‘Well, Charlie,’ I said, testing this new name out on my tongue to see how it felt. It felt pretty right to me. ‘I’d better be getting back to work.’
He held out his hand and I don’t know if it was just wishful thinking, but I think I saw a hint of disappointment in his kind eyes.
‘It’s been really nice talking to you,’ I added. Ask for his number! If you only listen to the voices inside your head just once in your whole, entire existence then let it be now. Let this be the moment! I reached out and took his hand, shaking it slowly, lingering as our skin touched for the first time. Maybe there would be other times too? But only if I stopped being a coward and asked for his number.
‘You too, Nell. I think I needed a chat with someone like you today.’
‘Me too,’ I replied.
He loosened his grip on my hand and I felt my stomach lurch as our hands parted ways.
‘It’s been great to meet you,’ I said, realising that I was stalling while I worked up the guts to ask.
Do it!
I stood up and pulled my bag strap over my shoulder. Gathered my rubbish and empty mug.
DO IT!
‘You too,’ he replied.
Do it, you loser!
I exhaled loudly, the words on my tongue but unwilling to fall out of my mouth. I was scared. I was a stupid scared little coward. I wasn’t used to this. It had been so long since I’d asked someone out and, even then, I’d got a friend to do it for me.
I sighed at myself and dithered a little on the balls of my feet. ‘Well … see ya.’ I lifted my rubbish-filled hand in a small wave and turned away.
I tugged open the door, more furious with myself than I had ever been before. I’d been so confident up until that last second. Shit! What was wrong with me? You couldn’t shut me up when it came to my lifelong bout of verbal diarrhoea, but when the moment was right, when the words really mattered, I became mute.
The soles of my trainers slapped against the pavement angrily as I stormed past people who eyed me with suspicion.
I was almost back at the office, the dismal grey building looming over me like a dystopian skyline, when I stopped, the momentum of my angry walk making me sway as I halted. You would never guess, from the outside, how much good happened inside that building.
When was this ever going to happen again? When was I going to have an accidental run-in with a good-looking Irishman? When did things like that ever happen in real life? Never! That’s when and I’d just wasted the moment of a lifetime.
I spun on my heel and began running back to the café, the courage to do what needed to be done burbling in my stomach along with my hastily eaten lunch.
Come on, Nell, you can do this. I held my bag tight against my hip as I ran. I hadn’t run in years, not since school and the dreaded bleep test. My legs cried out in anguish, as if asking, ‘What did we do to deserve this?’
I turned the corner, almost ploughing into a woman with a pram. I shouted a hasty apology before lowering my chin to my chest and sprinting the rest of the way. By the time I reached the café, I was panting so hard that I thought I might pass out. Sweat beaded on my brow and I just knew that my make-up would be a mess now, sliding down my face like a custard pie.
I opened the door and looked over at the bench but the space where he’d been was empty.
My shoulders sagged with the knowledge that I would probably never see him again and I felt like crying. This had been my one opportunity and I’d thrown it away.
I bit down hard on my bottom lip and turned around, walking back to work slowly, the journey harder this time because of my aching legs and the weight of crushing disappointment that I was carrying.
There was absolutely no way I was going to be on time now.
Chapter Two
I woke with that sickening feeling that I always got when I found a weight in the bed beside me and the sound of another person’s slumberous breaths on the pillow a few inches away from my face.
I opened one eye, squinting as if letting in less of the image would stop me from seeing what I knew I was about to see. There, his head half sunken into the memory foam pillow, was the face I’d woken up to thousands of times before. His unruly, finely kinked hair was a cloud around his head, tousled to disarray by the way he tossed and turned in his sleep.
Joel and I had broken up two years ago, after seven and a half years together. Things had been going south for a while prior to that and so when the time came to call a time of death, I did. It had been hard; breaking up always is, especially after so long. You grow to depend on the other person, settle into a routine and then all of a sudden, you have to picture your day without them and all the things that being with someone entails.
I’d been thinking about being on my own for a while, craving the solitude that came with not having someone else to think about all the time, but things had become startlingly clear to me almost two years before we broke up when I’d found myself in the self-service queue in Boots waiting to buy a pregnancy test. My period had been a week and a half late and the panic had been building up inside me since that little notification had popped up on my phone from my period tracking app, telling me that I was
