Bell rings. Mercifully.
Date three: Alex, 40, nurse.
Finally. Someone I actually find attractive. Alex has glorious eyes and a soothing smile. I feel my face reddening and my chest tightening like it’s 2002 and I’m buying condoms and lube in Boots.
I can barely make eye contact. I tug my shirt away from my chest and vow never again to trust a weather app that saysfeels like 25°C.It feels like an air fryer.
“So, what’s your story?” Alex asks, eyes twinkling.
Here it comes again. My story. I have so many versions of it, depending on who’s asking. Tonight’s version: “Forty-two, Bristol-born, divorced, currently on a sabbatical. Bit of a hopeless romantic.”
“Divorced?” Alex raises an eyebrow.
“Ten years together. Married at thirty, divorced at forty. Very amicable.”
That’s a lie. It wasn’t amicable.
It was Daniel.
Daniel who controlled the money, the holidays, the thermostat. Daniel who called me “too sensitive” so often that I started to believe it was stamped on my DNA. But I don’t say that here.
Instead, I shrug. “We’re still friends.”
Another lie. I haven’t spoken to Daniel in months. But it’s easier to pretend, in five-minute chunks, that I’m a functional adult with healthy breakups.
Alex smiles. “At least you know what you want now, right?”
I want to sayYes. I want Disney-princess love. I want a grand sweeping romance with fireworks and orchestras and the kind of sex that makes the neighbours complain.
Instead, I say, “Yes. Something like that.”
Bell rings. Alex squeezes my hand like he’s consoling my whole existence, before moving on. I’m left staring at the sweat marks on my notepad where my palm rested.
The dates blur together after that.
A man who talks exclusively about CrossFit. Another who calls himself “sapiosexual” and makes it sound like a medical condition. One who is actually quite nice but looks disturbingly like my uncle.
By the end of round ten, I feel like I’ve run a marathon in conversational small talk. My smile muscles ache. My shirt could be wrung out over a houseplant.
Mercedes Bends bounces past, sequins around her deep eye makeup catching the light. “Well, how did we do tonight?”
I muster a grin. “I think my soulmate might have been at Wagamama instead.”
She laughs, not unkindly, and hands me my scorecard. “Fill it in anyway. You never know.”
But I do know. I know I’ll tick maybe one or two names, they won’t tick me back, and I’ll get the dreaded “Thanks for coming!” email tomorrow.
I sit, pen hovering, and tick Alex, because those eyes. I hesitate over the nice one who looks like Uncle Stephen and, despite these desperate times, decide incest-adjacent is not a kink I need to unlock.
After the dates, the evening should continue with all the guys coming together to chat some more, but after pretending to go to the bathroom, I bolt out the door like I’ve just nicked a mug from Starbucks.
Walking through the city, I find myself by the harbourside; the place is buzzing — laughter, music, the clink of glasses. Life carrying on elsewhere while I marinate in my own mediocrity.
I catch my reflection in a dark shop window: the kind eyes, the fluffed-out hair, the sweat halo. Not unhandsome, I decide, in the way a mid-renovation kitchen is not unliveable. I lift my chin and try to see myself the way I hope someone else might: a good man, a little dented, a little anxious, funny if you know where to look. The sort you could bring home and I’d notice the wobbly shelf and fix it without being asked.
A couple brushes past, laughing into each other’s shoulders. I want that—shoulder laughter, the nose-snorting kind. I want a kiss I can hear. I want a hand to take without a seminar on terms and conditions.
And then, for some reason, I’m thinking of Daniel. Ten years married, ten years of subtle control. I had mistaken it for love, once. Mistaken being managed for being cherished. By the time I left, I was in pieces. Two years later, the pieces still don’t fit back together.
