Our Stop(10)
He made eye contact with her before he left. It felt like the bravest thing he’d done in months. She was beautiful and untamed. He stumbled a little, backing away from the pair, unsteady on his feet. She half watched him, looked at him for what could only have been half a second but felt like a full minute to Daniel, and then she turned back to Rich Man. Daniel felt like he’d been slapped by the Love Gods, and it wasn’t his dad he thought about as he walked through the doors of his office, but the woman.
‘She just had this … spirit,’ he said to Lorenzo, later on. ‘And no ring on her finger either. I checked.’
Lorenzo had laughed. ‘This is the first time you’ve seemed even vaguely excited by something since your dad, mate. I’m pleased for you.’ And then, in a lower, more serious voice: ‘You’ll never see her again, though, of course. Don’t get too carried away.’
5
Daniel
When Nadia got on Daniel’s train before work two days after he’d overheard her speak at the market, first he gave a word of thanks to the universe, or maybe his dad, or whoever was up there doing him this very solid favour, and then sent a swift gloating text to Lorenzo.
Had she been on the Northern line this whole time? (Yes.) Why was he only just noticing her now? (He had been in his own, grief-fuelled world.) He knew he had to do something about it. He hadn’t stopped thinking about her, and had even gone back to the same lunch spot the next week to see if she was a regular, which was a bit much but true nonetheless. She hadn’t been there, of course. It was a lot to expect she would be.
Seeing her on the train felt like being given a second chance at a first impression. He looked out for her the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that – greedily, he wanted his third chance, and his fourth. The tube trains were huge and there were so many people on the platform and he couldn’t be sure, obviously, that she hadn’t got on one of the others whizzing through the underground every morning. She could have been on the 7.28, or the 7.32, or the 8 a.m. or 6 a.m. People didn’t always stick to the same schedule like he did. Daniel was anally retentive in a lot of ways, and thrived off routine and certainty. But for Nadia to be on the same train as him, even that once? He decided to hold onto that as a sign.
In total he’d seen Nadia (though he actually couldn’t decide in his head what to call her. Nadia was her name, after all, but having not been formally introduced it seemed presumptuous, even in his imagination, to refer to her like that. But then, why would he call her ‘woman on the train’ when he knew her name? It was confusing, and mostly meant he just imagined her face and didn’t really call her anything) seven times, always around 7.30, always seeming a little frazzled in a ‘Working Woman with A Lot To Do’ kind of a way. Three of those times she’d been in his carriage, once he’d seen her on the platform at Angel, and three times he saw her on the escalator at London Bridge. Twice he thought he’d seen her in and around the general Borough Market area, but it hadn’t been her, it had only been wishful thinking.
When he did catch her, she always had her phone in her hand, but unlike a lot of other commuters, she didn’t wear headphones to listen to music as she travelled. Daniel knew if he spoke to her one day, out of the blue, at least she’d be able to hear him. But then, he didn’t want to screw up his one shot at getting to know her. He worried that simply striking up conversation on a crowded tube – a place notorious for how anti-conversation it could be, where even a smile could make you seem demented because it just isn’t the done thing – he’d seem slimy and pervy. A woman had every right to get to work without fending off advances from men who thought she was hot. He knew that. He wanted to give her a nod of encouragement so she could let him know if she was interested as well. It was Lorenzo who had joked that Missed Connections was the place to do it. Lorenzo was kidding around, but as soon as he’d suggested it, Daniel knew that was how he wanted to get this woman’s attention. He’d seen her reading the paper before. It could be just the ticket.
‘But why this woman?’ asked Lorenzo. ‘I don’t get it. You don’t know her!’
How could Daniel explain to Lorenzo that, above all else, he just had this feeling?
6
Nadia
‘Am I being crazy?’ Nadia asked. ‘I feel like I can’t put a message in as a response because it might not even be me. Can you imagine? He’s expecting bloody Daisy Lowe to respond, and he ends up with bloody ME?’
Emma was pushing a grilled peach around her plate, loading toasted hazelnuts and creamy goat’s curd onto her fork. She had summoned Nadia to In Bocca al Lupo because, yes, she had to review it imminently after an RnB star and her Saudi boyfriend were spotted eating at the bar two nights earlier and it had immediately become The Place to Be and her editor wanted it in Saturday’s paper, but also because, as she’d said in her text, In Bocca al Lupo means good luck! In Italian! And your grandmother was Italian and you need some good luck! It will be a good luck meal for love! It was a bizarre logic that suited only Emma’s mental gymnastics, especially because the restaurant itself wasn’t actually Italian, but Nadia couldn’t be bothered to go home and cook and, truly, if a singer with twelve Grammys and a sold-out arena tour was going to chow down on the wood-fired Torbay sole on a Friday evening, Nadia could sure as hell do the same thing the following Monday. Plus, Emma would be expensing it. It was something of a personal rule of Nadia’s to never turn down a free meal. In The New Routine to Change My Life she should, technically, have been at home with a face mask on, eating a salad and meditating, but that didn’t matter. She could do that tomorrow, and Monday had already been mostly a success.