My Single Friend (21 page)

‘Absolutely,’ says Henry.

‘Number two: act confident. You might feel anything but, Henry – that’s only natural. But don’t give it away. Relax your shoulders. Make sure you smile. Don’t twiddle your thumbs.’

‘I feel as if this is a job interview,’ says Henry.

‘It is, Henry,’ I tell him. ‘The vacant position is “boyfriend”.’

‘Number three,’ continues Dominique, ‘is flirt. We’ve been through this in detail. Lightly touch her arm. Make eye-contact. Hold her gaze.’

‘Yup,’ says Henry. ‘I’ve got it.’

‘Good,’ says Dominique. ‘Because there’s a final rule. One we’ve not discussed until now. It’s crucial that you don’t forget it.’

‘Another one?’ Henry looks worried.

Dominique nods. ‘Enjoy yourself.’

Tonight, something new and exciting is happening in our household: Henry and I are
both
getting ready for dates.

We dash around ironing clothes (Henry), retrieving lost hair curlers from under the sofa (me), and checking mobiles in case of a change of heart (both). By the time we’re ready for the off, we’ve generated enough nervous energy to fuel a light aircraft.

Henry takes a deep breath. ‘You look gorgeous.’

‘So do you,’ I reply, feeling strangely self-conscious.

I catch his eye and am unable to control myself. ‘Oh, Henry – come here and give me a hug!’ I throw my arms around him. ‘This is so exciting.’

He hesitates and squeezes me back. I wonder for a second if I can detect something wrong, but he unravels from my clutch and smiles. ‘I know.’

‘You nervous?’ I ask.

‘I’d feel more relaxed doing a tandem parachute jump with a suicide bomber.’

‘You’ve got no reason to be anything other than confident,’ I tell him, brushing fluff from his shoulder. I stand back to examine him and am struck by how true my words are. He is stunning tonight. It’s not just the new pale blue shirt and flattering jeans. His skin is glowing, his eyes sparkling. ‘Rachel thinks you’re the hottest thing on two legs.’

‘She must need her head examined,’ he grins as he opens the front door.

The city-centre bar is already packed when I meet Paul. I’m relieved that I glammed up as the place is WAG-Central. Not all the women are real WAGs, of course, though there are one or two genuine ones, with legs as long as their hair extensions and micro-dresses as short as their attention span. But there are lots of girls who look the part – a bling-tastic bevy of beautiful women who appear to have spent three weeks French-manicuring their nails. I can’t hope to compete and not least because, next to theirs, my nails look as if they’ve been filed with a chisel.

‘Lucy!’ Paul spots me approaching the bar and beckons me over. I take a deep breath and head towards him, trying to hide my nerves.

‘Hi,’ I grin. He throws an arm around my waist and pulls me in, kissing me hard on the mouth. The kiss only lasts for a second but when he releases me, I can feel myself blush, somewhat stunned.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Oh, um, fine,’ I reply breathlessly. I pull back and look into his eyes, reminding myself how gorgeous he is.

He removes his arm from my waist and grabs me by the hand. ‘Come and meet some of the guys.’

I shake my head, wondering if I’ve misheard him. ‘The guys? What guys?’
Did I say that out loud?

‘A few mates are hitting the town tonight so I thought we’d join them for a couple. You don’t mind, do you?’

Before I get a chance to lie –
of course
I don’t mind! – I am standing in front of three blokes clutching designer bottles of beer and laughing uproariously. When they sense our presence, the laughter dies down and they turn to look. I feel like a museum exhibit.

‘This is Jimmy, Brian and Chas,’ announces Paul.

‘Hi. Lovely to meet you,’ I beam. Their expressions are so surly I’m half-expecting to be issued with a parking ticket. ‘I’m Lucy. Lovely to meet you.’
You already said that, you idiot.
‘Um . . . do you know each other through work?’

I look directly at Jimmy, then Brian, then Chas. My aim is to detect a flicker of warmth from one so I can engage in conversation and begin bonding. If my relationship with Paul is to work out, I
must
demonstrate what a fantastic, convivial and all-round nice girl their friend is going out with.

