Swipe Right

by Stephie Chapman

  ‘Right. Got it. Good thinking,’ I say.

  ‘I suppose you’d like a coffee?’ He pushes back the duvet and suddenly I’m cold.

  ‘Can I drink it in bed?’ I ask.

  ‘If you’re quick about it.’

  He stands at the foot of his bed and stretches and everything’s on show, and I pull the duvet back up to my chin and try to look cute.

  I kept hoping he’d change his mind, but an hour later I’m caffeinated up to the gills, hungry, and I’ve just said a hurried and fairly sullen goodbye to Lucas before he jogged off in the opposite direction towards the bus stop. Grumpy now, and feeling more than a little hard done by, I fumble around in my bag for a cigarette and stamp off towards the station, stopping off for a pain au chocolat on the way. Looks like it’s tarragon chicken and rice for one tonight.

  Chapter Eight

  Suze is abroad, Lydia’s busy doing spousy things with Jeff, and I’m still a little upset with Lucas, so I spend the rest of the weekend indulging in some me time, and by Monday the flat is spotless, all the laundry is up to date, the fridge is full and I’m back at work, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed early in the morning. The office is quiet as I walk in, and I stop and chat to Mindy for a few minutes.

  ‘Good weekend?’ she asks, brightly. ‘Hey, was that your boyfriend on Friday night? He’s nice, eh? Good work.’

  ‘Aw, yeah that’s Lucas,’ I say. ‘He’s alright when he wants to be.’ I shrug it off with a grin as if I’m being facetious because no one needs to know we’re not hugely simpatico right now. Fortunately, she takes it as such.

  ‘Aren’t they all?’ she laughs, and rolls her eyes. ‘Hey, there are croissants in the kitchen. I’d grab one whilst they’re still soft and warm.’

  ‘Oh, wow, I will do, thanks,’ I say, suddenly desperate for a mocha to dip one in.

  Back at my desk, with my pastry wrapped in a paper napkin and my coffee cooling down, I sit and make a list of all the things I want to achieve this week. I put on an uplifting playlist and listen through headphones whilst singing along, and soon I’m lost in it. I’m expanding on my lists, and using all our notes to write a detailed plan for our video. I’m sure it is hugely extra for a video short about cooking, but I want to set the bar high, and I want this project to go well. And anyway, a little bit of organisation never harmed anyone. As Lydia says, if you fail to prepare, then you’d better be prepared to fail.

  ‘I think perhaps you should have auditioned for The X Factor,’ Ollie says, tapping me on the shoulder, and I jump a mile. My hand knocks against my coffee cup and the drink spills over the side. ‘Easy, there,’ he says.

  I’m not sure if he’s being serious, and therefore complimentary, or joking around; I can hold a tune, but I’m no Adele. I suspect the latter.

  ‘Jesus, Ollie,’ I say, immediately yanking out my headphones and tossing them down on the desk. ‘Was it really necessary to creep up on me like that?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, petulantly. ‘I wasn’t trying to interrupt.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say, and suddenly I feel unkind. I didn’t mean to snap but I wasn’t expecting to see him so early. And I was hoping that when he did arrive, there’d be other people around to dilute his presence a little. Water it down and provide me with distractions. Because I think we need to address the mirror incident but I’m certainly not going to be the one to bring it up. It doesn’t look like he is, either, so maybe I’m reading too much into it. Maybe I read too much into it all yesterday when I was vacuuming the flat, and wiping down the bathroom, and watching Netflix. Maybe he was just staring into space, and not at me at all on Friday evening. Maybe he was having a silent seizure and my ego got the better of me. And if that’s the case, I absolutely cannot admit that I thought he was watching me, because if I did and he wasn’t, he’d never let me forget it. ‘How was your weekend? Friday evening was good, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah it was. We had a quiet one.’

  ‘Me too,’ I say, wiping up my spilt coffee.

  ‘You’re always spilling drinks,’ he says, loftily.

  ‘Only twice. And both times, you had something to do with it.’

  He smirks. ‘What are you up to there?’ he says, nodding at the screen and changing the subject.

