Our Stop(17)

Nadia was an hour late for work, and in a foul mood. She’d been on time for work once this week, on Monday, but had forgotten to set her alarm twice after that. Last night she’d had a cocktail after work with her team, and then met her old colleague Naomi for dinner and they had talked so late that she was basically asleep by the time she fell into bed at midnight – again forgetting to set an alarm. That meant she’d woken up this Thursday morning with a start, had to rush to shower, and hadn’t had time to fully assess if her outfit actually looked like an outfit or was mismatched in a way she couldn’t pass off as cool. She’d have to start The New Routine to Change My Life again tomorrow. Or maybe on Monday.

‘Don’t act like you’re mad!’ said Emma, when she eventually called back in response to the scathing voice note. ‘It’s a cute advert. I did you a favour! And I promise I didn’t do it when we were drunk. I saved it in drafts and only sent it yesterday, when I was sure it was a good one.’

‘It’s not a good one! It’s awful!’ said Nadia, determined to give her a hard time for doing it without her permission. I don’t bite?! What was Emma thinking?

‘No! It is a good one! I 200 per cent know in my bones he will approach you. You’d be talking 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.