Sadly none of them answers.

‘We go way back,’ says Paul, downing the last quarter of his bottle in a demonstrative gulp. ‘Drink?’

It doesn’t take long to realize that Jimmy, Brian and Chas, who clearly resent the intrusion of a female on their lads’ night out, are going to be hard work. In fact, calling them hard work underestimates it. I feel like a dancing monkey before a Roman Emperor more used to seeing virgins’ heads ripped off by marauding lions. My attempts to engage in small talk are greeted with one-syllable grunts – if I’m lucky – and it soon becomes clear that they think Paul was insane to bring me along tonight. Which is about the only thing on which we agree.

If Paul notices this dynamic, he doesn’t show it. Instead, he joins in as they leap from topics of conversation which include (in no particular order): Keeley Hawes’s tits; last night’s
Top Gear
; whether it is acceptable form to fart on a first date (apparently this is not simply okay, but to be encouraged). For two hours – despite the peals of laughter – I struggle to detect a single genuinely witty remark among this poor excuse for schoolboy humour. Yet the last thing I want is to be dismissed as having no sense of fun, so I stand redundantly with a smile fixed to my face. This sounds easy, but it’s anything but. Unlike Paul, who has tears rolling down his cheeks, I find his friends about as hilarious as dysentery.

‘God, they’re funny!’ laughs Paul. He turns to the bar and I have a rare opportunity to talk to him alone. ‘Don’t you think? Brian’s like the next Billy Connolly – everyone says so.’

Comparing Brian with Billy Connolly is akin to calling a cack-handed painting-by-numbers enthusiast the next Vincent Van Gogh. He might have an extensive repertoire of jokes, but you’d have to be lobotomized to find any of them amusing.

‘He certainly knows a joke or two,’ I force myself to say. Then: ‘Are we going somewhere else soon?’

‘Oh, dunno. Maybe,’ shrugs Paul, handing over a twenty-pound note to the bartender. ‘We’ll see what the boys are doing.’

My heart sinks. ‘Oh, weren’t they going somewhere else?’

‘They’d planned to but, well, we’re all having a laugh here, aren’t we?’

I look at him blankly, unable to think of something to say. We’re interrupted by Jimmy.

‘Paul! Wait till you hear this cracker Brian’s got about a nun with a boob job . . .’

We finally get rid of Jimmy, Brian and Chas at 2.15 a.m. when, having bar-crawled round the city centre, Jimmy throws up under a table and we are politely asked to leave. On the way out, Brian and Chas bump into two women from a call centre where Chas’s brother Darren used to work. Mercifully, we manage to lose them.

‘So, you’ve been initiated,’ grins Paul, putting his arm round me as we wander up Castle Street looking for a taxi. ‘I get the feeling my friends like you.’

I get the feeling Paul must be out of his mind, but decide not to say anything.

He squeezes my waist and leans down to kiss my hair. My pulse quickens and it suddenly makes me forget to be irritated that he’s put me through one of the worst nights of my life. Instead I feel a rush of lust.

‘Shame we didn’t get much chance by ourselves though,’ he continues.

‘True,’ I shrug.

He stops and turns to me, cupping my face in his hands as the light from the Town Hall lamps flickers in his eyes.

‘God, you’re sexy, Lucy,’ he breathes. I can feel his hips gently pressing against me and gulp. He leans in and brushes his lips against mine. Fireworks explode inside my new underwear – underwear I strangely found myself purchasing despite swearing that sex was off the agenda until I could trust Paul again after the North-west Business Awards.

I wrap my arms around him and feel a bulge against my leg. I don’t know how long we kiss in the street for, but it’s long enough for me to know that when he suggests getting a taxi to his place, I’m not going to hesitate. We kiss the whole way home and, as the taxi trundles along, I feel myself getting more turned on.

By the time it stops outside his house, I am breathless with desire and anticipation, so much so that I can’t bring myself to stop his hand as it moves underneath my top. We stumble into his flat, still kissing, and I know as the door slams that my rules are about to go out of the window.

