Chapter 1
TOM
I’m sweating. Not a polite shimmer across the forehead, not a dignified glow. Sweating in that full-bodied, damp-shirt, regretting-my-life-choices way.
It’s the middle of July, thirty degrees outside, and somehow even hotter inside the sauna that is Revolution on Baldwin Street.
Whoever thought to host a speed dating night upstairs on the balcony should be charged with crimes against humanity.
Bristol’s early evening might be glittering outside, the bars humming with life on a sunny Thursday, but I’m trapped in a steam-bath-cum-enforced-small-talk-nightmare that serves overpriced cocktails in jam jars.
I tug at my shirt collar and silently curse myself for wearing pale blue cotton. The sweat patches are practically performance art by this point, a mood ring for anxiety. Although out of view, I can feel the damp vertical line spreading across my back, essentially waving at those behind me.
The long balcony bar has been stripped of its usual mid-week thrum and repurposed into speed dating central.
Fairy lights droop overhead, trying their best to look whimsical, but the overall effect is less romance in the city and more student union at closing time.
Tiny round tables dot the space, each with a number card propped up like they’re awaiting a pub quiz team.
I sit at table four, alone, pretending to read the “rules” sheet in front of me as if it contains spoilers for the end of Stranger Things. I already know the rules: five minutes per person, rotate when the bell rings, give them a tick if you fancy seeing them again.
Nothing complicated.
Except the dating itself, which is very complicated indeed. Complicated, gruelling, exhausting. Like trying to find love during a fire drill.
I scratch the stubble on my chin. It’s “deliberately rugged,” the sort of thing handsome men in coffee adverts have, but really it’s a by-product of a broken razor and an afternoon of talking myself into leaving the house.
My brown hair — flecked with grey that arrived uninvited and now refuses to leave — needs a trim.
It puffs at the ears like it’s trying to eavesdrop on better lives.
I’ve been here twelve minutes, avoiding eye contact with the other gentlemen as much as feasibly possible, while also taking in every inch of them without being clocked.
I scan the room, doing the mathematics nobody admits to doing.
Ten men.
I am, generously, attracted to three.
One is wearing a waistcoat without irony.
Another looks like he might be here because he got lost on his way to a Wetherspoons curry club.
And then there’s the wild card: a Chinese student who can’t be older than eighteen, to which no one has raised that it’s “30s I’m the kind of man people used to call “boy next door” although not since Britney last had a top ten hit.
But the kind eyes help. Strangers tell me things in queues.
A woman in Greggs once shared about sleeping with her boss’s wife while lining up for a vegan lattice.
Unfortunately, this is speed dating, not confessional, and what I mostly want right now is industrial air-con and a shirt the colour of camouflage.
I sigh and glance at the event host, a relentlessly chipper drag queen named Mercedes Bends, dressed head to toe in leopard print, with matching Bette Lynch hair, who looks like she runs on vodka Red Bull and healing crystals.
She claps her hands together. “Okay, everyone, places! Let’s make some magic! ”
Magic. Yes.
I came tonight with the sort of optimism normally reserved for lottery winners and labradors.
In my head, speed dating was going to be a glittering carousel of possibility, a human pick-and-mix where somewhere between “semi-professional magician” and “accountant with a good pension plan” I’d stumble upon The One.
I pictured fireworks, violins, perhaps even a story we could one day tell at our wedding — “We only had five minutes, but that’s all true love ever needs. ”
In reality, of course, I’m wedged into a sticky chair on an overheated balcony, praying my deodorant has more stamina than I do. But still—hope dies hard, and I came prepared to meet my Disney prince, even if the universe had only packed me ten dwarves.
I look over the edge of the balcony to the bar below. At least there’s a practical escape route if it all gets too uncomfortable, albeit slightly extreme.
My first date is an IT Consultant called Gareth, 37.
“So, what do you do?” Gareth asks, leaning forward with the enthusiasm of a man who probably has very strong opinions about HDMI cables.
Here it comes.
The part where I have to explain my life in thirty-second soundbites, as if condensing forty-two years of awkwardness and mild trauma into a LinkedIn summary.
“I, um, work in finance,” I say automatically, though that’s not true anymore. “Well, I did. Took a step back recently. Bit of time off.”
“Burnout?” Gareth asks.
“Death of my father, actually,” I reply. Because why not drop a conversational anvil in the first thirty seconds?
Gareth blinks. “Right. Sorry.”
I force a smile. “It’s fine. I’m doing the whole self-care thing. Yoga, journaling, trying to find love in a bar that smells faintly of J?gerbombs. You know. Wellness.”
Gareth nods politely.
“And do you like gerbils?” he asks, as if it’s a perfectly sensible segue from parental death response.
“Gerbils?” I ask, my forehead turning into a scrunchy.
“Well, I have gerbils,” Gareth says, with the expression of a serious gerbil owner.
