‘Me neither.’ I smiled at the soft, drunk look in his eyes. I tucked my hair behind my ear, pulling it away from where the rain was beginning to flatten it to my forehead. He reached out a hand towards my chest. For a moment, I didn’t know what he would do and I drew in an uncertain breath. He picked up the small fraying plait that I’d absentmindedly braided during a call earlier on in my shift and stroked it between the pads of his thumb and index finger.
My heart rate quickened at the physical contact that I couldn’t even feel and I watched his faraway eyes as they watched what his fingers were doing, as if he had no control over them and was interested to see what they would do next.
His brow drew into a frown and his mouth quirked as if he was in mild pain. He said something through lips that barely moved and it was so quiet that I didn’t know if I’d imagined it or not.
‘Sorry?’ I bowed my head and tried to bring myself into his gaze. ‘What was that?’
He looked up and the moment his eyes met mine, I was struck by the expression in them. I couldn’t place it because I didn’t think I’d ever seen it before.
‘I said, thank you,’ he said a little clearer.
‘For what?’
‘For talking to me in the café.’
‘No problem.’ I smiled softly. My confidence soared from the positive vibes I was getting from him and the alcohol that was coursing through my veins. I knew I must be more drunk than I thought I was because of what I said next. ‘It’s not every lunch break that you find yourself sitting next to a pretty Irishman, so I thought I’d try and make the most of it.’
His mouth drew into a wide smile and lines carved their way into his cheeks, partially hidden behind that stubble that I kept imagining scratching its way across my chin. ‘Pretty? Is that what I am?’
I blushed, but didn’t look away, the alcohol making me braver than I could remember being in recent memory. ‘There it is,’ he said, placing his crooked finger beneath my chin. ‘That smile.’
‘I’ve been smiling all night,’ I said nervously.
‘No, that’s your show smile. This here, this is the real one. It’s like sunshine.’
‘Okay, now I know you’ve had too much to drink.’
My grin grew wider as I tried to not let the feel of his skin on mine, no matter how little skin that was, turn me into a giggling, babbling moron.
I felt like all of the social rules about personal space had already evaporated. Like if I wanted to reach out and touch him, I could, and it wouldn’t be weird. I wondered if this, if Charlie, would turn out to be my first one-night stand. I’d never liked the idea of them – maybe because I was conceived during one – but the idea of being naked and vulnerable with a near-stranger seemed like something I’d need a hell of a lot more alcohol for than this.
He stepped closer, my thin piece of braided hair still in his hand and his eyes on mine. I felt a swell of nerves in my chest and found myself wanting him to kiss me more than I had ever wanted anything in my whole life.
Were you meant to kiss on the first date? Would doing that make me easy or was that only a rule in Noughties sitcoms? And who was even policing these rules? Was there a board of people waiting in the conifer hedge to leap out and call me a whore?
‘Do … you … erm …’ I mumbled as his face drew a little closer and mine mirrored his movement until I could feel his breath dancing across my lips, smell the detergent drifting up from his clothes, feel the heat seeping through the fabric of his T-shirt and into the sliver of air between our chests. ‘Do … you want to come in?’
I had no idea how I was being so brazen, but the idea of not kissing him before the night was out was too much of a tragedy to contemplate. I moved a little closer, my lips pouting out to meet his. My top lip grazed his and I felt the stubble of his upper lip, wiry and sharp against the soft skin of my face.
His lips parted and his body moved against mine, his chest firm and warm. All of a sudden, I felt like we were both wearing far too many clothes. I laced my fingers through the hand that hung at his side.
‘I …’ he began. We were so close that we were sharing breaths, the air leaving my lungs and falling straight into his. ‘I can’t do this.’
I exhaled a disappointed breath as he swiftly stepped away and my heart fell into my stomach. ‘Oh.’
He walked away a few paces and dragged rigid fingers through his hair. ‘What the feck am I doing?’ he said quietly, almost to himself.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, reaching out to touch the sleeve of his jacket, but he shook my hand away. I stepped back, my pride smarting.
