‘Hands off,’ said Will evenly. ‘Not friends.’
Ginger perked up.
Will reached across the table and grabbed her hand. ‘We’re on a date, Mario. Skedaddle. Or I’ll load up the weight bar next time you’re in and see how you cope.’
‘Gotcha.’ Mario shot a finger at Will, blew a kiss at Ginger and went back into the kitchen.
‘Half-Sicilian, half-Belfast, fiery combination,’ said Will, still holding her hand. His large fingers began to stroke the underside of her palm and Ginger found it to be the most erotic thing anyone had ever done to her – and that included her encounter with her fake wedding-date.
‘Isthis a date?’ she asked, wanting to know before she said the wrong thing. Because it couldn’t be—
‘Do you want it to be a date?’ Will kept holding on to her hand.
Ginger nodded.
‘You’re like a wild deer in the forest, Ginger Reilly,’ he said, looking into her amber eyes. ‘You look sassy and tough, but you’re shy, vulnerable. Like you’ve been hurt. I wanted to take it slow but I couldn’t. Now that the article has been done, and the final shoot is over, you keep coming back and I’m afraid that one day, you won’t show up anymore.’
Ginger could say nothing. She could only breathe. For the first time in her life, she feltseen. Utterlyunderstoodby a man who was not a relative.
‘I want it to be a date,’ she said, in a breathy tone that was not like her and not fake. It just came out like that. ‘But—’
‘But you have no confidence and you aren’t sure?’
Ginger looked at him across the table.
‘How do you know?’ she asked, all artifice gone. No longer sassy Office Ginger. Not don’t-look-at-me Ginger. But just pure Ginger, all her heart and soul spiralling into that one simple question.
‘I can see it in you.’
There was silence. He still held her hand.
Will sat up a bit straighter. ‘OK, this is my story. I haven’t dated in a while,’ he said. ‘Got my heart broken a few years back, takes a while to get over that, and then I saw a few people. Nothing felt right. I wanted—’
‘—a connection?’
‘Yes.’ His warm eyes roved over her face, not her body, just her face. Seeing her, drinking her in. ‘Exactly. I’m thirty-four and my mother worries herself sick I’ll never find the right person. She’s an artist: thinks the women who fancy me are all gym bunnies who care about the superficial and she hates that. She and my dad have something special: something deep. I want that.’
‘It’s what I want too, but I’ve never had it,’ said Ginger. She’d never been this honest before. Not ever, really. Girlfriend would approve.Be honest. If he can’t accept you as you are, but only as the version of you he likes, then he is not the right man.YOU are good enough.
She kept going. ‘My heart’s been broken but only by – by me, I guess. By me pretending to be people I wasn’t, trying to fit in. By someone I considered a best friend who humiliated me.’
‘Who? Tell me?’ he demanded.
Ginger shook her head. ‘Not now.’ She smiled. ‘Another time.’
There would be another time.
‘That first day in your office, after you’d been working with that girl, I could see the decency in you. You understood her and her fears. And then you showed me the picture of you when you were ...’ She didn’t want to use the word fat anymore. It was a horrible word. A word to put people down. She would never use it again. ‘Like me,’ she said instead. ‘A bigger person in this thinner person’s world.’
‘I understood that. I try to change that in my gym. It’s part of our ethos: we make the real you stronger.’
A waiter arrived, apologising for the delay, blaming a sick member of staff, an eclipse, something. They both grinned at him, not listening.
They let go of each other’s hand just to take the menus.
Ginger had often wondered what she’d eat if she ever was in a restaurant with a man. How crazy was that? Imagining what to order so as not to look like a crazed foodaholic.
The gym had great leaflets on good foods. There were no bad foods, just moderation. Exercise. Moving more, being happy.
