After You Left(25)

I couldn’t quite believe he’d said such a lovely thing. I stared at him and noticed the tiny scar above his top lip. ‘I’ll be there,’ I said.

A slightly roguish smile spread across his face this time, sending deep lines fanning around his eyes. Maybe he wasn’t such a nerd after all. Hmm. We would see . . .

‘Tuesday, then?’ he said.

‘Tuesday,’ I repeated.



I’d reckoned it was 50–50 that he would show up. But, then again, that was generally about as positive as I got when it came to dates. He studied me long and hard from across the table. The hostess had considered the floor plan, then seated us in a conspicuously romantic corner, leaving us with a slightly envious and knowing smile.

He had the most amazingly healthy eyes: blue-green with ultra-clear whites. Stunning eyes.

‘What would you like to drink?’ he asked, right off the bat. ‘Do you normally like a cocktail first, or do you want to go straight to wine? And a bottle, or by glass?’ He reached for the wine list. The way he fumbled with it made me think perhaps he had been honest when he said he didn’t do the chatting up thing/dating thing very well. Plus, he wore a well-ironed, checked shirt with a button-down collar, and his hair looked slightly over-combed. The nerd had resurfaced. I must have been looking at him oddly, because he suddenly looked up, studied my face, and smiled, then said a suspicious, ‘What?’ I grinned. He did too now, fully.

‘Nothing!’ I sat back in the chair, crossed my arms and studied him, as if I were a doctor and he my patient.

He laughed a little, nervously, which amused me, too.

‘I think we would be insane to skip cocktails and proceed to wine,’ I said.

‘My thoughts exactly.’ He looked relieved to put down the wine list.

We ordered two Hendrick’s martinis. ‘Do you normally ask women out on dates before you’ve even said hello to them?’ Our eyes did a little dance over the rims.

‘Never,’ he said. ‘I’ve actually never done that before. But, as they say, life’s short, isn’t it? Once you want to make something happen, you’ve got to just go for it. Or it never does. Or someone else will . . .’ The waitress set down a little antipasti plate of cheeses and ham. He reached for a toothpick, and I noted his nice square fingernails and strong hands.

I liked his reply. The someone else will part. It felt significant.

‘Besides, as I said, you’re a very attractive woman. And I sensed you’re intelligent right away because there’s, you know, a brightness in your eyes. They’re very expressive eyes, actually . . .’ He held them now, as though they had the power to stop all thought. ‘Plus, you were dressed nicely: classy, like you’re an individual rather than a sheep. And your friend looked normal, which is always a good sign. And you weren’t overly intoxicated. Women these days are nearly always pissed, I find.’

‘That’s it, then? I’m attractive and I don’t seem to be wasted?’

‘You’re mocking me now.’ He tut-tutted, and passed me the bread basket. ‘I was trying to pay you a compliment.’

I watched him lightly butter his bread, and found myself inwardly smiling. ‘You paid several.’

‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘To go back to what you asked me . . . To be honest, I can’t really say I date all that much. What with the fact that I’m married to my work . . .’ He held up his hands in surrender. ‘As I said, I’ve actually never done anything as crazy as this before, and I honestly never expected you’d say yes. But you did. So that was a lucky strike.’

I found myself being so awake to him, so in tune. He was different. Nice different. I felt oddly at ease with him and trusting of him, which was a novel feeling for me. ‘So you’ll be doing it all the time now? I’ll have started a trend?’ I wasn’t sure how I was going to manage to eat; there were tiny birds’ wings in my stomach.

‘I hope not. That would spoil the coolness of this. Wouldn’t it?’

He ordered us wine once we’d perused the menu, and I liked that he asked if I wanted to choose it, or if he should. Over dinner, our conversation was surprisingly unstoppable: a crash course in what we did for a living, where we had grown up, our friends. We talked about music, TV, royalty, anorexic actresses, his recent trip to Machu Picchu, my desire to go on an African safari if it weren’t for the fact that I was terrified of having to get all those vaccinations. I told him how my job had brought me to Newcastle from Stockport. Justin said he’d grown up in a modest house in Durham, then had gone to read Law at Oxford, but he had left after the first year to travel the world. ‘I just hated the routine and demands of Uni. I realised I’d gone there before I was really ready.’

‘So you walked out of Oxford?’ Was he mad?

‘Well, yes. But I went back.’ After a doubting look, he said, ‘I was always going to go back, Alice.’

The way he casually said my name felt unexpectedly familiar and flattering. He grew on me in leaps and bounds, just with that one tiny little thing.

All was going swimmingly until he asked my age. ‘Why are you asking me that?’ I replied, then joked about how you never ask a lady her age.

He looked slightly wrong-footed for a moment. ‘I don’t know why I asked,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise it was such a bad question.’