He turned around halfway, but didn’t meet my eye. ‘I just can’t do this. Okay?’ His words were clipped and almost angry.
‘What happened? Everything was fine a minute ago,’ I said taking a step closer. He countered with a step back.
‘I need to go.’ He spun on the ball of his foot and began marching away.
‘Shall I call you?’ I shouted after him.
‘No. No. Just …’ he replied ‘… don’t.’
Then he was off, walking into the darkness and leaving me confused on the driveway.
I would be lying if I said that I didn’t go straight upstairs, get into a shower that was too hot to be physically safe, and cry a little into the scalding water. The heart is like a rattlesnake in the way that if you leave it alone and don’t provoke it, it won’t hurt you. It’ll just carry on doing its thing, while you carry on doing yours. But once it senses danger, it begins preparations to protect itself. It remembers all the hurts that came before, the ones that almost destroyed it, and it knows that it can’t let that happen again. I’d provoked my heart again, letting it run away with itself on the childish idea that meeting a man in a café would be my happily ever after. But that was not how life worked in the real world. Maybe in the choruses of Eighties ballads or in the finale of TV shows, but life never came out that cleanly.
I turned my face up to the deluge of water that was almost too hot to bear and let it drum against my skin. I didn’t know what had happened to make him change so suddenly. It was as if he’d had a crisis of conscience, but I had no idea what had provoked it. What had that sudden guilt been about?
I hit the button on the shower and the water ceased to fall. I stood in the glass box for a minute or two, the water dripping from me like my whole body was crying.
A little over twenty-four hours ago, I hadn’t even known Charlie Stone, so why was I so upset?
I stepped out of the shower and wrapped myself in my fuchsia pink towel. A good sleep – that was probably all I needed and, in the morning, this would all be forgotten. I hoped.
Chapter Five
I had been wrong. A single sleep could not cheer me up, not even slightly. I sat on the sofa in my pyjamas after a poor night’s sleep, with my feet propped up on the coffee table and my bowl of Cheerios balanced on my boobs. I was knackered and had just wanted to stay in bed, but after waking up at the crack of dawn, I’d struggled to do anything other than lie there, staring up at my ceiling and getting gradually more annoyed at my sustained wakefulness.
I clicked the remote with my lazy left hand and found some mindless, colourful cartoon to numb my brain for twenty minutes.
‘You’re up early.’ Ned’s voice drifted into the room a moment or two before he appeared in the doorway. I spotted him in my peripheral vision, but didn’t turn. That would have been far too much effort. He walked over to the sofa and I looked up and found him eyeing me expectantly, his dark green tie lying limp and unknotted around his neck. ‘Go on then, what’s he like?’
I shoved a heaped spoon of cereal into my mouth and chewed down on the soggy little rings. ‘He’s like Prince Charming, but during a bad-boy phase where he joins a band and starts wearing jewellery.’
‘Okay, that was strangely specific.’
‘Yeah. Strange is the word I’d use too.’
‘Why?’ He paused but I didn’t answer. I didn’t know qu
ite how to explain what had happened. ‘Well, at least give me a name. What did you do? How did it end?’ I didn’t need to look at him to know he’d sent a wink my way.
‘His name is Charlie and …’ I stopped and looked up at him with narrowed eyes. ‘We went to a bar, we almost kissed and then he ruined it all.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing happened. It was all going well and sparks were, you know, flying and whatnot. But then, abruptly he closed off, got kind of angry and then told me not to call him.’
‘Oh, and you have no idea what made him change his mind?’
I shook my head.
‘Did you eat in front of him? Because that would be enough to put any man off,’ he said in a vain attempt to lighten the mood.
‘Shut up.’ I managed a pathetic smile.
‘What did he get angry about?’
‘I have no idea. It was like he felt guilty about almost kissing me.’
Ned tilted his head in thought. ‘He’s not married, is he?’
I let out a long sigh and closed my eyes. ‘Shit. I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.’ I scoffed at my own stupidity. ‘He’s married, isn’t he?’
