Our Stop. Laura Williams Jane
to him right now if you’d been on time for work! That’s how good it is!’
Nadia had a weird twinge in her tummy at the thought of it – that if she had gone into the office on time, on her regular train, she could be talking to her future right now. But her future could wait twenty-four hours. Couldn’t it? She could use today to build her courage. Suddenly she was less angry and more excited.
After talking to Emma, Nadia picked up the paper again, open on the page with Missed Connections on. She took a breath and reread it, carefully unpicking it sentence by sentence.
It’s creepy that you’re watching me when you could be saying hello, but maybe you’re trying to be romantic.
Okay, well. That bit was actually okay, if she was totally honest. It was a sort of warning that he had better not be an actual creep, stalking her or something. She could deal with that. The line between big romantic gesture from a stranger and weird stalking was, actually, pretty fine, and probably rested on how handsome and well-adjusted the author of the letters was. Nadia had once read a Twitter thread about a girl whose date had known to come to the back door of her house, not the front, and brought a bouquet of lilies for her, because he knew she liked lilies. The woman said she’d never told him to use the back door, and that her favourite flowers had never come up in conversation; and to some it might have seemed like she was overreacting, but this woman said she knew in her stomach something wasn’t right. Two weeks later, the guy was arrested for masturbating onto her car bonnet at three o’clock in the morning.
I just want you to know that I won’t bite until at least the third date, so don’t be shy. Bloody hell. That bit really was awful. Horrid, horrid, horrid. I won’t bite until at least the third date? Emma was insane for including that. It was provocative in all the wrong ways. If Nadia had written it, she would have said something like … well. She wasn’t actually sure, off the top of her head. That’s why she’d delayed writing her own response – it was tough to get the tone right! But just because she hadn’t got around to it herself didn’t mean she wouldn’t have done it in the end. Probably. Maybe.
Hmmm. Nadia started to acknowledge the edges of a feeling that maybe Emma had done her a favour. Would she have ever decided on the ‘perfect’ response? Maybe it was like Pilates: you could put off doing it, or you could just go and get it over with and admit the flood of endorphins felt incredible after.
If you think I’m devastatingly cute then be brave with it: kind, romantic and bold? That’s my love language.
Hmmm. That bit was nice. Nadia could deal with that. It sort of stated her values and she liked declaring out loud that kindness was key. Kindness without being wet. Kindness that meant he knew to let other people off the tube before he got on, and that if he came to the pub and Emma was there he’d let her rant on a bit and then tell her she was absolutely right, no matter what she was ranting about. That was something else her old boss Katherine had told her: that when her husband was still just her boyfriend, he’d been out with her friends and listened sympathetically to a break-up story that went on and on. Katherine had thanked him afterwards for listening, for being as good a friend to her BFF as Katherine tried to be.
‘If she’s important to you, then I want her to be important to me,’ he’d explained to her.
Katherine said that was when she knew she wanted to marry him. Nadia had loved hearing that story. She loved knowing when men had been good and caring. She carried around a mental storybook of all the tales the women in her life had told her, that she opened in her mind when she felt herself begin to go down the all-men-are-the-same path. They weren’t. The good ones existed. Maybe not all of them were good, but perhaps Emma had been right when she said one in fifty was good. Katherine and Naomi had both won in those odds. Nadia forced herself to believe that she could too.
If she had to score the ad out of ten she’d begrudgingly give it an eight and a half. Emma lost a point for the biting thing – Nadia wouldn’t ever forgive that. But. Maybe, possibly, potentially it could have taken Nadia weeks to do it herself, and so at least something was out there.
She allowed herself a little smile.
He could be reading it right now, she thought to herself. He could be thinking of me as I am thinking of him.
The idea of it wasn’t unpleasant. In fact, it felt oddly comforting.
What would he say in return?
Daniel
‘I really am going to have to ask you to piss off,’ Daniel said to Lorenzo as he poured boiling water into his favourite Arsenal mug. ‘I am not reading a dating guide. Absolutely not.’
He manoeuvred around his flatmate to the fridge, pulling out the plastic carton of milk and doing a double take as he realized that it was weirdly light. He looked at it, pointedly, sighing dramatically.
‘Lorenzo, did you put an empty milk carton back into the fridge?’
Lorenzo looked from the carton to Daniel’s raised eyebrows.
‘It’s an emergency stash day,’ Lorenzo said with a shrug, opening the drawer where they kept the single-portion pots of UHT milk that they made a game of stealing from hotels and buffet breakfasts. Daniel wasn’t sure how it had begun, but there was now a specific drawer for them, for these long-life UHT milks, which had more recently come to involve UHT milk sachets too.
‘There’s a trend for them,’ Lorenzo had acknowledged knowingly once, as he returned from a weekend wedding in Edinburgh with ten sachets. ‘The sachets are much easier to open. More environmentally friendly too.’
Some weeks they didn’t buy proper milk at all, living off the UHT drawer. What was weirder was that Daniel and Lorenzo didn’t even really talk about it. It was just a thing that they did. No milk in the fridge? Time for the milk drawer, then. It normally happened at the end of the week, on a Friday, so at least today they were consistent with their milk-buying inconsistencies.
By way of a mild apology it was an easy-open sachet that Lorenzo handed over now. Daniel took it, shaking his head. It felt like there was a ‘Joey and Chandler’ dynamic between them sometimes – and that probably wasn’t a good thing.
‘I’m just saying, have a glance at it,’ Lorenzo said, taking a milk sachet for himself and ripping it open with his teeth. He drank it down, on its own, in one gulp.
‘It’s for girls!’ Daniel said. ‘Presumably girls who want to pick up boys! I don’t want to pick up boys!’ He held his tea by the rim of the mug, deciding it was too hot and switching it to the other hand to hold by the handle. ‘If I was a girl picking up boys it looks like a mighty fine book, but as I am not, I shall proceed on my own, book-free,’ he said, adding defensively, ‘I don’t need a book to tell me how to chat a woman up.’
Lorenzo picked up the copy of Get Your Guys! from the table where he’d left it out for Daniel the night before.
‘All I’m saying,’ Lorenzo intoned, ‘is that everyone at work was equally as sceptical as you, except the woman who commissioned it. And one by one, she passed it out to the 5 girls on the staff and, one by one, they all had stories about trying what –’ he glanced down at the front cover to remind himself of the author’s name ‘– Grant Garby says, and now most of them are engaged.’
‘But,’ Daniel said, closing his eyes as if very, very tired. ‘They are women. Hitting on men.’
Lorenzo shook his head. ‘Well, you see, I thought I should take a look at it, you know, as research, and it is my job to PR books, even if I wasn’t PR-ing this one. Know the market and all that. And he’s fucking genius. Grant Garby. He has this whole YouTube series and everything. It’s been a slow grower, but since it came out and word has spread, he’s sold like, one hundred thousand copies.