  ‘Oh this? I’m just… being a bit extra. Trying to sort things out for the week.’

  ‘Looks to me like a treatment,’ he observes.

  ‘It is, I guess.’ I say and am immediately cross with myself for dumbing it, and my abilities, down. ‘Did you want to deal with all that then? Seeing as you’re the one with all the video experience.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ he asks, and quirks an eyebrow.

  Shit! Trust me to open my mouth. ‘You told me,’ I lie. He’s never really told me as such, but it’s all there to see on his LinkedIn profile and his Twitter account. Which I definitely did not look at yesterday afternoon with pitta bread and taramasalata and a glass of wine.

  ‘Right,’ he says, and I can’t look at him, because I just get the feeling that if I did, he’d know. He scans over everything I’ve written. ‘Looks pretty good, actually,’ he says. ‘Thorough. I mean, overkill for such a tiny pilot, but better to go in over prepared than under. Email it to me and I can add to it, if you like?’

  ‘Will do,’ I say. And then: ‘Why are you in so early, anyway? What time did you get here?’

  ‘About an hour ago, and probably the same reason as you,’ he shrugs, but unless he and Lou fell out and he came to work early to be around people whilst his flatmate is in California, I doubt it. ‘Just wanted to get ahead and make a good impression.’

  I bark out a laugh. I can’t help it.

  ‘What?’ he asks.

  ‘Ollie. You make a great impression and you know it. You’re here a week and you’ve got everyone eating out of the palm of your hand. It’s a little bit intimidating.’

  It’s true. All of it. He has. He settled in within mere seconds. He brought pastel de nata in for his team on Wednesday, and then a secret Slack channel appeared and a lot of chat went down about how lovely he is. How fit. How friendly. And on Friday, at the pub, he was enveloped into the fold like family. It’s not that I think I’m not fitting in, but it’s fair to say his charm has placed him streets ahead.

  ‘I mean, I can’t help that. What’s not to like?’ he grins, sitting back in his chair and folding his arms behind his head. ‘My mum raised me right.’

  ‘Yeah, a little friend to all the world,’ I say.

  ‘Oi, actually, that’s something I wanted to ask about.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘On Friday. At the pub. When your boyfriend arrived. And you introduced me to him as your friend.’

  ‘Yeah?’ I say. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing, I guess. But we’re not really friends, are we?’

  ‘What? Why wouldn’t we be?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Men and women can’t be friends. Not really.’

  ‘News to me, boyo,’ I swivel my chair so we’re facing each other, and rest my head on my arm. ‘Enlighten me, why can’t men and women be friends? That’s a pretty antiquated point of view, no?’

  Vaguely misogynistic, too, but calling people women-haters isn’t the best way to win friends and influence people.

  ‘Because in a friendship between two heterosexual people of the opposite sex, sex always gets in the way. Without fail. And then the friendship’s dead in the water. So it’s almost easier to not even pretend.’

  ‘Give me a break,’ I scoff. ‘Not everyone wants to sleep with you, Ollie; get over yourself.’

  He looks very solemn.

  ‘It’s true. You might as well call it like you see it. There’s always a tiny part of you that wonders, what if? What would happen if we threw all caution to the wind and just went there? What would that be like? How would things be afterwards? How would the dynamic change? Even if it’s just one percent of your brain. Or even just one fleeting thought. But
once you’ve had it, it never really goes away. It embeds itself. It grows. Slowly, maybe, but it does. And then it’s always there. And that’s why we’re not really friends.’

  ‘Really?’ I say, drily. ‘What if you don’t find them attractive?’

  ‘Admittedly it’s a bit easier if you don’t fancy them, but it still happens. It’s like those horrible thoughts that crop up out of nowhere at the vinegar stroke. Like of Thatcher or your nan.’

  I should be horrified. I am horrified. But he basically just implied he finds me attractive, and even though he’s being a pig, that’s thrilling.

  ‘You’ve thought about that, then?’

