I type, delete, type again, and then send something that sounds like me and also like someone braver:Thursday?
Before I set off again, I look up at the night. It isn’t a Disney sky — no fireworks, no orchestras. Just a city roofline, slightly crooked and very dear. I walk home feeling less like a man waiting for a life to happen to him, and more like a person who might, just possibly, make one on purpose.
Open, I think, testing the word in my mouth. Not a door flung wide for any weather; not a gate you forget to latch. Just… open. Like a window on a day that doesn’t need air-con because the breeze is doing its job.
I can work with that.
My phone buzzes again.
I look at the message.
Not again.
I can’t respond to these, not tonight.
Evelyn: I lie in bed thinking about how the knife sliced through him.
Chapter 10
TOM
I arrive fifteen minutes early because apparently, I’m still that teenager who thinks punctuality equals attractiveness. The restaurant is dimly lit, full of dangling bulbs and ironic chalkboards with quotes about wine. One of them actually says“save water, drink prosecco.”I instantly want to leave.
A friendly waiter walks me to our table, but I’m too nervous to formulate enough words to generate any small talk, so just smile at him as he walks away.
I feel like a man about to be interviewed for a job he doesn’t remember applying for. My palms are so sweaty the cutlery keeps sliding when I try to adjust it, and, within a minute, I’ve already rearranged the salt and pepper shakers into four different formations, like I’m rehearsing for some condiment-based military parade. My heart is hammering and my left foot is anxiety-drumming so much I’m fairly sure the couple next to me think there’s a rave happening under the table.
Then Pete walks in, like he’s stepped out of a lifestyle blog. Casual but deliberate. Navy shirt, rolled sleeves, dark jeans. Stubble trimmed just enough to look accidental. He smiles when he sees me and — God help me — it’s the kind of smile that makes me forget words exist.
I feel immediately underdressed in my Marks & Spencer shirt, which I ironed twice and still managed to crease on the walk over.
“Tom!” he says, striding over. “We meet again. And not surrounded by judgemental seagulls this time. Progress.”
“Yes, and I’m sat down, so less chance of me tripping over a bollard,” I say.
He laughs, loud enough to make heads turn, and I feel ridiculously pleased with myself.
We order burgers and chips—because let’s not pretend either of us are salad people—and settle in.
By the time the food arrives, Pete is already mid-story about a guy he hooked up with once who asked for his Netflix password before they’d even kissed.
“You should’ve seen his face when I said I only had Now TV,” Pete says, grinning. “Like I’d just told him Santa died.”
I’m laughing so hard I nearly snort beer up my nose. This is Pete’s thing — he’s so relentlessly chipper it’s impossible not to get swept along.
I take a sip of beer. “I once hooked up with a guy whose mum came home early. He panicked, shoved me in the kitchen cupboard, and I had to sit there for forty minutes while she cooked a casserole. Hugely uncomfortable, but I got a stonking slow cooker recipe I still use to this day.”
Pete laughs so loudly the couple at the next table glance over.
And this is the general tone of the conversation for the next hour: hookup stories, dating disasters, the kind of anecdotes that would make our mothers faint but which feel like currency here, between us. Every time Pete laughs, I feel like I’ve won a small prize, like my terrible romantic track record has finally found its true purpose: making him grin at me across a sticky table.
But eventually there comes a natural pause in the conversation. And I feel it’s my time to ask.
“So. James?”
Here we go. The big one.
“Have you been dying to ask all night?”