Before I know it, I’m in my bra in his hallway with his lips on my neck. I’m stumbling up the stairs as his shirt comes off. We’re collapsing through his bedroom door as my skirt is discarded. I’m panting with desire as his trousers are thrown to one side and the condom packet in his wallet is decisively ripped open.

Writhing on his bed, my eyes close as I submit to the pleasure of the moment, to the sheer exhilaration I feel in the knowledge that the rest of the night is going to be the most sensual experience I’ve had in a very long time.

I am staring at the ceiling of Paul’s bedroom as his snores ripple across the room. Pulling up his duvet over my chest, I wonder if I ought to go home.

There is clearly no way he’s going to be roused from his slumber to continue this liaison. Besides, I don’t think I could work myself up again if I wanted to. Paul falling asleep on the job – in fact,
before
the job – is the mood-breaker to end all others.

I wonder if it would have been good sex? Probably not, judging by how quickly he dropped off. Knowing my luck, it would have been over faster than you could soft-boil an egg.

I sigh, nudge Paul to the other side of the bed and start retrieving my clothes before realizing that I’ve left my top draped on the bottom of the stairs and my bra outside the bathroom.

I open his door and peer out. When I’m confident nobody else is in the house, I creep downstairs, grabbing my top from the banister and galloping back towards his bedroom, scooping up the bra on the way.

‘Hiya.’

I am so startled by this voice I almost drop my top again, but fortunately manage to clutch it defensively to my chest.

The source of this greeting turns out to be one of Paul’s flatmates.

‘Good night?’ he says.

‘Oh, great,’ I reply, wondering whether he’s noticed the fact that I am standing at the top of his stairs, bare-breasted and, therefore, not in the mood to chat.

‘Where’d you go?’ he asks.

‘The Loft.’ I clutch my top tighter around my chest.

‘Right,’ he nods. ‘Can’t stand it in there.’

‘Really? Never mind. Must go.’

‘No problem,’ he says. ‘Catch you soon. Janice, isn’t it?’

‘Lucy,’ I correct him, hovering behind Paul’s door.

‘Right,’ he nods. ‘Catch you soon, Darcy.’

‘Yeah,’ I smile, as I close the door behind him decisively.

Paul has shifted onto his front when I return, his athletic back on full view, his buttocks barely covered by his quilt. I crouch down close to his face as it presses against his pillow. His soft mouth is slightly open, his flickering eyelids revealing busy dreams. He looks vulnerable, almost childlike, and it makes me smile. I lean down and kiss him on the head.

‘Not quite what I was hoping for,’ I whisper, brushing away a hair from his face. ‘Shame I still fancy you so much.’

When I wake the next morning in my own bed, I don’t feel good. The fact that I almost had sex with someone so soon after meeting him has made me feel cheap. I could live with this puritanical disappointment in myself if it had been steamy and sensational; that it was short and not especially sweet is the real killer. Then I close my eyes and picture Paul’s face, laughing, and feel a swell of affection regardless.

My phone beeps. I pick it up from the side of my bed and see that a text has arrived. It’s from Paul.

Sorry about my performance last night. Was a blip – honestly. Feel horrendous. Can we try again? xx

I close the text and phone Dominique.

‘Jesus. How bad was it?’

‘It wasn’t great,’ is all I’m prepared to say. ‘But sex isn’t everything, is it? I’d be pretty shallow if I let this put me off, wouldn’t I?’

Dominique hesitates and I realize I’m asking the wrong person. ‘So, everything else went well until that point?’

‘N-yes.’

‘Here’s what I think: part of me admires the guy for admitting he screwed up. That takes balls. Certainly enough to risk seeing him again.
If
you really like him, that is. I think you should give him a chance to redeem himself.’

I am satisfied with this answer. So the date wasn’t the stuff of a Cary Grant and Doris Day movie, but something still makes me want to give it a go with Paul, if only to prove I’m capable of being part of a couple.