In a voice too bright and bubbly to be believable, she said, ‘That’s lovely.’
To other parents, it might seem odd that my mother was more at ease with my lack of commitment than the prospect of me starting anything serious with someone. Shouldn’t you want your child to find their soulmate? If you believed in such things, which I didn’t. Whilst most parents with a grown child were dreaming of grandchildren to dote on, or weddings to plan. That very thought caused all the muscles in Mum’s body to tighten. Her fear of history repeating itself solidified in her veins.
Exhaling a sharp breath, she spun around and collected me in a swift, bone-crushing hug.
The scent of her Nivea face cream and perfume filled my nostrils, the smell familiar and warm.
‘Be careful,’ she breathed before pulling away with that same forced smile plastered on her face.
‘It’s just a date,' I tried to say, in a tone that hopefully told her how inconsequential I considered tonight.
It didn’t diminish the worry in her eyes. But I’d learned from years of experience that nothing could. There’s a particular type of pain that doesn’t fade over time, it doesn’t lessen or vanish. It often embeds itself, burrowing deep into your soul, and when you’ve been hurt by men as often as she had, me going out on a date wasn’t innocuous. It’s sending the thing you love most in the world into the hands of what caused you immense suffering.
And nothing I could say would change that.
So I stayed quiet.
Saying a quick goodbye to Roxy, who was well used to our routine by this point, I gave mum another quick hug and closed the door. My heart pounded hard, blood whooshing around my head.
It’s just a date.
One date. I could handle anything for one night.
9
Wasit possible to get bored to death? To the point you decided that ceasing to exist was a better alternative to a date as boring as this.
I had been mulling over this phenomenon for the past thirty minutes. All the while my date sat opposite, not noticing or caring that I stopped listening to him, giving only perfunctory nods and noises of acknowledgements when necessary.
God, I was losing the will to live.
Michael—or was it Mitchell? I couldn’t remember—sat across from me at the table tucked into the corner of the crowded restaurant. I had the suspicion the date was doomed from the moment we entered. Michael’s lip curled up in distaste at the rustic atmosphere. All the furniture in here looked several years old, and the fanciest thing they had on the menu was something calledcreamy pasta,which I had the suspicion was carbonara without the confidence.
So when Michael, yes, definitely Michael, turned up his nose the second we entered and asked if I was sure this was the place I wanted to eat, with the air of someone whothought dining in anything less than a Michelin-star restaurant denoted terrible life decisions, my hopes for the date had dwindled.
I shifted in my seat, picking up my wine glass to take a large gulp. The lace body suit I wore wasted on the man before me. He’d spent the first twenty minutes of our conversation talking exclusively to my tits. The conversation had been stilted and awkward. I struggled around the social convention of small talk in general, but it was even more difficult when you had a man who didn’t ask questions unless it was not-so-subtle comments about your body. ‘You must work out a lot. Didn’t know being a vet put you in that good shape.’
I’d taken every lousy attempt at a compliment with a curt smile—biting my tongue from saying what I wanted to say.
My will to live had rapidly declined when I’d made the fatal error of asking him about his hobbies.
Cricket.
His eyes bugged out of his head when I’d asked him what he did for fun, and he’d got a severe case of verbal diarrhoea and started to drone on about the world’s most objectively boring sport. He clearly wasn’t the kind of person who required any input from anyone else to carry a conversation—taking my grunts and weak laughs as all the encouragement he needed.
I finished the dregs of my wine, feeling it slide down my throat and warm my belly. Doing nothing to dissuade the hunger pains that were starting up. We hadn’t even got around to ordering food yet. Michael kept waving the server away when he’d come over, still in raptures over talking about cricket.
‘It was completely out of bounds. I knew it; the umpire knew it. But they let him get away with it.’ Michael rolled his eyes, lifted his glass of Shiraz to his lips, sniffed it, and thenput it down with a grimace. He had yet to sample the wine. For the past hour, he kept bringing it halfway to his face and sniffing it before deciding against it. I’d watched him do it nearly five times; each time, my frustration grew to a boiling point, and I was seconds away from pouring the contents of the glass down his perfectly pressed suit just to see a little colour on him. I restrained myself… barely.
‘Hmm.’ My stomach rumbled loudly, clearly having had enough of waiting around and being tortured by the smell of the dishes passing our table every few minutes.
Michael halted in his story, a smarmy grin playing on his lips. He was handsome—in a bankerish sort of way. Hisabout mesection online had said he loved animals, so I thought I’d struck gold. But he seemed to have missed something vitally important in his bio.
Has no personality.
‘Sorry, listen to me waffling on.’ He reached out to his glass again, and I gritted my teeth. If he picked it up again without taking so much as a single sip, I was leaving. However, his hand bypassed the wine and turned up in the middle of the table.
I glanced down at his waiting palm. When my eyes flicked back to his face, his lips parted in what I assumed he considered a sensual pout.
