‘No way, me too!’ he says. ‘Is this your first stop?’
I nod. So much for sounding more experienced.
‘How exciting! I only started a couple of weeks ago. Good luck.’
He follows this with a mock-salute of support. I salute back. He smiles wider, before turning on his heel and heading for the exit. But as he walks away, I feel my stomach start to plummet. He can’t leave now. Not while I’m standing alone in the station.
If I told Sara or Paige that I felt so drawn to a stranger I met fifteen minutes previously, they’d patronise me with a lecture about stranger danger. But they’re not here. I’m alone. All alone in a country where I know no one and have no one, and can’t speak the language. And here is this man – this super-friendly man with a smile like butter and eyes that soothed my worries in seconds. And he’s walking away for ever. I’ll never find him again or see him again unless I do something – say something, right this moment.
‘Noah?’
His name echoes across the walls, bouncing off the steel and stopping him dead in his tracks. He turns towards me.
‘You wanna go get coffee?’ I ask meekly.
I regret it instantly as I start to view the interaction through his eyes.
The poor guy did one favour for a stranger and now suddenly she’s trying to follow him around the city. He must be terrified.Horrified.It’s giving low-level stalking; a stepping stone to going full-on Joe Goldberg. I need to take it back – fake a phone call, pretend there’s another Noah in the distance... Maybe drop to the floor and fake a fainting spell. Anything thatgives him the chance to politely excuse himself from the weirdo hanger-on he’s accidentally just pulled.
He looks at his watch and my heart drops again as I run through all the possible time-related excuses I’ve forced him to formulate. But then he smiles, his eyes twinkling.
‘It’s past five o’clock. Let’s make that coffee a pint.’
. . .a first date
Noah was so excited to take me to ‘his favourite spot’ that there was nothing I could have said to derail him.
‘Do you like beer?’ he asked.
‘Not at all,’ I said, scowling.
‘You’ll like the beer here,’ he said, before leading me into the city centre.
The place stretches over various floors and buildings, each as filled to the brim with people as the next, and we had to hover for ten minutes before swiping a tiny table for two near the back. He took my suitcase without asking, jamming it under the table before pulling out my chair for me. The second I sat down, he headed for the bar without even taking my order and returned with a metre-long wooden plank loaded with ten glasses, some very scary in colour.
‘Why’s that one green?’ I ask, pointing at the main one I’ve been avoiding for the last twenty minutes.
‘Taste it and see!’ he says, laughing as I shake my head. ‘What is the point of getting a beer flight if you’re not going to taste all the beers?’
‘I never agreed to a beer-tasting in the first place!’ I pout back at his smiling face. ‘I wouldn’t have, because I don’t like beer.’
‘Keep it down, Amorie!’ he mock-chastises me. ‘This is not the place for that negativity.’
‘Then why are we here if you knew that?’ I ask pointedly.
He ignores all my snark, smile still plastered on his face. ‘It’s a Brussels staple! My aunt Lisa told me that if you don’t visitat least once, you may as well have not come to Brussels.’ He grabs a drink from the plank for himself and places a dark-red one in front of me. ‘That one’s probably least offensive.’ He nods towards it.
He raises his glass, I follow, and we both take a sip. I splutter. It’s still beer. Vaguely cherry-ish, but definitely beer. The cherry actually makes it almost medicinal in taste, which I would argue is worse. And that’s saying something given my absolute disdain for the true form.
‘The quicker you down it, the less you’ll taste it,’ he says.
I hold my nose and tip the liquid down my throat as quickly as it will go.
He gives a cheer. ‘That’s the spirit! So, Amorie, why did you decide to interrail alone?’
I stare back at him blankly, confused at the sudden switch.
He shrugs. ‘Nobody solo-travels for this long without some sort of story.’
