Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
S aturday was here at last. Harry had confirmed yesterday, so everything was on.
I was in a bit of a weird mood, as I was still thinking about Mum and Neil at the club last night.
I just presumed it was a bucket-list thing.
In fact, it was no different to me. I’d finally ticked off the sex club.
It was something I’d always wanted to try, but like all fantasies, it just wasn’t as good as the version I had locked away in the safety of my brain, mainly due to Neil and Mum turning up.
Just before I was about to leave and pick up Harry, I received a WhatsApp message.
‘Hey! Hope you’re still on for meeting up. I booked a hotel in South Kensington. Is that near you? Anyway, thought we could share the room. Hope we can hang out a lot!’
Oh, shit. I had some ‘online only’ things going on with a couple of guys––as you do.
Even when you seem to have found someone that was relationship eligible, I still somehow felt the need to keep a couple of online back-ups––just in case it all went tits-up.
I had been messaging someone on my ‘subs’ bench’ called Werner over the last few weeks, but since I thought that I could be heading for potential ‘in a relationship’ Facebook status, I had kind of forgotten about him.
He was a German guy from Berlin that I had been having a sext only relationship with.
I had been distracted over the last few weeks with other stuff (dates) and had totally forgotten about him mentioning that he was coming to the UK.
I also forgot that he had made it clear that he was mostly here to see me.
Judging from the location of the hotel that he’d booked, he had clearly spent quite a bit of cash as well.
He was also expecting to hang out ‘a lot’ as he put it.
Immediately, I put myself in his position.
Imagine if you went over to meet someone in a foreign land and spaffed shedloads of money booking a plush hotel, only to find out that they had started seeing someone else and had completely blown you off. Horrible.
So, merely trying to be nice, I messaged back:
‘Cool! See you next week… looking forward to it!’
I figured that the least I could do was meet up with him. If things went well with Harry today, then I’d just find a way of sneaking off for an evening with Werner and avoid kissing or having sexy times with him for moral reasons. Easy.
But for now, I had to concentrate on tarting myself up for Harry.
I had drawn the short straw to drive, and we were off to a country pub for lunch in the bizarrely spelt Meopham, in Kent. Apparently, Deal wasn’t as nice as Harry had initially thought. I picked him up and he slid into my passenger seat with all of the elegance of a floating swan.
“Ooh, what’s this on the floor?” he asked as he picked up the screwed-up parking permit from the sex club that I’d completely forgotten to dispose of.
“Oh, that’s just a parking permit for a charity I do some voluntary work for from time to time. Disadvantaged kids and that.”
“Sounds like a sex club, ha-ha!” said Harry, eyeing the ambiguous ‘Sunseekers’ logo.
He wore the sort of expression that looked like he knew I was talking out of my arse. He could tell I wasn't the type to do charity work, and he knew that I knew he knew, but we closed the subject immediately and hit the road.
An hour and a half later, we hit the mean street of Meopham.
It literally was one street, and for the record, it didn't really look mean––there were way too many immaculately pruned trees for that. Harry’s aunt and uncle lived around there when he was growing up, and he loved this pub.
He thought it’d make a great date destination.
When we arrived, I couldn't have agreed more.
Well, that was until I saw a very familiar face.
Birthday Boy Frank from the Sunseekers Club sans Sara Lee birthday cake was only sitting at a table full of meaty-looking chaps.
He was obviously continuing his birthday celebrations and seemed to be in a particularly jovial and social mood, which meant that if he were to see me he would definitely be popping over to our table for a catch-up.
As their table got rowdier, I became less and less relaxed. It put an enormous strain on our date as Harry noticed that I had become increasingly distant.
I’d opted to face Frank and his cronies, because I just wanted to see what was going on. I couldn’t face that tap on the shoulder without having those vital few seconds to prepare something in my head about how I knew him, or give him a subtle nod warning him to keep it zipped about last night.
I had positioned my head right in front of Harry’s.
His hair was big enough to hide my face.
Even so, I could see heads turning out of the corner of my eye, and was dreading them all coming up and ruining my life with my possible future husband.
The only way to resolve this would be to somehow have a word with Frank before he could cause any damage, so I seized my moment when I saw him go to the toilet, and followed him in there.
“Oh, I thought it was you, boy,” he said cheerfully.
