have a Stella, please, mate.’ He seems at ease with bar staff at least. He turns to me. ‘What are you having?’
‘Large gin and tonic please, ice and lime if you’ve got it, lemon if you haven’t.’ The barman nods and I see Mike surreptitiously checking the note and some change he’s got in his hand. Well, good, he should know it’s expensive going out with an older woman. Especially an older woman who has got butterflies and isn’t exactly sure what it is she is meant to be doing, who keeps thinking about the last time he kissed her and who needs a large G and T even to be here.
‘Shall we sit down?’ he says. I follow him to a little niche in the corner and he steps aside, gesturing that I should sit down first. Instead of sitting opposite, he slides in next to me. This is bad for two reasons. Firstly, it seems as if he has far more sophisticated first-date experience than I gave him credit for, and secondly, after I’ve finished this drink I’ll probably need the loo in about three minutes and I’ll have to ask him to move. You can’t see the bar from where we are sitting and I can’t see any other customers. I think I saw this set in a German porn film once.
He looks down at his hands so that his fringe flops forward over his eyes, and then smiles at me sideways. ‘I didn’t think you would meet me tonight. I mean, you didn’t reply to my message or anything,’ he says and turns a little to face me. This would all be much easier if he wasn’t so my type. I really didn’t think that ginger hair
was
my type, but the summer seems to have lightened his with little gold flecks and I am finding the slightly almond shape of his brown eyes disconcerting, more so even than the way that he is biting his soft lower lip that kissed me so nicely only the other day.
‘Well, I thought it was best,’ I say. This is it. I have to do it. I have been around the block enough times to know exactly what misery and mayhem will come my way right now if I say and do the wrong thing. I open my mouth to speak but he gets there before me.
‘It’s just, well, the first time I met you, you were so cool and everything and you were really nice to us and you looked really beautiful even though you were mashed from the night before and I was really pissed off because you got off with that bloke who was obviously a twat.’ I couldn’t fault him so far. ‘That bloke’ was my most recent rebound fling after Owen (break-up number six), a friend of Josh’s called Danny, very pretty but a complete jerk and the cause of an embarrassed silence between Josh and me for a couple of weeks.
‘And then when I saw you again in the park, even though it was a year later, I thought, you know, this means something like fate or something and you’re so sexy, I’ve never met a woman as sexy as you and you looked great, even though you were a bit hungover. And after that kiss I couldn’t stop thinking about you, I thought about it all the time and I chucked Sarah last week because she kept going on about you and now her mum’s not speaking to my mum. It took me ages to get up the guts to phone you, after you never replied to my message, and then I thought you were pissed off with me when we spoke, but when you turned up looking like
that
, like really beautiful, I thought well maybe she does want to know me? I know you’re a bit older than me, twenty-two or something, and you think I’m a geek probably, but I think that kiss was
so
good that you must have felt it too and so well I want to ask you if you will go out with me?’
As he makes his speech he flushes pink from the hollow in the base of his throat up to his temples and if I could see into a mirror right now I’d see two red spots on my cheeks too. I can’t remember the last time anyone said something like that to me and I don’t think there was ever a time when I heard that kind of speech and believed that it was sincere. The romance of it all is going to my head and
‘Large gin and tonic please, ice and lime if you’ve got it, lemon if you haven’t.’ The barman nods and I see Mike surreptitiously checking the note and some change he’s got in his hand. Well, good, he should know it’s expensive going out with an older woman. Especially an older woman who has got butterflies and isn’t exactly sure what it is she is meant to be doing, who keeps thinking about the last time he kissed her and who needs a large G and T even to be here.
‘Shall we sit down?’ he says. I follow him to a little niche in the corner and he steps aside, gesturing that I should sit down first. Instead of sitting opposite, he slides in next to me. This is bad for two reasons. Firstly, it seems as if he has far more sophisticated first-date experience than I gave him credit for, and secondly, after I’ve finished this drink I’ll probably need the loo in about three minutes and I’ll have to ask him to move. You can’t see the bar from where we are sitting and I can’t see any other customers. I think I saw this set in a German porn film once.
He looks down at his hands so that his fringe flops forward over his eyes, and then smiles at me sideways. ‘I didn’t think you would meet me tonight. I mean, you didn’t reply to my message or anything,’ he says and turns a little to face me. This would all be much easier if he wasn’t so my type. I really didn’t think that ginger hair
was
my type, but the summer seems to have lightened his with little gold flecks and I am finding the slightly almond shape of his brown eyes disconcerting, more so even than the way that he is biting his soft lower lip that kissed me so nicely only the other day.
‘Well, I thought it was best,’ I say. This is it. I have to do it. I have been around the block enough times to know exactly what misery and mayhem will come my way right now if I say and do the wrong thing. I open my mouth to speak but he gets there before me.
‘It’s just, well, the first time I met you, you were so cool and everything and you were really nice to us and you looked really beautiful even though you were mashed from the night before and I was really pissed off because you got off with that bloke who was obviously a twat.’ I couldn’t fault him so far. ‘That bloke’ was my most recent rebound fling after Owen (break-up number six), a friend of Josh’s called Danny, very pretty but a complete jerk and the cause of an embarrassed silence between Josh and me for a couple of weeks.
‘And then when I saw you again in the park, even though it was a year later, I thought, you know, this means something like fate or something and you’re so sexy, I’ve never met a woman as sexy as you and you looked great, even though you were a bit hungover. And after that kiss I couldn’t stop thinking about you, I thought about it all the time and I chucked Sarah last week because she kept going on about you and now her mum’s not speaking to my mum. It took me ages to get up the guts to phone you, after you never replied to my message, and then I thought you were pissed off with me when we spoke, but when you turned up looking like
that
, like really beautiful, I thought well maybe she does want to know me? I know you’re a bit older than me, twenty-two or something, and you think I’m a geek probably, but I think that kiss was
so
good that you must have felt it too and so well I want to ask you if you will go out with me?’
As he makes his speech he flushes pink from the hollow in the base of his throat up to his temples and if I could see into a mirror right now I’d see two red spots on my cheeks too. I can’t remember the last time anyone said something like that to me and I don’t think there was ever a time when I heard that kind of speech and believed that it was sincere. The romance of it all is going to my head and
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