After a bit of a gloomy start to the month, London decides to pull out all the stops for my first date with Johnny. A freshly laundered sky. Bright sunshine. A balmy twenty-four degrees. It’s one of those perfect summer days that makes you fall back in love with the city that held you hostage all winter and dicked you around for most of spring.
In celebration of the weather, we choose to meet for a drink at a local pub on the river. Everyone has had the same idea and it’s jammed with people. I look around me – at the crowds spilling onto the terrace outside with their smiles and pints and Aperol Spritz, and back to Johnny sitting opposite me at the wooden table. The happiness is palpable.
‘So, tell me, how can you be single?’ he’s asking now, as we work our way through a bottle of wine and I officially decide there’s nowhere I’d rather be than here, with him, wearing a summer dress and drinking rosé.
‘Same reason as someone like you,’ I fire back.
‘Because you haven’t met the right person yet?’ He raises an eyebrow.
‘Do you reckon everyone says that?’
‘Well, it’s a lot better than saying you cheated, or you’re an alcoholic, or your last partner dumped you because you have a weird sex fetish.’
‘True,’ I laugh, before adding, ‘why, do you have a weird sex fetish?’
He laughs. ‘Only sometimes.’
‘And what would that be?’ I’m tipsy and flirting.
‘I have this weird attraction to women who only wear one glove.’
I groan. ‘I walked right into that one, didn’t I?’
‘I think you could say I led you,’ he replies, quick as a flash.
‘But now I have a pair, remember? So you’re cured.’
The corners of his mouth turn up in a smile. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’ He goes to fill up our glasses, but there’s only a few drops left. ‘I think we need another bottle.’
‘I can’t believe we’ve drunk all that already.’
‘Flirting’s thirsty work,’ he quips.
Bloody hell.
As soon as he makes his excuses and disappears to the bar, I bolt for the ladies’. I’m dying to use the bathroom but, more importantly, I’m dying to call Liza. I can’t quite believe it! Talk about chemistry. I couldn’t have hoped for a better first date. As soon as I walked into the pub and Johnny greeted me with a smile, any fears or nervousness I might have felt disappeared. There was an instant ease between us. Well, I suppose seeing someone naked does break the ice.
We hit the ground running. I told him a bit about my childhood, growing up, working as an editor and moving to New York, and about my recent move back from the States. Admittedly I did give him the edited version, but doesn’t everyone give a sort of ‘greatest hits’ of their life when they first meet someone? Who needs to hear the crappy B-sides?
He described his childhood growing up in Surrey with his sister, how he used to be a professional tennis player – ‘nothing up to Wimbledon standards’, but it paid for a deposit on his house and he got a few trophies ‘for my mum to polish’. Now he works as a tennis coach at a private club, ‘when I’m not taking my clothes off’, he grinned, and has ambitions to open a vinyl-record store on the high street. He is funny and self-deprecating and attractive, and most definitely single after breaking up with his girlfriend of two years, who recently moved back to Canada.
‘It seems too good to be true,’ I say, calling Liza from inside the cubicle.
‘Stop being such a pessimist. Not all men are bastards. Just the ones I fall for.’
‘I’m just scared, that’s all. Of getting hurt again . . .’
I finish weeing and flush the loo.
‘I think I like him.’
‘How much have you had to drink?’
‘Two glasses of wine.’
‘Have another.’
I wash my hands and peer at my reflection in the mirror. Luckily the wine has taken the edge off it and I feel all fuzzy and soft-focused. I put on a bit of lip gloss, fluff my hair and go back into the pub. I spot Johnny sitting in the corner on one of those squashy button-back leather sofas.
‘It was getting a little cool out there. I thought this might be a bit cosier.’
He’s already filled up my glass, and as I squeeze past the low table and sit down next to him, my bare leg presses against his.
‘Thanks,’ I smile, accepting the glass from him and taking a large mouthful. He’s bought Côtes de Provence. The palest kind; it goes down like water.
‘This reminds me of when you and I met, when you were sitting in the corner at the pub—’
‘Yes, I remember. It was my birthday.’
‘Really?’
For a split second I wish I hadn’t mentioned that. I don’t want to look like I have no friends. But the rosé is weaving its way through my veins and any filter I have is fast dissolving. ‘Yes, all my friends were busy so I ended up at the pub by myself with Arthur – to be honest, it wasn’t a bad birthday in the end.’ I smile, remembering.