  ‘You and me? Making the beast with two backs? Sure.’ And he’s so comfortable with admitting this that for a few seconds I think he might be onto something. Until I remember that he referred to it as ‘making the beast with two backs’, and I want to be sick.

  ‘That’s gross,’ I say. ‘Don’t be that guy. At the very least, it’s not something you should admit. And you have a girlfriend.’

  ‘That’s a moot point. I’d never hurt Lou. She’s my absolute rock. But you can’t tell me you haven’t thought about other people when you’ve been with what’s his name? That, Fran, really is just human nature. I bet you’ve even thought about me. Us.’

  Looking in the mirror in the pub. Looking in the mirror in Lucas’ bedroom. His hands on me. His mouth on my neck and my earlobe, and me, remembering that look in the pub. Did I think about being with Ollie when I was having sex with Lucas? I can’t even remember now. I don’t think my head went there, but with him sitting in front of me now, I can’t be sure.

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  ‘So there we go. It’s the same thing.’

  ‘I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on that,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell you what we can agree on, though.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘We’re definitely not friends, and I promise never to introduce you as that again.’

  He looks at me, but he doesn’t say anything. And his eyes are exactly the same as they were on Friday evening. Green and clear and suddenly hollow, except this time there’s a lick of something else there. Something about the way his jaw is set and how his brow is a fraction furrowed suggests I’ve hurt him a bit.

  ‘Alright,’ he says, eventually. ‘I’ll let you get back to it then. Can you just email it over when you’re done and we can get started.’

  He wheels himself back to his desk, and he doesn’t look back over. Instead, he plugs his headphones into his computer and jams them into his ears. It’s a clear signal. I reach over and turn the volume up on my playlist again and now I’m reeling. Why do I feel like a giant bitch when he goaded me into it in the first place? Why do I get the feeling that he was trying to get a rise out of me, but when it came down to it, really didn’t like what I said? And much later on in the morning, after everyone’s in and we’ve chatted about our weekends and made coffee and finished up the pastries, and he talks to me again, he’s friendly but distant. There are no more questions about whether my internet search history includes him. No more chat about anything personal. Nothing much besides the video pilot. No joking or banter at all.

  But then why would there be when all we are is colleagues?

  Chapter Nine

  September

  It’s a Thursday afternoon, weeks on from that Monday morning conversation, and Ollie and I are definitely both pretending it never happened. I think we’re doing alright. Nothing was ever mentioned again, and we got on with forging the sort of relationship you have with people you work closely with. We casually compliment each other on our choice of clothes. We know how each other likes a cup of tea. We ask about each other’s weekends and evening plans and sometimes only half listen to the responses. Nothing was ever mentioned about the mirror incident, either, which was enough to convince me it didn’t mean anything to him.

  And as it turned out, our video pilot was a delicious hit, and the footage that came back from the team in LA was brilliant. Somehow they seem a little more polished over there. More like presenters. They’re slick. They throw in funny one-liners, and their facial expressions were, at times, hilarious. We sent them stargazey pie and they sent us Jell-O salad. I can’t comment on the pie, but jelly mixed with hacked up fruit and vegetables and cottage cheese is truly revolting.

  In any case Lexi and Lily are trying to become famous on the internet and they think the best way to go about this is by making videos of themselves lip-syncing to rap songs and uploading them. Carlina rolled her eyes and called them Tumblr girls, which I reckon, coming from her, is an insult but I can’t be sure. It’s a little unwarranted if it is; they’re not terrible, by any means. They’re just loud, and I’ve got stuff to do, so I take a laptop over to the corner of the office with the egg chairs, and settle in, cross-legged, with a can of Coke. And for a while it’s quiet and blissful. The egg chair blocks out all the rapping so it’s just a hum in the background. I like how enclosed I feel. How unseen and unwatched. It’s nice to be able to swivel around in my own little world. For a while I can crack on, jot down some ideas for an article and drag some stock photos for a quiz into a folder to use later on.

  ‘Fran, is that you? I think it is. I recognise your shoes,’ Ollie says, and then, more tentatively, ‘Or if it’s not Fran, do you know where she is?’