‘Did he mention a wife or girlfriend?’ He perched himself on the sofa arm and fiddled with the ends of his tie.
I smacked my forehead with my palm. ‘No, but when I brought that up in conversation, he quickly changed the subject.’
‘It’s looking like you might have dropped the ball on this one, Nell.’
‘I’m a homewrecker. A skanky little homewrecker.’ I groaned in frustration. How had I even thought for one second that a man like that was single?
‘Don’t beat yourself up. If he is married then he’s the one who should be feeling stupid.’
‘He wasn’t wearing a ring.’ I thought back to the café when I’d seen the guitar callouses on his fingers. No, I don’t think I saw a ring. My hope flared.
‘Neither did I. Not every person does,’ he replied.
Hope, dashed.
My shoulders sagged.
‘Well,’ Ned said as he took hold of his tie and began knotting it, ‘even if he’s hitched, it was nice to see you getting out again. You’ve spent long enough doing whatever it is that you’re doing with that idiot, Joel.’ It was no secret that Ned didn’t think highly of Joel, not after those first few months when he’d show up outside the house. This one time he’d thrown pebbles at my window, only it wasn’t my window, it was Ned’s, and the pebbles he was throwing proved a little too large when one found its way on to Ned’s bedroom floor surrounded by tiny shards of glass.
In the past I’d fought Joel’s corner when people talked poorly of him, but I was slowly coming to realise that sticking up for him wasn’t my job anymore.
‘How long are you going to stay mad about that window?’ I asked. ‘Joel could have been worse, I guess. He didn’t have a secret wife, like Charlie probably has, and he didn’t run off with someone else like Connie did.’ I saw him flinch a little at the mention of his ex-wife’s name, but he was becoming more immune to her as time went on. ‘He could have done much worse to me.’
‘Yeah, he could have done much better too.’ Ned sighed and fiddled with the knot of his tie until it sat, smartly, against his collar. ‘Let’s just agree that we are both terrible at picking partners for ourselves.’ Ned shook his head in frustration. ‘You gonna be okay?’ he asked, reaching down a hand to squeeze my shoulder.
I sucked my teeth in response.
‘Well, text me if there are any developments. I’m off, but I’ll see you in a bit. Don’t forget we have that meeting with the project manager at two.’
‘I hadn’t forgotten,’ I lied.
He walked to the door but stopped at the last second, holding the doorframe with both hands and peering around it. ‘Oh, are we doing shitty film night tonight?’
I looked at him over my shoulder. ‘It’s not like I have any other plans. My boyfriend’s busy with his wife.’ I sighed and reassumed the position of lazing on the sofa. I watched as several computer-animated dogs in various work uniforms jumped clumsily across the screen. I sighed as I heard the sound of the front door closing. Alone again. I shoved another spoonful of cereal into my mouth and chewed angrily.
No one would have guessed, by how I handled myself at work, that I was completely distracted by thoughts of the night before and by the time the end of my shift rolled around I was feeling exhausted from faking a cheerful façade all day. That afternoon, Ned and I left work together and headed to Tesco to buy dinner and to peruse the bargain DVD shelves for our Friday night tradition of shitty film, beer and pizza. The rules were that the film had to be under five pounds and the pizza had to have garlic and herb dip; other than those two stipulations, we were pretty flexible.
I was reading the back of an early Noughties’ horror film, with a screaming, blood-spattered, scantily clad woman on the front, when my phone began buzzing in my pocket. I pulled it out and saw my mum’s face beaming at me from the screen. I accepted the video call and held the phone up.
‘Guten Abend,’ she said when her beaming face appeared. She looked beautiful, as always, her blonde hair coiffed to perfection, her green eyes twinkling in the muted lighting. Her phone was propped up on a crisp white tablecloth, so I got to see the whole envy-inducing image of her lounging in a warmly lit corner of a bustling restaurant.
