Our Stop(23)

There.

He’d moved across to a seat the other side of the glass partition, and was reading the paper.

That’s him! Nadia thought, staring at the top of his head. I can feel it, that’s him!

He was younger than the other guy, and his beard wasn’t expertly manicured like Married Man, but a bit more scraggly and unkempt. She could see what his mother meant by how a bit of a tidy-up would nudge him a few points higher on the Handsome Scale. He looked a bit student-y still, despite definitely being closer to thirty than twenty-one.

He wore suit trousers with New Balance trainers, and a shirt that was open at the neck, no tie. He didn’t look corporate so much as maybe designery, like he was less likely to work at a finance firm and more like he worked in media. Nadia couldn’t think which media companies were at London Bridge – weren’t most of them in Leicester Square, or Soho? Not that that mattered. She’d find out all that, if she rose to his challenge and said hi in person.

Nadia wove through the bodies in the middle of the carriage and approached where he sat, positioning herself so that she faced the glass partition, and could easily lean across and speak to him without scaring him.

‘Your mother is right,’ she settled on, bowing down so that her voice landed squarely in his ear, in a way she thought was suitably sexy and provocative. ‘You would be handsome after a shave.’

She thought she sounded flirtatious and that it was fun to allude to the self-effacing joke he’d made at his own expense. She imagined he’d look up and he’d concede that his mother was a clever woman, and then Nadia could say something about how attractive it was that he respected his family that way. Or something. She hadn’t figured out the details – all of this was new, and a tiny bit scary. She hadn’t wanted to overthink it. So that’s why she’d just said it. Said the first thing that came to her. Your mother is right.

The guy looked up. ‘I beg your pardon?’ he said, his brow knitted together in confusion.

Ah, shit. She had led with the wrong thing. She tried to back-pedal.

Nadia forced a giggle. ‘No, I don’t mean that,’ she said. ‘I meant … Your mother is obviously certifiably mad.’

The man’s eyebrows shot up now, from above his nose to below his hairline.

‘Well, maybe not certifiably mad,’ Nadia countered, feeling hot at her neck. ‘No, just, you know, she probably means well. Mothers, hey! Ha!’

Oh god, oh god, oh god, she thought to herself. You are fucking this up, royally!

‘You’re very handsome,’ she continued. ‘Probably even more so with the beard.’ Her words tumbled out over each other in a nervous pile-up. ‘And very romantic. Well done. You are handsome and romantic. That’s … the … jackpot! Handsome and romantic is the jackpot!’

‘Ma’am,’ somebody beside her said. ‘Are you okay?’ The voice turned away from her. ‘Is she okay?’

The man was looking up at her, and Nadia had a nauseous feeling in the pit of her stomach that told her something was wrong. Very wrong.

‘I’m just nervous, is all,’ she said, her voice squeaky now. ‘I don’t normally … you know … go up to men on public transport, and—’

The man stood up. The tube was pulling into London Bridge station, her stop.

‘Get the fuck away from me,’ the guy said, leaving her to stand staring at the space he had vacated, hot with humiliation. She came to just as the doors were beginning to close, realizing she had better get off as well. She hoped it didn’t look like she was following him.

An older man with grey hair and white sticky bits of dried spittle at the corners of his mouth, a man who Nadia couldn’t be certain had brushed his teeth that morning, or any morning, actually, tapped her on the shoulder as she stood to catch her humiliated breath and, as she turned around, stood there hopefully and said, ‘I’ll go out with you.’

Nadia’s jaw dropped. ‘I … No, thank you,’ she said, scurrying off towards the escalator, wanting nobody in the history of the world to ever talk to her ever again.

‘Whore!’ the man shouted behind her.

Nadia’s phone buzzed as she crossed the road to her office.

Anything? said Emma.

Nadia sent back a sad face emoji. I just hit on the wrong guy, she typed. Well. At least I hope it was the wrong guy. If that was the right guy I definitely blew my chance.

What happened?????!!!!

Oh god, I can’t. I’ll tell you later.

There had been a moment when Nadia saw a woman with a blonde bob and a fake Louis Vuitton bag in her carriage, and her imagined narrative was interrupted by the worry that maybe she was the devastatingly cute blonde.

No, Nadia thought, no way. She’s got press-on fake nails!

Nadia hated that – that she’d been reduced to making another woman the competition and thinking bad thoughts about her. Even if the woman was wearing an awful lot of winged eyeliner for that early in the morning. Nadia had so wanted this all to be true – for this to be her romantic moment. She hadn’t understood how hungry she was for it until the temptation had been waved in her face, and it had appeared it had made her territorial. She wanted to protect what she thought of as hers.

Gaby was waiting for her in the lobby at work.

‘Anything?’ she said, handing her a tall black coffee, which was lucky because Nadia had already given up on her KeepCup. It was too much of a faff to make coffee before she’d had coffee, ironically.