Wild About You

Prologue

FLAVIA – TWELVE YEARS AGO

‘Do you think twenty-two is too young to meet The One?’ My best friend Jenna smiles dreamily as she hands me a very soap-suddy glass to dry.

Our landlord has been promising to mend our dishwasher the entire time since we moved into our flat six weeks ago.

In the meantime, we’re washing everything up by hand, which has been totally fine until now, because we’ve both been doing a summer job in a pub and have had a lot of spare time during the day for chores, plus we haven’t been cooking much anyway, so there haven’t been that many dirty dishes.

Today, though, we woke up – heads sore, eyes gritty and mouths woolly – to an actual mountain of washing up.

We hosted a party last night and somehow an incredible number of used glasses ended up in our kitchen.

We don’t know where they all came from, but we do know they all have to be washed up immediately because they’re attracting wasps, and we can’t close the window to keep them out, because it’s one of London’s hottest Augusts ever and our flat is boiling (not to mention reeking of stale alcohol, crisps and a touch of vomit).

We’ve been at it for a good hour now, taking it in turns to wash and dry, and there’s still no end in sight, and if I’m honest it’s making us regret some of our party-planning decisions.

‘No?’ I say, because obviously Jenna can only be asking the question with that faraway look in her eye if she does in fact think she’s met her One.

I mean, yes, of course twenty-two is too young to meet The One.

Most people of our age still have so much to do before they settle down.

In our case, we’re both starting our first full-time jobs next week, having done three-year degrees at uni followed by a year-long teacher training course, and we both have lots of travel plans, adventure plans, plans we haven’t even thought of.

We’ll probably be completely different people in a few years’ time and our ideas about who our One is will no doubt be completely different too.

I mean, obviously some people meet their One when they’re young.

Like my Italian grandparents. They met at a dance when they were nineteen and seventeen and have just had a big and very happy sixtieth wedding anniversary party.

But maybe they were just naturally more mature or something.

Or they had different lives: neither of them went to university and they didn’t have the opportunity to travel until they were much older and had done their growing up together.

Maybe the earlier you start work and live independently, the earlier you grow up.

If I’m honest, I don’t feel remotely grown-up yet, and while I do adore Jenna, I don’t think she’s anywhere near a fully fledged adult either.

I mean, we can’t even get our landlord to sort basic household appliances for us and we don’t even know why our kitchen is filled with literally one hundred and forty-two glasses (we counted).

Or what we’re going to do with them when they’re all clean and dry.

‘Really?’ Jenna continues. ‘You mean it?’

‘Totally.’ I nod, looking round the kitchen for a spare surface where I can place the latest dry glass. Eventually I get a chair to put it on top of one of the wall cupboards. Eurgh, eurgh, eurgh. It’s sticky up there. I get down again and look for a cloth to clean it.

‘Good. Because I think I met him yesterday in Tesco. His name’s Pranav and he’s gorgeous. And funny. And very interesting. And we had the exact same three items in our baskets.’

‘Wow.’ I climb up again and scrub the top of the cupboard. ‘That’s amazing. What were the three items?’

‘Special-offer penne, carrots and chicken Kyivs.’

‘You can’t eat pasta with chicken Kyivs.’

‘The pasta was more of a long-term purchase because I’m a mature adult who plans for the future – and it was on special offer. And Pranav bought his for the exact same reason.’

‘Serendipity,’ I say, obviously not actually meaning it.

‘I know. I think I’m going to marry him,’ she says, entirely sincerely.

I blink, because that’s a lot to take in on a hangover, and, also, it’s clearly just not true.

‘Wow,’ I repeat eventually. ‘That’s so exciting.’

‘Yeah.’ Jenna’s gone off into her own dreamy world again.

I really hope she isn’t going to get hurt.

Clearly this isn’t going to be a happily-ever-after thing.

Even if some people do meet their forever person at our age they don’t fall in love in the space of five minutes in a supermarket aisle, however much they might share the same taste in dried pasta stockpiling and chicken Kyivs.

* * *

A month later, that morning standing washing and drying glasses in our kitchen feels like it was a lifetime ago.

Jenna is now fully loved up with Pranav, and it’s kind of as though they’ve been together for years. (I’m almost prepared to admit I was wrong to scoff at the idea of love at first sight in Tesco.)