“Gerbils? Like plural?” I ask, wondering why I need this clarity.
“Yes, I have fourteen of them. But they’re all very friendly.”
“Oh good,” I faux-engage.
“Apart from Betty, but she can get anxiety during the winter months.”
I consider the over-the-balcony escape route, settling for mentally scrubbing Gareth off the list with three and a half minutes left to go.
Date two is Marcus, a 40-year-old property developer, originally from Windsor.
He spends at least four and a half minutes talking about his buy-to-let portfolio and how “Brexit was actually a good thing if you knew how to play it right.” I spend four and a half minutes imagining Marcus being chased through the streets of Stokes Croft by his tenants with rolling pins following the latest rent hike.
Bell rings. Mercifully.
Date three: Alex, 40, nurse.
Finally. Someone I actually find attractive. Alex has glorious eyes and a soothing smile. I feel my face reddening and my chest tightening like it’s 2002 and I’m buying condoms and lube in Boots.
I can barely make eye contact. I tug my shirt away from my chest and vow never again to trust a weather app that says feels like 25°C. It feels like an air fryer.
“So, what’s your story?” Alex asks, eyes twinkling.
Here it comes again. My story. I have so many versions of it, depending on who’s asking. Tonight’s version: “Forty-two, Bristol-born, divorced, currently on a sabbatical. Bit of a hopeless romantic.”
“Divorced?” Alex raises an eyebrow.
“Ten years together. Married at thirty, divorced at forty. Very amicable.”
That’s a lie. It wasn’t amicable.
It was Daniel.
Daniel who controlled the money, the holidays, the thermostat. Daniel who called me “too sensitive” so often that I started to believe it was stamped on my DNA. But I don’t say that here.
Instead, I shrug. “We’re still friends.”
Another lie. I haven’t spoken to Daniel in months. But it’s easier to pretend, in five-minute chunks, that I’m a functional adult with healthy breakups.
Alex smiles. “At least you know what you want now, right?”
I want to say Yes. I want Disney-princess love. I want a grand sweeping romance with fireworks and orchestras and the kind of sex that makes the neighbours complain.
Instead, I say, “Yes. Something like that.”
Bell rings. Alex squeezes my hand like he’s consoling my whole existence, before moving on. I’m left staring at the sweat marks on my notepad where my palm rested.
The dates blur together after that.
A man who talks exclusively about CrossFit. Another who calls himself “sapiosexual” and makes it sound like a medical condition. One who is actually quite nice but looks disturbingly like my uncle.
By the end of round ten, I feel like I’ve run a marathon in conversational small talk. My smile muscles ache. My shirt could be wrung out over a houseplant.
Mercedes Bends bounces past, sequins around her deep eye makeup catching the light. “Well, how did we do tonight?”
I muster a grin. “I think my soulmate might have been at Wagamama instead.”
She laughs, not unkindly, and hands me my scorecard. “Fill it in anyway. You never know.”
But I do know. I know I’ll tick maybe one or two names, they won’t tick me back, and I’ll get the dreaded “Thanks for coming!” email tomorrow.
I sit, pen hovering, and tick Alex, because those eyes. I hesitate over the nice one who looks like Uncle Stephen and, despite these desperate times, decide incest-adjacent is not a kink I need to unlock.
After the dates, the evening should continue with all the guys coming together to chat some more, but after pretending to go to the bathroom, I bolt out the door like I’ve just nicked a mug from Starbucks.
Walking through the city, I find myself by the harbourside; the place is buzzing — laughter, music, the clink of glasses. Life carrying on elsewhere while I marinate in my own mediocrity.
I catch my reflection in a dark shop window: the kind eyes, the fluffed-out hair, the sweat halo.
Not unhandsome, I decide, in the way a mid-renovation kitchen is not unliveable.
I lift my chin and try to see myself the way I hope someone else might: a good man, a little dented, a little anxious, funny if you know where to look.
The sort you could bring home and I’d notice the wobbly shelf and fix it without being asked.
A couple brushes past, laughing into each other’s shoulders. I want that—shoulder laughter, the nose-snorting kind. I want a kiss I can hear. I want a hand to take without a seminar on terms and conditions.
And then, for some reason, I’m thinking of Daniel. Ten years married, ten years of subtle control. I had mistaken it for love, once. Mistaken being managed for being cherished. By the time I left, I was in pieces. Two years later, the pieces still don’t fit back together.
My dating life since: a parade of men with exit strategies.
The ghoster who said “I’m just so busy” and then posted hourly from Ibiza.
The one who cried at dessert because he wasn’t over his ex (I paid; of course I paid).
The man who brought his mother to the third date because “she has great instincts about people” and whose mother referred to me as “nice.”
Nice. Jesus. The worst word in dating. You may as well just write BEIGE on my forehead with a Sharpie.
I laugh bitterly to myself. If there’s a god of romance, he must have me on some kind of watchlist.
Love, it seems, is still on back order.