outside, how much good happened inside that building.

  When was this ever going to happen again? When was I going to have an accidental run-in with a good-looking Irishman? When did things like that ever happen in real life? Never! That’s when and I’d just wasted the moment of a lifetime.

  I spun on my heel and began running back to the café, the courage to do what needed
to be done burbling in my stomach along with my hastily eaten lunch.

  Come on, Nell, you can do this. I held my bag tight against my hip as I ran. I hadn’t run in years, not since school and the dreaded bleep test. My legs cried out in anguish, as if asking, ‘What did we do to deserve this?’

  I turned the corner, almost ploughing into a woman with a pram. I shouted a hasty apology before lowering my chin to my chest and sprinting the rest of the way. By the time I reached the café, I was panting so hard that I thought I might pass out. Sweat beaded on my brow and I just knew that my make-up would be a mess now, sliding down my face like a custard pie.

  I opened the door and looked over at the bench but the space where he’d been was empty.

  My shoulders sagged with the knowledge that I would probably never see him again and I felt like crying. This had been my one opportunity and I’d thrown it away.

  I bit down hard on my bottom lip and turned around, walking back to work slowly, the journey harder this time because of my aching legs and the weight of crushing disappointment that I was carrying.

  There was absolutely no way I was going to be on time now.

  Chapter Two

  I woke with that sickening feeling that I always got when I found a weight in the bed beside me and the sound of another person’s slumberous breaths on the pillow a few inches away from my face.

  I opened one eye, squinting as if letting in less of the image would stop me from seeing what I knew I was about to see. There, his head half sunken into the memory foam pillow, was the face I’d woken up to thousands of times before. His unruly, finely kinked hair was a cloud around his head, tousled to disarray by the way he tossed and turned in his sleep.

  Joel and I had broken up two years ago, after seven and a half years together. Things had been going south for a while prior to that and so when the time came to call a time of death, I did. It had been hard; breaking up always is, especially after so long. You grow to depend on the other person, settle into a routine and then all of a sudden, you have to picture your day without them and all the things that being with someone entails.

  I’d been thinking about being on my own for a while, craving the solitude that came with not having someone else to think about all the time, but things had become startlingly clear to me almost two years before we broke up when I’d found myself in the self-service queue in Boots waiting to buy a pregnancy test. My period had been a week and a half late and the panic had been building up inside me since that little notification had popped up on my phone from my period tracking app, telling me that I was late.

  I’d cried as I’d waited for my future to be spelled out in little pink lines and thought about what a baby would mean for us. I couldn’t raise a baby alone. I didn’t have the money, we didn’t have the space and I couldn’t imagine a young life being shaped in that horrid little hovel that we’d shared at the time. Thankfully there had been no baby and, even though it would take me a good long while to be able to act on the feelings of discontent I had towards our relationship, that was the moment I knew that the forever that Joel and I had promised ourselves at the start wouldn’t be as long as we’d both thought.

  Us ending was for the best. There wasn’t a person alive or dead who would argue with that. We were happier apart. We functioned better, got along better too and we respected each other way more than we had done over half of the duration of our relationship. But over the last six months, to the chagrin and dismay of the few who knew, we’d started to become each other’s cushion against the harsh world that we hadn’t had to engage with before.

  We were both in the same terrifying, unfamiliar boat and so it only seemed logical that we would run back to each other for solace.

  It all started when Joel’s dad had died. He’d been at working at the builders’ merchant, where he’d been for over fifteen years, walking between the stacks to help a customer find something. A forklift on the other side of the stack was getting a pallet of cement bags from one of the high shelves when the whole stack collapsed. Joel’s dad and the customer had died instantly and Joel had been devastated. He’d comforted his mum, but one night as she slept off the tranquiliser that the doctor had given her, he’d gone out walking and ended up at my front door.

  Ned, my housemate, best friend and colleague (it’s a long story), was not a fan of Joel, to put it lightly. He thought he was a waste of space who’d wronged me far too many times to be excused, but Joel had been the first and only love of my life and there’s a bond there that you can’t deny will always exist. I’d let him in, shed a tear or two along with him and he’d ended up staying the night. Now, I didn’t sleep with him out of pity. I don’t want anyone thinking that I’m some sort of compassionate hooker, paid in sad stories. He was lonely and I was too. I think we needed each other with a kind of mutual loneliness that could only be solved in one way.

