Our Stop(72)

She wished she could tell Emma about it all. Especially when she walked into the gym space for her class that night, just as a friendly looking blond man left the changing rooms at the other side of the doors, and they both reached for the door handle at the same time.

‘Oh, pardon me, let me get that for you,’ the guy had said. He pulled the door open and let Nadia walk on ahead. She picked a spot towards the back of the room – over her dead body would she enter a middle row, let alone a front one – and threw down her water bottle and face towel. She stood to queue at the weights section to pick up her bar and a few dumbbells when they were called for, queuing behind the man who’d just held the door for her. He looked up and around at her.

‘Oh, hey again,’ he said.

‘Hey again,’ Nadia replied, slightly puzzled at his friendliness.

‘Can I pass you something?’ he said.

Did he work here? she wondered.

‘Oh, you’re very kind. Yes. Sure. What about a pair of the sixes, and maybe of the eights as well.’

The guy wore a gym vest and as he leaned across to pick up her weights his back muscles rippled and she stared too long. He caught her. He smirked.

‘There you go,’ he said, a pair in each hand.

Nadia’s hands weren’t as big as his so he offered to follow her back to her mat. She walked ahead of him, self-consciously, wondering: was he flirting?

‘Thank you again,’ she said, and he put down her weights beside her water bottle and stood up, pulling himself up tall, shoulders back and neck elongated, and smiled broadly.

‘Any time,’ he said, winking at her. And then he was gone.

Nadia had caught sight of herself in the studio mirror. She looked flushed and silly, and she was smiling. He walked in front of her to get to his own mat, smiling at her again, and Nadia felt self-conscious for the whole session.

‘Have a good one,’ he shouted across the room to her as she left, sweating and red-faced.

Nadia had taken that class at least once a week for a year and never been hit on, but suddenly with the spring in her step of having flirted the night before, another man had flirted with her today. She wanted to tell Emma, ‘That was it! That was the law of attraction!’ She’d probably have been deeply suspicious of the guy helping her even two days ago. But with a different mindset came different reactions to the world. She believed romance was imminent, and so everything seemed more romantic.

I’m going to see this guy again, she told herself, after she left the gym and walked halfway home before getting the bus, to get rid of her excess energy. I am. I am going to see Waistcoat Guy again.

She had to tell somebody what was going through her mind, so she texted Naomi to see if she was about and arranged to call her when she got home, after her shower.

‘And I don’t mean to sound like a total stalker or anything, but … I found him on Instagram.’

Nadia could hear Naomi raise her eyebrows. ‘You found the mystery man from last night on Instagram?’

Nadia stretched out on her bed, wearing nothing but a towel. She’d got out of the shower almost an hour ago, but in between scrolling through @DannyBoy101’s Instagram (again), staring out of the window, and now talking to Naomi, she’d got no further than moisturizing her legs.

‘It was an accident! I was on the bus on the way to work, and I put up the photo of us, and tagged the location. And then I was bored, and so clicked the geo-tag thing, and it brought up all the photos of that night. And one of the top ones had him in it.’

Naomi’s smirk was obvious even down the phone. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Sure.’

‘It’s true!’

Nadia lazily lifted a leg in the air to examine it. She should have shaved them. They were overgrown and patchy: a crop of thick dark hair sprouted with impunity from behind her ankle.

‘I just – well, because he was wearing that stupid waistcoat thing, it caught my eye when I fell down the Insta-hole.’

She stood up and made her way to stand in front of the mirror.

‘I saw his arms before I saw his face. His friend had tagged him in it. So I clicked on his handle. And then … I had a bit of a look.’

She loosened her towel so she was naked and able to look at her reflection. She turned this way and that, examining herself, and then lifted an arm. She looked like Julia Roberts at the Notting Hill premiere: she’d forgotten to shave there, too. She wondered if she could pass it off as a political statement, not that anyone saw her armpits.

‘Well, you can’t message him,’ Naomi shrieked. ‘What would you say, “Hey! I eavesdropped on your private conversation and thought you were super emotionally mature and that’s my love language, and then you picked up my phone after knocking it out of my hand and it turns out you’re fit too. I tracked you down like Glenn Close to say: drink?”?’

Nadia shrugged. ‘I mean … yes?’

‘Okay, no. No way. You are way above this. There must be another way! He was cute, darling, but not so cute that you have to act weird about it. What would you do if he messaged you on Instagram?’

‘I know,’ said Nadia. ‘I wondered the same thing. But also, hey! I literally cannot believe you are judging me right now. You don’t know what it’s like to be out there, single and looking! You’ve been with Callum for years. Don’t forget how rare it is to feel … the thing.’ Nadia lay back down on the bed. ‘I felt like I knew him! When he looked at me, it was like you or Emma or Gaby looking back. Dead familiar. Nice.’