And I have now spent three weeks teaching history to a variety of secondary-school year groups and I have aged.

I am really not a morning person but I have learnt how to get out of bed on time (more or less) every day.

I have discovered that I adore teaching and that I love the range of personalities, abilities and levels of interest that my pupils display.

And I have discovered that work-related admin is torture and that teachers really do have a lot of it to do, even very junior ones like me.

Overall, all good, though. Better than good.

I feel extremely lucky to have found a job that feels so exactly right for me straight off.

I still want to travel, but I’m in far less of a hurry now.

I want to get firmly established in my career first.

Right now, I’m in my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house in the Cotswolds, applying mascara and lipstick before I go downstairs for my dad’s birthday party.

It’s his fifty-sixth, obviously not the usual candidate for a big celebration, but he’s just recovered from a ten-day hospitalisation for a very nasty bout of pneumonia, which came out of nowhere, and really threw all of us, and my mum’s making a big fuss of him for his birthday, with a party this weekend.

I apply a second coat of lipstick and do a little twirl for myself in the mirror. I’m wearing a new dress that I bought out of my first ever pay cheque (couldn’t really afford it but it was so cool to be paid that I had to celebrate) and I love it. And then off I go downstairs.

And as I reach the bottoms of the stairs I walk slap bang into the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen.

He’s tall. Broad but not too much. Thick, dark, slightly curly hair.

Tanned skin. A really nice smile that grows slowly as we lock eyes, and does all sorts of things to my insides.

A tiny bit of stubble that makes me wonder what it would be like to kiss him (which really is not something I usually think about complete strangers).

He’s also around my age. How can he possibly be a friend of my parents? Has he strayed into the wrong house?

We smile at each other without speaking for a ridiculously long time before I say, ‘Hello,’ which is apparently the best conversation I can manage.

He laughs. Obviously, his laugh is perfect. Low, rumbly, infectious.

‘Hello,’ he replies. Then he sticks his out his hand (which is perfectly shaped, it goes almost with saying, big but quite slim, nice and strong-looking, with short and clean nails) and leans forward in an air-kiss stance.

I put my hand into his and proffer my face and we shake hands while our cheeks graze.

I try to ignore the actual tingle that spreads through my entire body at his touch.

‘I’m Flavia,’ I say, feeling weirdly bold, like I’m coming onto him, except actually it’s entirely normal to introduce yourself at a party at your parents’ house.

‘I know.’ His smile reaches his eyes immediately, and I smile in response, before registering that it’s odd that he knows my name.

Or maybe it isn’t odd; he must, despite his youth, be a friend of my parents (and why shouldn’t people have cross-generational friendships), and they probably told him about me.

I’m about to ask how he knows them, and what his name is, but am interrupted by some other guests, and then we’re both swept into my parents’ open-plan kitchen-diner-living room, and then out into the garden beyond, and then I’m busy greeting family and friends and he’s with other people and it feels like that’s that.

Except, I’m pleased to say, I find myself next to him when we’re all queuing for the barbecue.

‘So what are you up to now?’ he asks.

‘Erm.’ I’m disappointed. I was expecting better chat than this from him. ‘Waiting for my food?’

‘Ha. Yeah, no. I meant what are you up to now with uni, work, that kind of thing?’

It’s weird how he’s phrased it like we know each other. The now is strange. When you meet someone for the first time surely you just say something like: so what do you do? Not: what do you do now?

I study him more closely. He does look slightly familiar.

‘Have we met before?’ I ask.

‘Is that a serious question?’

‘Yes?’ I screw my face up because I’m getting the impression that I’m being very rude, as in totally failing to recognise someone I actually know, but, also, how is that remotely possible?

Did we once meet when I was very drunk or something and I’ve completely forgotten?

And really? I cannot believe I would forget someone as extremely gorgeous as him.

I mean, call me shallow, but honestly, he’s made a big impression on me now and I can’t imagine what state I’d have to be in not to notice his extreme sex-on-legness.

‘Oh my God, you actually don’t know who I am, do you?’ He laughs his sexy laugh, and I laugh too, because it’s infectious.

‘Noooo,’ I admit.

‘I’m Dominic Rock.’