‘Is that because you met me?’ he teases.
I roll my eyes. ‘I think it was the fish and chips that did it.’
He laughs. ‘I wish I’d known. It would have made chatting you up a lot easier. I could have just sung “Happy Birthday” and been done with it, though my singing is pretty terrible.’
I’m looking at him in astonishment. ‘You chatted me up?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘I had no idea.’
‘How could you not notice? I even sent Oliver in as my envoy.’
My eyes go wide. ‘That’s child labour!’
‘He got a packet of Haribo and an hour’s extra screen time – he was pretty happy.’
He’s smiling now and gazing at me with those denim-blue eyes and, as his words sink in, I can feel my disbelief turning to delight.
‘I thought you were his dad. I thought you were married,’ I admit.
‘Me? Married?’
‘Well, don’t look so shocked,’ I smile, ‘it’s not beyond the realm of possibility . . .’
He laughs and takes a large mouthful of wine.
‘Is it?’
‘Are you asking me if I’m the marrying kind?’ His eyes flash with amusement.
I feel suddenly flustered. ‘No, I wasn’t meaning that . . . I was meaning . . .’ Only now I’ve lost the thread of what exactly I was meaning, and I’ve had a bit too much wine and my attempts at flirting have gone awry—
‘I’m only teasing.’
I swat him.
‘Sorry, I couldn’t help it. Will you forgive me?’
‘I’ll have to think about that.’
‘Well, don’t think about it too long.’
‘And why’s that?’
Then, before I quite know what’s happening, he pulls me towards him and he kisses me.
Afterwards he holds my hand and walks me home. I can’t remember much of what we talk about, but there’s a lot of laughing and that flirty ‘banter’ everyone mentions in their dating profile yet until now I haven’t experienced.
‘I take back everything about online dating. I’m a total convert,’ I say, as we pause for him to put his sweatshirt around my shoulders. It’s soft and warm, and I relish the simple gesture. It’s not just about the big stuff when you’re single. It’s often the little things you notice. When you’re on your own, there’s no one there to care if you’re feeling the evening chill.
‘Not a fan, huh?’
‘I deactivated my account. I only signed up properly when I got the message from you.’
‘I should have asked you out that day in the snow, saved you the sixty quid membership fee.’
‘And the dates,’ I add ruefully.
‘That bad?’
‘I think the escape room one was the worst.’
He laughs.
‘Still, I take full responsibility.’
‘Oh, I don’t believe that for a minute.’ He shoots me a sideways smile and, despite the sweatshirt, I feel a little shiver run up my spine.
‘Well, I hope this one is making up for it.’
‘Hmm . . .’ I pretend to think about it.
‘Hey!’
‘I’m only teasing,’ I say, mimicking him earlier, and he laughs. We both do.
But I don’t say what I’m thinking: that this date is more than making up for it, that I feel happy and young and carefree, and that it’s the first time since Ethan and I broke up that I’ve looked at another man and thought maybe this could be something.
I’m drunk, but I’m not that drunk.
‘Is this you?’
Ten minutes later we reach my front door.
‘Yes—’ I begin to answer, when we’re suddenly bathed in bright light as a security spotlight flicks on.
‘Whoa, I’m being blinded.’ Johnny lets go of my hand.
‘Sorry, it’s a motion sensor,’ I explain hurriedly, shading my eyes. No woman of any age wants to have a bright spotlight on her at close to midnight after sharing two bottles of wine, with her date standing only inches away from her face.
But it gets worse. Arthur starts barking. And then—
‘Who’s that?’
I look up to where Johnny is pointing, to see the curtains twitching at the upstairs window and a bespectacled face squinting down at us.
Oh God.
‘That’s Edward, my landlord,’ I say, like it’s the most normal thing in the world for someone in their forties to be renting a room and for their landlord to be peering down at them in their pyjamas.
Well, OK, he’s wearing what looks like a T-shirt, but seriously, it might as well be pyjamas.
‘Right, well then, I guess this is where I say goodnight . . .’
‘Yes,’ I nod, looking away from the window. ‘I guess so.’
But if I’m disappointed, it doesn’t last long. Because then he kisses me again. Only longer this time, and as he wraps his arms around my bare shoulders, I feel like a teenager, kissing on my parents’ doorstep, not caring who sees me, not noticing when eventually the light switches off, plunging us back into soft, streetlamp-lit darkness.
I don’t know how long we stay like that.
I’m grateful for: