I put his embroidery into my tote and slide my arms into my coat. ‘I’m genuinely going to enjoy having this memento of what has turned out to be awaymore enjoyable evening than I was expecting.’
‘Are you saying that you take pleasure in the failures of others?’
I shake my head. ‘There was no failure, Jake. Just an unusual representation of what you were seeing.’
‘Modern embroidery if you will?’ he suggests.
‘Exactly. And I will cherish your modern embroidery because laughter is good for the soul.’
Jake pulls his own jacket on and begins to stand.
‘Jake.’ Petra has practically sprinted across the room. ‘Are you leaving?’
‘Work tomorrow,’ he says.
‘What job do you do?’ she purrs. There’s really no need for her to place her hand on his arm, but she does so anyway. And not his forearm, but his bicep, which is, frankly,veryunprofessional and verging on sexual harassment.
‘Lawyer.’
‘Lawyer. Ilovelawyers.’
‘Great.’
I’m in danger of laughing again, because the way Jake’s backing away from her isvery funny.
He lifts his jacket to look at a watch that is not in fact on his wrist, and then pulls his phone out of his pocket. ‘My taxi’s right outside,’ he says. ‘Goodnight. Freya? You coming?’
‘Er, yes. Thank you so much, Petra.’
‘Where’s the taxi?’ I ask when we get outside.
‘No taxi,’ he says. ‘Just thought it wise to escape.’
‘Oh my goodness. Have you, perhaps, learnt from Petra that you will never find love? Have I won?’
‘No. I’ve learnt from Petra that I don’t believe I will find love withher.’
‘That’s reminded me that we should do our video,’ I say. ‘Shall we show the nation our finished results?’
‘I actually think we should. I mean, not yours. Yours is just a bog-standard very impressively good piece of embroidery art for your first time. Mine, though, could be of genuine public service if it makes other people laugh as much as it made us laugh.’
‘Maybe you had to be there, though?’ I take it out of my bag and we both look at it and start laughing again. ‘Yeah, no, definite genuine public service.’
Jake takes his phone and angles it at us from above and we take it in turns to describe the evening – neither of us mentioning Petra – and then Jake shows my embroidery and says that he was impressed by my natural talent, and then he does jazz hands and then I showhisembroidery and say that I was impressed too.
‘Impressed by my natural talent?’ he checks.
‘Absolutely,’ I say, and he stops the video.
And then we say goodnight to each other as friendlily as we ever have and get in separate Ubers and take our embroidery mementos home.
It has quickly become a way of life waiting for Sonja’s unpredictably timed bombshells following each Tuesday date. Will she insist that we go back to setting each other up on blind dates, single or double-dating, the two of us doing activities together, or will we be sent on our weekend as our next activity, and when will that be?
What I do not expect is for alotof my friends to text me on Thursday morning while I’m still thinking about getting out of bed, to ask if I’ve seen Jake’s newspaper interview in which hemassivelydisses romance and links it to the rising divorce rate.Obviouslythe article references me, because the whole reason they chose to write the piece on Jake in the first place was his ‘hot lawyer’ look on TV with me.
What?
I google quickly and read it. And, honestly, I want to kill him. What aweasel. Either he laughed away during embroidery with me knowing that he’d done this interview, or he did itafterthe embroidery. Either way,sotwo-faced.
