I felt consumed by desire, but also felt desirable – like there was some kind of digital thread of lust connecting me to this man I’d never met. We didn’t even appear to have that much in common, and we hadn’t talked about anything meaningful – well, I suppose sex is meaningful, isn’t it? And we’d talked about that, a lot. I’d promised myself that if I felt uncomfortable at any point, I’d stop and block him – but I hadn’t felt uncomfortable. Not one bit.
From his pictures, he wasn’t even anything special – nice enough to look at, with cropped dark hair that was covered by a hat in quite a lot of his photos, and eyes that were a kind of tawny light brown, but not the kind of handsome that stops you in your tracks. He was older than I’d have ideally wanted, too, right at the upper limit of the age range I’d specified.
But none of that mattered. I was like a woman possessed. In spite of my tiredness, I felt giddy with excitement all that morning, racing through my tasks in the kitchen, running up the stairs to change into my gym kit at three in the afternoon, almost unaware of how tough my workout was, or that Dani wasn’t in the gym at her usual time – again.
Oh, and checking my phone. I did that a lot. Every time it chirruped with an alert, I grabbed it like I was worried it might run away. When it was only a calendar reminder or a push notification from Stargazer, or a message from someone I’d been speaking to on and off on Tinder and assumed had gone off the boil, I felt a lurch of disappointment, but that did little to dull my giddy excitement.
I understood, now, what Robbie had meant when he talked about going to a stranger’s home for sex. Not caring if it was dangerous, or reckless, or stupid – just feeling a total, all-consuming longing to tear off my clothes and sleep with someone. A particular someone.
And Seth felt the same, I was sure. When we signed off the previous night, he’d said that, next time, it would be in real life. I didn’t care if we had a drink first, or even if he liked cats.
Robbie, to his credit, managed to put up with my distractedness all day. It was only when we were cleaning up after the evening service had finished that he said, ‘Now. Listen up.’
‘What?’ I jerked out of my reverie.
‘I know you’re my boss and everything. But you need to get your shit together, Zoë. Today you left the deep-fat fryer unattended and you could have burned the place down. You almost used the tongs I’d been turning chicken with to serve up the tofu. You would’ve sent a dessert out with beetroot ketchup on it instead of raspberry coulis if I hadn’t stopped you.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I’ve been all over the place. It’s lack of sleep. I’ll be fine tomorrow.’
He gave me a hard stare. ‘You will not be fine until you get that man out of your system. When are you seeing him?’
‘Weeelll… he did mention meeting up on Thursday. But that’s your night off, and—’
‘Night off, schmight off. I’ll swap with you. You go off on your date, and afterwards maybe you’ll be able to get through a service without bringing shame on this pub.’
I didn’t need telling twice. I thanked him, apologised again, and got straight on my phone to see if there was a local salon that could fit me in the next day to have every surplus hair on my body waxed off in preparation for my date with Seth. Bollocks to my feminist principles.
Nine
Passion is your governor today, Aquarius. Be guided by your heart, but remember that those who play with fire risk getting scorched.
I lifted my martini glass, carefully so as not to spill any of the clear, icy liquid that filled it, and took a sip. My lipstick left a red smear on its rim, and I wondered what I was supposed to do about that – ignore it? Try to lick it off? Wipe it with a napkin? I’d never been much of a make-up wearer, but tonight I’d gone full femme fatale. My eyelashes were curled and mascaraed to within an inch of their lives. My freckles were blotted out with foundation. My eyebrows – normally almost invisible – had been pencilled in with countless tiny strokes and gelled into place.
I was wearing dark skinny jeans, a silky black top I’d had for years and never worn because it had scratchy beading on the neckline, and a pair of kitten-heeled mules I’d bought in a charity shop ages ago for a party, then discovered that they slipped off my feet with every step.
I didn’t feel even slightly like me. I felt like someone daring, alluring and sexy. At least, I would, once I’d got half this cocktail down me.
Seth had suggested a swanky cocktail bar in North London for our date. It was near to where he lived, he’d said, and I knew that what he meant was, convenient for going back to for a shag afterwards. The thought made my stomach turn a somersault, and I saw my hand trembling slightly as I lifted my glass for another sip of what was basically cold, neat gin.
Zoë the femme fatale would feel entirely comfortable perched on a bar stool sipping a dry martini while she waited for her date. I just wished she’d hurry up and take over from the regular Zoë, who was twitching with nerves and whose arse was slowly going numb from the bar stool’s slippery marble top.
‘Hello, Zoë. There you are. Did you find it okay? Sorry I’m late – I got held up at the office.’
I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting Seth to do – greet me with a sleazy, ‘Hey, baby,’ and stare down my cleavage or something – but this totally normal, casual greeting surprised me and put me a bit more at ease.
‘That’s okay. I haven’t been waiting long.’
He slipped onto the stool next to mine and looked at me for a moment, smiling. His teeth were slightly crooked, with a bit of a gap between the front ones. He was wearing jeans and a white shirt, the top button undone, and I could see that his brown leather belt had recently been let out a notch.
Liam Hemsworth he was not. He was just an ordinary, decent-looking guy in his mid-thirties, average height, average build, average everything – everything except his eyes. They were the most amazing colour. Light brown? Hazel? Whatever you called it, they were almost golden, and a fine black line surrounded each iris, as perfect as if it had been applied with liquid eyeliner (at least, by someone who could apply liquid eyeliner perfectly, so not me). And when he looked at me with that curious, smiling stare, I felt something happening inside me – a loosening, melting feeling that made me even more worried that I might slide off the bar stool. It was like he’d sprayed himself with some mysterious pheromone-boosting cologne, or clicked on one of those emails that always go into your junk folder saying they’ve got the secret that will make you irresistible to women.
Or maybe I was so desperate for a shag I’d imagine anyone as the next Casanova, so long as they weren’t actively repulsive. But that wasn’t the case, I told myself – I hadn’t felt this way about Paul or Justin. I wasn’t accosting random men in the street and begging them to come back to mine and bump uglies.
Whatever it was Seth had, he had it in spades, and I was in no fit state to analyse it.
He ordered an Old Fashioned for himself and another martini for me; the first one seemed to have mysteriously disappeared. We drank our drinks and we talked about perfectly ordinary things: his job doing something complicated involving buying online advertising space, my job in the pub, places where we’d travelled and books we’d read. He asked me stuff about myself like he was really, genuinely interested. Everything I said seemed to make him laugh, and when he did, those amazing eyes sparkled like shards of amber glass in the sun.