‘You’re my first,’ he said. ‘I hope you feel special. Although, just saying, you could have gone on for a bit longer, so that I got to try out an actual Heimlich manoeuvre on you. I’ve never done one of those before.’
She laughed. ‘Sorry about that. Pretty inconsiderate of me. Next time I’ll try harder.’
‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ he replied. ‘I was just gearing up for it as well. Quite excited, to be honest. Although the one I’ve really been looking forward to having a go at is stopping a kid from choking. You know you have to dangle them upside down by their ankles?’
She wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not, especially because she knew very little about kids. ‘You don’t,’ she replied, sensing he was teasing her.
‘You do! Hang them upside down and whack them on the back. Let gravity do its thing.’
Janine came back just then, plonking a bottle of Bud on the table. ‘Is this a private first aid lesson or can anyone join in?’ she asked. ‘Cheers, anyway,’ she went on, clinking her bottle against Lara’s and Ben’s. ‘To surprise encounters.’
‘To surprise encounters,’ they echoed. She liked him, she thought, as the three of them began chatting. Properly liked him, in a warm fluttery way she hadn’t experienced in so long. He was funny and friendly and interested in her, plus she was delighted to come across another British person, having spent the last few weeks feeling pretty friendless and alone. Conversation flowed easily, along with the drinks. He was a designer, taking some time out to ‘find himself’, he told her, making air quotes with his fingers as if the phrase embarrassed him, only to laugh when she grabbed his arm and said, ‘Here you are. I found you!’ They talked about living in London; how he’d been renting a flat in Stoke Newington while she shared a house with a few girlfriends in Camberwell (‘What’s that great pub in Camberwell? The Sun – do you ever go there?’ he asked, only for her to exclaim, ‘All the time! That’s my local!’). They talked about each other’s families – he had more sisters than was good for any man, he’d groaned, while Lara made him laugh describing a particularly disastrous camping holiday she and Richie had suffered with their mum, Frances, one summer in Morecambe – and then he’d told her about his trip, and all the sights he and his friends, Sam and Charlie, were due to take in over the next month. Sam and Charlie came over themselves when it became obvious that Ben wasn’t about to return to his former seat, and the five of them shared bowls of salty chips, along with several other beers.
Janine left after a while – ‘Time to get back to the ranch,’ she said apologetically, winking at Lara as she sashayed out of there. She had two little children, as well as a husband who apparently broke out in a cold sweat if he was left alone with them for too long. Soon afterwards, Sam and Charlie also made their exits, saying they were going to get pizza, which left only Lara and Ben at the table.
The bar had filled up by now. It was a laid-back sort of place, all dark wood and dim lighting, with a soundtrack of easy-listening music and occasional clicks and clacks from the pool table behind them. A ceiling fan stirred the muggy air above their heads and outside Lara could see the sky darkening from rose gold to violet. They had just worked out that they’d been at the same Glastonbury festival the year before, seeing almost exactly the same bands. ‘We might have been dancing right next to each other,’ Lara said, laughing. ‘How weird is that?’
‘We could have met a whole year earlier!’ he cried, slapping a hand to his head as if he regretted the intervening twelve months as lost time.
‘Or before that, if we’d got chatting in The Sun,’ she said, playing along. ‘Small world.’
They both fell silent momentarily, looking at each other as if uncertain where they went from here. She felt such chemistry between them, such an easy, flirty rapport, but at the end of the day, they were only a couple of strangers in a bar, right? Two people who’d enjoyed a few drinks and a chat, and maybe that would have to be enough. He was heading off to Boston in a week, whereas she . . . wasn’t. And this was all part of being away from home, wasn’t it? Striking up conversations with people along the way, meeting one another tangentially, temporarily, before moving on to the next place, the next person. Lara, who was a realist at heart, was already preparing a line about how nice it was to have met him and wishing him well on his trip. ‘Well . . .’ she began – with some regret, admittedly, because he was by far the most fun and interesting person she’d had a drink with for ages, and if they were back in the UK, she would certainly be wondering if the evening might lead to anything more substantial.
Before she could finish her sentence though, he asked, ‘Do you want to get anything else to eat? Or we could go for a walk?’
*
Lara hadn’t seen much of the city by night, at that point. Toni was often out with friends or back at her parents’ place in Brooklyn for family dinners, and Lara had felt apprehensive about venturing out very far on her own once the sun went down. Shy, almost, as if she were tiptoeing around this relationship with her new city, afraid to dive right in. But with Ben, she felt differently – bolder, more adventurous. Having already explored the Lower East Side a little by day, she was able to point out Katz’s Deli – ‘You know, from When Harry Met Sally?’ – and the tenement buildings from the guidebook reading she’d done, but then, as they progressed towards Greenwich Village, she found herself in new territory and enjoyed that they could marvel over everything together: the jostle of bars and restaurants and arty shops, music spilling from open windows, the humidity and smells of the city as it eased from evening into night. Couples kissed on the corners of the streets. Taxis honked, their drivers’ elbows angled through the windows as they waited at the lights, drumming their fingers.
‘This is amazing,’ he said, gazing around. ‘I feel as if I’ve escaped everything back home and plunged straight into a proper adventure, do you know what I mean?’
‘Totally,’ she replied. They were walking past a cellar jazz bar just then and glimpsed a couple dancing together, her in a red dress that spun out around her knees, him in a sharp suit, his shirt open at the neck. She almost wanted to laugh at how cinematic everything seemed. ‘It’s like being part of a film,’ she went on, before blurting out, ‘Thank you.’
‘What for?’ he asked, bemused.
‘For . . . turning up. For appearing just when I needed you to,’ she said, then laughed, bashful at her own words. ‘Now I sound like I’m in a film. A really terrible one.’
‘I’m glad to be in your terrible film,’ he said, taking her hand and squeezing it. ‘I’m having a good night too. The sort of night you don’t want to end.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘My turn for the cheesy dialogue. Who wrote this thing?’ he cried, shaking a fist jokily. ‘I demand to see my agent. And a script editor!’