  Suddenly my peace is shattered. I poke my head around the side of the chair.

  ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘What’s up?’

  He drags the other egg chair over and sinks into it, and he mirrors my cross-legged position for a few seconds, but then stretches out his leg so that he’s resting his foot on my chair.

  ‘They are so noisy,’ he whispers and jerks his head back towards our desks.

  ‘Yeah,’ I agree. And then, careful with my words, because, after all, he does sit with them: ‘It’s fine though. I just needed some quiet to get some stuff done.’

  ‘Another video?’ he asks.

  ‘Nah. Something about the weird things that kids collect, and how they become massive crazes.’

  ‘Oh right,’ he says. ‘Well, I sort of came to see if you wanted to chat about another video.’

  ‘We can do that. I’ve hit a bit of a wall with this, anyway. What are you thinking?’

  ‘Well,’ he looks at me a little blankly. ‘As I see it, we have two options. Either we carry on and we’ll always use a team from here, or we pass the baton.’

  ‘Are you saying you don’t really want to carry on doing these with me, in a roundabout sort of way? Because option two would be exactly that, no?’

  ‘No. Not at all, Fran. I liked making that video with you. Why do you always go on the defensive?’

  ‘I don’t,’ I say defensively, and the irony of that isn’t lost on me. It’s not lost on Ollie either, if his smirk is anything to go by. ‘I was just asking in a poorly worded way what you’d rather do.’

  ‘I mean, like I said, I actually liked working with you.’ He swallows. ‘We… well, we made a pretty good team.’

  I feel like it’s killed him to admit that.

  ‘We did,’ I say.

  Lily and Lexi break into another song and it gives me an idea, and it’s one so blindingly obvious and so utterly brilliant that I don’t know why it never occurred to either of us before.

  ‘Hey, you know who should present the next one, don’t you?’

  He thinks about this for a few seconds, and then shrugs, and I use my foot to swivel his chair back towards the studio. They are harmonising the chorus now. Mickey is clapping along. ‘They want to be Insta-famous,’ I say. ‘What do you think? I reckon they’d be perfect.’

  ‘Fran!’ Ollie laughs. ‘That might actually be genius. They’re so on their own planet half the time. Have you seen that thing they do when they fit whole donuts in their mouths and video it?’

  ‘Yes! Why do they do that?’

  ‘They’re trying to make it a thing,’ he says, and shrugs.


  ‘Your team sounds wild,’ I laugh. ‘Have they succeeded in making it a thing?’

  ‘Hmmm. Well, no, not really. But I don’t think they’re ever getting famous off the back of stuffing things in their mouths.’

  ‘I dunno, it worked for Linda Lovelace,’ I say, and he snorts, and tells me I’m a funny fucker, and things feel easier between us than they have for a while. He opens a bottle of water and swigs from it.

  ‘So that’s settled then,’ he says, and I nod, and wait for him to say more. But he doesn’t. Instead, he sits back in his egg chair and swivels it from side to side, grinning at me, and after a few seconds I go back to my research.

  ‘Was that it?’ I ask, finally.

  ‘That was it about the vids,’ he says, and still he doesn’t move.

  ‘Did you want to talk about anything else? Like, maybe put another schedule together or what?’

  ‘What weird thing did you collect as a child?’ he asks, and I look at him for a few seconds before answering.

  ‘Marbles,’ I say finally, and he scoffs.

  ‘That, Fran, is not weird at all. That’s completely normal and almost a little bit dull, actually. You can do better than that.’

  ‘It’s not. I only collected the giant ones that looked like planets,’ I say, indignant now. ‘Not that I need to explain my collection choices to you.’

  ‘But you’re going to all the same. Why did you only collect the ones which looked like planets?’

  ‘Because I used to pretend they were their own little worlds, and I was the keeper of them. I took very good care of them. Blu-Tacked them to a shelf in my bedroom and everything, so they wouldn’t go missing. I used to dream up things that happened on these tiny worlds in my bedroom. Then I saw Men in Black and was convinced they’d stolen my idea for ages.’