  After that, Joel and I spent quite a bit of time together. I had been close with his mother and brothers and so I had helped them with the funeral arrangements and been there with my friendly, absorbent shoulder when they needed it. His father’s side of the family came from Nigeria and so I had never met them before. His grandmother was so old that she reminded me of when you burn paper and the ash retains its shape. I feared that one touch might damage her deep brown, creped skin and turn her to dust. We’d talked on the phone and I’d been on the front of every Christmas card that the family had sent to her for the last six years. So, no one had the heart to tell her that we’d broken up. I’m pretty sure she’d have gone into cardiac arrest right there and then if we’d told her. We’d kept up the charade for ten days, until the family went back home and Joel and I parted awkwardly at the door.

  We’d slept together about fifteen times since then, which was fifteen more times than we had over the last eighteen months of our relationship.

  These nights of weakness usually came when one of us was upset or lonely, when one of us had had a bad day or if we were simply bored.

  Ned told me that I was being reckless, but I reminded him that if his ex-wife showed up, the last thing he’d do was turn her away.

  I sighed into the bunched-up duvet that I’d pulled over my face and slipped out of bed as soundlessly as possible. I took Joel’s faded red Bob Dylan T-shirt from the floor and pulled it over my head before easing open the door and running to the bathroom.

  I jumped into the shower and turned the heat right up in an attempt to scald away my shame. I’d felt awful last night, my stomach churning with regret at not having the balls to ask Charlie for his number. When I’d called Joel and invited him over, I’d wanted to be calling someone else. When I’d plied him with beer and kissed him in the kitchen, I’d imagined he was Charlie. When I was leading him upstairs, I don’t know what I was thinking, but my head wasn’t filled with what I know Joel wished it was. I sanded off a layer of skin with an exfoliating mitt and dabbed myself dry with a fluffy towel before going and standing by the mirror and taking a long, hard, literal look at myself. I looked the same as I had yesterday; perpetually tanned skin – courtesy of my father as my mother was as pale as Casper – same long chestnut-coloured hair, same large unruly eyebrows sitting above even larger brown eyes. But added on to that familiar image of myself were dark bags beneath my eyes, weighed down with all of the self-hatred that I felt towards myself right now.

  I knew how this encounter would end. It would be the same as all the other times and I didn’t know if I could have that conversation again. I combed out my hair, brushed my teeth, heaved a great sigh and made my way back to my room. Just as I reached the door, Ned stepped out onto the landing and tilted his head in judgement.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said quietly, with the hope that I could get dressed and slip out to work without Joel waking. It was a coward’s way out, but I had never pretended to be brave. ‘I already hate myself enough.’

  I slipped into the room and my heart sank when I found Joel, half dressed, his red-rimmed glasses, which I’
d picked out for him, perched on the bridge of his nose, and searching for his T-shirt. ‘Ah, there it is,’ he said with a wide, cheerful grin when he saw me. ‘I’ve been looking for that.’ He walked over and placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘Looks far better on you though.’ He leaned forward and tried to kiss me. I don’t know why he did this. Why he always thought that things were going to change, that this time would be different.

  ‘Joel, you know what I’m going to say,’ I said, quietly, feeling like the worst person in the world. When we initiated these encounters/booty calls, we would always start off on the same page. Sex, that’s all this was. A tumble in the sheets to alleviate the boredom and loneliness of our otherwise socially barren lives, but in the mornings, he would always think that things had changed, that wounds had been repaired, that I loved him again like I once had.

  ‘Come on, Nell. There has to be a reason why we keep coming back to each other. I know we let things slip a bit at the end, but we’re meant to be together. I know you feel it.’

  I walked over to my chest of drawers, just so he’d stop looking into my eyes like Kaa from The Jungle Book, trying to hypnotise me into loving him again. I found some underwear and awkwardly put it on while keeping Joel’s shirt firmly over the parts that I didn’t want him seeing again.

  ‘We agreed,’ I almost snapped then tried to soften my voice a little. ‘We agreed that sex was all this was. You agreed to that too, remember?’ I hated who Joel turned me into. I hadn’t been a nice person during our last couple of years together. I could see that now in retrospect and I never wanted to be that version of me again. Bitter and depressed with a volatile anger that needed little to ignite, but the more time I spent with Joel, the more I felt her coming back.

  ‘I do remember – but, Nell, we’ve been doing this for half a year now. Surely that’s got to tell you something.’

  My anger was building by the millisecond. He always made me feel like the villain; it was his specialty. He knew full well that he’d agreed to this. Smash and dash. Moment of weakness. Tryst. One-night stand. Ill-advised mistake. Whatever you wanted to call it, that’s what it was.