‘Good evening to you too,’ I responded and tossed the film into my basket. ‘How’s Germany?’ I wished I could have been more specific but she moved around so much and with so little notice that if she hadn’t just greeted me in German, I would have completely forgotten where she was. It never used to bother me too much when I saw her off in all of these places that I had never even come close to, because I always thought that I’d be having my own adventure when the time was right. I’d thought that, eventually, my crippling fear of flying would subside and I’d be able to jet off wherever I wanted when the time came. But time had been and gone and I still hadn’t set foot very far outside the UK. So now, whenever she called from Germany or China or Denmark, I got a pang of FOMO in my gut that set me off kilter for a moment or two.
‘Cold,’ she answered. ‘Nothing much more to report. We’re wrapping up here and so I’m going to have some free time in the next month. Wondered if I could come and see you and crash in a spare bed?’
I sucked my teeth as I pretended to ponder the question and shook my head. ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s going to be possible.’
‘Damn it, the gutter it is then.’ We both chuckled and the sound of wine sloshing into a glass could be heard down the line.
‘Sounds like you’re enjoying yourself.’ I turned at the end of the aisle and made my way to the pizza section where Ned would, no doubt, be facing his weekly conundrum: four cheese or ham and mushroom.
‘I’m just out for drinks with a couple of co-workers.’ She picked up the phone and turned it to show me the other five people chatting animatedly at the table. I recognised one of them as Piero. She’d had a casual romance with him ever since they met on a job in Italy a few years ago. I’d never met him and I doubted I ever would. She liked him, but my mother’s true love was her work and no man was ever going to get between those two. She placed the phone back on the table and reclined in her chair. Her cream silk dress clinging to a body that a woman who never set foot in a gym had absolutely no right in having.
‘How are things with you? How’s Ned?’ she asked as she lifted a glass of red to her lips and sipped.
‘Ned’s fine. We’re just getting dinner.’ I didn’t carry on but something about the look on my face must have betrayed me.
‘What aren’t you telling me?’
I sighed and lowered my voice as I spoke. ‘I did something I shouldn’t have.’
‘Oh God, please tell me you didn’t. Not with Ned.’ Her eyes widened with genuine fear and she lowered her head into her free hand. She looked sickened. ‘Nelly. No.’
‘Ew, Mum, no,’ I said. Why was sex with Ned always the first place people’s minds went to? ‘It’s nothing to do with Ned at all. I kind of went on a date with a man I met over the phone at work.’
She almost choked on her second sip of wine. ‘You did what, Nelly?’
My mother was the only person on the planet that I allowed to call me Nelly and that was simply because she’d gone through the agony of birthing me. I’d escaped from school pretty unscathed in terms of bullies, but I think I’d been referred to as Nelly the Elephant about twenty thousand times between the ages of five and sixteen.
‘It’s a long story that didn’t end up going anywhere, so I’ll just fill you in when you get here. When will that be, exactly?’
‘You’ll know as soon as I do.’ Her eyes filled with pity. ‘Did you like this man, the one you went out with?’
I scrunched up my face and my voice turned to a whine. ‘I did.’
‘Well, I’m sorry it didn’t turn out how you wanted it to, but, Nelly, it’s so nice to know you’re back out there.’
‘God! Is everyone just waiting with bated breath for me to start dating again?’ Everyone was acting as if I’d just renounced my vow of chastity. I mean, she didn’t know about me and Joel restarting the physical side of things, but even so, it hadn’t been that long since I’d gone on that Tinder date with that overly handsy radiographer who kept tutting every time I neglected my coaster. But then again, maybe it was for the best that no one remembered that particular lapse in judgement.
‘Nelly, it’s been two years. You’ll be thirty soon and I just don’t want you ending up alone.’
‘You don’t mind being alone, neither do I,’ I argued.
‘I do mind, very much so. It’s just that my job and all the travelling don’t allow for that kind of thing.’ She sipped her wine again and gracefully tucked her hair behind her ear. ‘Anyway, I’ll let you know when I’ll be heading back to you.’ She tutted. ‘And, Nelly, don’t be sad about him. He’s an idiot if he didn’t fall head over heels for you, but maybe this was just the start of you stepping out again.’
At First Sight Page 5