“Yes. It is me. Listen, I’m kind of on a non-sex-based date here, and I’m not sure he’s into the whole erm…” I made a circle out of my left finger and thumb making a weird squawky sex noise, then poked my right finger through it repeatedly.
“Ah... gotcha, son. Say no more, your secret’s safe with me,” he said, tapping the side of his bulbous boozer nose.
“Cool. Thanks. Thanks so much. Oh, and happy birthday… for yesterday.”
“Cheers, boy. Good luck with him, mate. He’s a right sort. I mean, if you’re into that sort of thing.”
“Thank you. That's really kind of you to say, I think.”
With that, he stumbled out the door, and I went back to our table super-relaxed and totally on form. The connection was back between us and the flirting had increased as much as it possibly could when I wasn’t drinking.
I asked him why he had changed his tune about going out with me again. It turned out that, like me, he’d exhausted himself with the London dating scene. He was fed up of continually searching for something better, and even suggested that we were all being brainwashed into using these sites .
“Maybe it’s a government ploy to stop us breeding,” I suggested.
“What, you mean they’re just getting us all addicted to these sites so we never find anyone to get married to and make babies?” He gasped. “It’s population control. Genius. Nice and subtle, so nobody realises what’s going on,” he continued.
“And maybe they send out agents just to go on shit dates with people so that we eventually lose faith and become celibate, eh?”
“Okay, that's a bit far-fetched,” he said.
He sucked some gin & tonic through his straw and winked at me. We smiled at each other, shared a momentary silence, then he leaned over and kissed me. Then he uttered the words that everyone wanted to hear on a good date. The old classic:
“I’ve been wanting to do that all afternoon.”
Ahhh!
We finished our meal and decided that when we got back to London we should dump the car, go out, and get good and drunk, even though Harry had had a fair few G&Ts already.
As we left the pub, I completely took leave of my senses due to all the excitement, and forgot that I was pretending not to know Frank.
“See you later, mate,” I said, giving him a friendly wave.
Shit the bed.
“Be lucky, son. Good to see ya,” he replied.
Harry stopped, looked at me, and I almost walked into him, ushering him out of the pub as quickly as I could.
“Do you know that bloke?” he asked.
“Er… yeah, he used to be my… dentist. Weird, eh?” I lied.
“Oh. He seems a bit...”
“Edgy for a dentist? I know. Mad, eh? ”
“This country.” He laughed.
Good. He seemed to buy that load of horseshit, so I hurried him back to the car and drove off back to London.
When we returned to my flat, we decided to have a kiss outside. And my word, it was another great kiss, bringing back memories of rolling on the floor at Corky’s wine bar all those weeks ago. Oh, did I not mention that bit before?
But whilst we were immersed in passion, some cheeky little Herbert had decided to whip his manbag from the front seat of my car like something out of the beginning of a Dirty Harry movie.
We were so engrossed in what turned out to be the perfect kiss, that he was in and out like a ninja.
Because of that, there was no time to reflect on the kiss now.
The robbery really spiked my adrenaline, and left me super focused.
Harry had the bright idea of tracking his iPhone signal from his work phone which was plugged into my car stereo.
Then we managed to tail the thief to Finsbury Park of all places to perform a kind of mild stakeout, until the police arrived a while later thanks to me and my contacts. Well, my brother.
Harry seemed to think that it would be a bad idea for me to tackle the criminals without police protection, especially as my karate skills were limited to non-existent.
I hardly thought that my white belt-second mon in judo was going to cut the mustard either.
By the time the police arrived on the scene, the criminals turned off the phone anyway and had probably scarpered somewhere else.
“Do I know you from somewhere?” asked the female officer.
I remained purse-lipped, knowing damn well that she did and from somewhere not too far from here and not too long ago .
Harry decided to stay at my flat and we ended up not having sex but still enjoying ourselves.
We’d already done some sexy stuff before, and I was geared up to the nines with condoms and lube, so I wasn't entirely sure why we didn't do anything. I had my suspicions that it was G&T related, as he wasn’t long for the land of nod.
We had brunch the next day, and to my delight, he didn't even take a picture of his meal. Apparently, he only used his Instagram account to follow crazy animals and accounts that contained videos of people falling over. What a guy.
A third date was secured and everything seemed like it was going to plan. The only thing that I had left to do out in the field was to go out with Werner and not have sex with him. Only then would I be free to fully escape the Alcatraz of online dating.