Chapter 1 #2
“I’m not finished.” He sets the glass down. “I also think sensible is not always as noble as people pretend.”
I let that sit between us for a moment.
The stupid thing is, I know exactly what he means.
Safe has always been easier to dress as responsible.
Before I can say anything, Becca reappears with fresh drinks, nudging mine towards me. “There. Another pint for the man of the hour.”
“Please never call me that again.”
“You are so difficult to celebrate.”
“I’m easy to celebrate,” I say. “I’m just hard to sentimentalise.”
“Same difference.”
The table pulls me back in after that. Somebody asks Luke about his next book and he launches into a scathing assessment of police procedure in contemporary fiction that is, regrettably, fascinating.
Then Julia tells a story about a cover meeting gone wrong involving a shirtless duke, a peacock, and a font choice that nearly ended in violence.
I laugh, properly this time, and feel some of the tightness in my chest loosen.
Maybe this is all nerves. Maybe moving to another country is meant to feel like stepping out onto a bridge in the fog.
It is a decent thought.
Shame I do not quite believe it.
An hour later the first wave of departures begins. Trains. Babysitters. Dogs that apparently cannot be left emotionally unsupported for too long, which makes me feel a grudging kinship with them.
There are hugs. So many hugs.
I endure them with reasonable grace.
Becca clings to me for a second longer than necessary. “You better send photos.”
“Of Toronto?”
“Of everything. Your flat. Your office. Your winter wardrobe when you inevitably realise London has not, in fact, prepared you for Canada.”
“I already own a coat.”
She laughs into my shoulder. “I’m going to miss you.”
Something twists lightly in my chest. “I’m going to miss you too.”
She lets go and pulls a face. “Ugh. Hate this. Right. Bye.”
Once she is gone, the others follow quickly. More handshakes, more promises to visit, more joking threats to send manuscripts across the Atlantic at unreasonable hours. Then it is just me and Luke at the table, surrounded by empty glasses and the debris of a thoroughly civilised evening.
He glances at his watch. “Do you need me to continue supervising your emotions, or are you all right from here?”
“That depends. Are you charging by the hour?”
“I should.”
“I’ll risk it, then.”
He stands, shrugging on his coat. “Send me your Toronto address when you’ve got one. I need to know where to direct my complaints.”
“You can send them by email like a normal person.”
“I could,” he says, “but then I’d lose the pleasure of imagining them crossing an ocean.”
I stand as well. “Safe journey home.”
He pauses, then gives me a look that is almost kind if you are willing to squint at it hard enough.
“If you get there and hate it,” he says, “try admitting that before stubbornness turns it into a personality trait.”
I hold his gaze for a second. “Goodnight, Luke.”
“I’ll miss you,” he mutters, and heads for the door.
I watch him go with a small smile.
Then the smile fades, because the table is empty now and the evening, stripped of noise and obligation, is suddenly what it has been all along.
A goodbye.
To colleagues, to London, and to a version of my life that calcified so slowly I almost failed to notice.
I pick up the abandoned beer mat in front of me and turn it over in my hands. The edge is damp. Someone has drawn a wonky heart on it in blue biro. Probably Becca. She is emotionally indiscriminate like that.
I should leave.
Instead, I find myself looking towards the bar.
The pub is still busy, though the crowd has shifted older, looser, more intent on the business of a Friday night becoming something slightly less respectable. Couples lean towards each other under low lights. Friends spill laughter into corners.
I smile to myself and then, before I can think better of it, head to the bar for one last drink.
It is not because I am avoiding going home.
That would be absurd.
I weave through the crowd and claim a patch of polished wood between a woman in red lipstick and a man with forearms like he chops wood recreationally. The bartender is somewhere near the other end, pouring Guinness with the concentration of a surgeon. I lean an elbow on the bar and wait.
This is usually the part of the evening where I feel most conspicuously single.
Not in a tragic way. I am too old to turn being single into performance art. More in the quiet, observational sense. A room full of people becomes very obvious in its pairings once you notice them. People arriving together, leaving together, speaking to each other with shorthand built over time.
I date. I am not some monastic figure haunting North London with only a hamster for company. I have apps. I have had short relationships, decent sex, and the occasional run of dates that began well and then quietly died of mutual underwhelm.
At some point in the last few years, I seem to have become a man other men like in theory. Intelligent. Funny. Together. Reasonably attractive, provided one is not exclusively interested in gym-sculpted torsos and jawlines that look allergic to cake.
I do all right.
But there is a difference between being wanted and having someone know you beyond the convenient parts. Perhaps I have spent too long making peace with the first because it asks less of me than the second.
The thought annoys me enough that I almost order a whisky instead of a pint.
The bartender finally makes it over. “What can I get you?”
“Another pint of Stella, please.”
He nods and turns away.
I glance down the bar, mostly to give myself something to do, and that is when I notice him.
Taller than most of the people around him.
Broad through the shoulders. Dark T-shirt stretched across a body that looks built rather than cultivated, his leather jacket slung over the back of his chair.
Ink covers both arms, disappearing beneath the sleeves.
His head is clean-shaven, his profile all hard lines and quiet focus as he listens to whatever story is being told.
He laughs at something his friend says and dimples appear.
Dimples.
That feels almost unfair on a man who is otherwise shaped like he could carry a washing machine by himself.
I look away at once, because apparently I am eighteen again.
The bartender sets down my drink. I thank him, reach for my card, and tell myself with great firmness that I am not standing at a bar in Islington getting distracted by a complete stranger who could be married and have four adorable little monsters.
It means nothing. Just one fit bloke in a pub.
Men are attractive all the time. London is full of them. It would be deeply impractical to respond to each one like a virgin with a weak constitution.
I turn slightly to make room for someone passing behind me and catch, in the mirror backing the bar, the exact moment the stranger lifts his head and looks in my direction.
For a beat I assume he is looking past me.
Then his gaze lands, and something in my stomach gives a small, interested turn.
I pick up my pint, far more aware of myself than I was ten seconds ago, and glance over because I am, at heart, still an optimist where bad ideas are concerned.
Up close, or close enough, he is even more arresting. Ice-blue eyes. Strong nose. Mouth that looks as though it is used to smiling but not cheaply. There is steadiness to him. Not swagger. Not that brittle sort of confidence some men wear like aftershave.
This is worse, frankly.
He looks like the kind of man who means things.
His friend says something to him, but he doesn’t answer straight away. He is still looking at me, not rudely, not boldly even, just with a sort of calm interest.
I should turn away.
I don’t.
Then his mouth curves, small and knowing, and I feel the answering flicker of a smile threaten at the corner of mine before I can stop it.
Oh, this is absolutely not what I need.
I am leaving the country in five days.
I have a packed life, a moving checklist, a perfectly respectable amount of emotional avoidance to maintain.
I do not need a stranger with blue eyes and forearms like original sin looking at me as if he has already decided I am worth walking over for.
And yet, absurdly, embarrassingly, the first thing I feel is not alarm.
It is wakefulness.
As though some part of me that has been sitting quietly in the dark for far too long has just lifted its head.
I take a sip of my drink, buying myself a second.
When I lower the glass, he is still watching me.
This time, I smile first.