Before I Do(11)

7


Four Years Before I Do



Audrey didn’t remember the first time she met Josh; that’s how much of an impression he’d made. In her mind, the first time they’d met was at a birthday party in a bar on Northcote Road, but Josh always claimed there was an earlier occasion. He said he had met her in the kitchen of her Tooting house share one evening. He’d come over to watch the rugby with her flatmate Paul. Audrey had been cooking, and he’d complimented her on the smell of her risotto as he fetched a beer from the fridge.

“What are you making?” he’d asked.

“Oh, I don’t know yet, I usually just chuck in whatever I have in the cupboard, risotto à la leftovers.”

“Well, it smells great,” he’d said.

The conversation must have lasted less than thirty seconds, hardly the meet-cute great love stories are written about.

Audrey had been living with Paul and Clara for three months. This house was the first place Audrey had lived, other than her mother’s house, that felt like a home. After dropping out of university, then failing to make the grade she needed to study astronomy, Audrey had traveled the world for a year. Her mother had offered to fund the trip—guilt money, perhaps. When she returned to London, it had taken Audrey a long time to get settled. She had moved from flat share to flat share in a series of disastrous arrangements. First there was Nelly, the evangelical Christian who wouldn’t let Audrey watch or read anything containing a sex scene in the communal living space. Then there were Gary and Gilly, who turned out to be Southwark’s most successful weed dealers, with a doorbell that rang around the clock. Just as she was contemplating the unappealing prospect of moving back in with Vivien and her latest husband, Clara announced that a room had become available in the Tooting house share where she was living.

Clara had found Paul through an advert on Craigslist. He worked in the city, had a double-barreled surname, and had studied politics at Cambridge. He wasn’t the kind of person Clara and Audrey would necessarily have been friends with in real life, but he paid his bills on time, had no illegal or antisocial hobbies, and had a twenty percent–off membership card for the local wine shop. All in all, he was the perfect housemate.

It was Paul’s twenty-sixth birthday party, at All Bar One, where Audrey remembered meeting Josh. Paul introduced his two flatmates to “the rugby lads,” who all nodded in Clara and Audrey’s direction. Of the group, it was one called Andrew who was the most forthcoming, whose eyes were the brightest, the one whose name locked in Audrey’s mind. All she noticed about Josh that night was his badly fitting jeans. They were shapeless and baggy, the kind a teenage boy might have been bought by his mother and then continued to buy as an adult without thinking to explore other options. She thought he had a nice face, but then all of Paul’s friends had nice faces—with their healthy skin, broad athletic frames, and teeth that suggested years of expensive orthodontic work.

These men were not Audrey’s type. She liked skinny musicians, artists, creative types who had callings rather than careers. She liked lone wolves, not boys who played in packs.

Later that evening, she found herself queuing at the bar next to Bad Jeans Josh.

“Hey, Audrey, right?” he said, blushing slightly.

“Yeah,” she said, returning his smile.

“I’m Josh, I was at Cambridge with Paul. We met briefly before.”

She nodded, though she didn’t remember.

“Paul said you were a photographer?” he said, wiping his top lip nervously.

Audrey suppressed an internal sigh. “What do you do?” was her least favorite question, but one everyone else seemed extremely attached to. Why did your job have to be your defining characteristic? She was currently working in a café while she tried to build her photography portfolio, often doing shoots for free, but she wasn’t in the mood to explain all that now.

“Kind of,” she said. “How about you?” She raised a hand to the bartender, keen to get his attention and go back to her friends.

“I work in the City, in reinsurance.” Josh paused, and she blinked slowly. “It’s a bit of a conversation killer, I know it sounds boring.”

“Well, is it boring?” she asked.

“Not to me.”

At that moment, the bartender came over to ask Josh what he wanted, and he politely deferred to Audrey, allowing her to order first.

“Thanks,” she said, and noticed his cheeks turn ever so slightly pink again.

As she ordered her drinks, a tall brunette with a blunt-cut fringe muscled in at the bar next to Josh.

“I’m Harriet,” she said to Audrey. “I’m in the Cambridge gang with Paul and Josh, I’ve known these boys forever. You must be the new flatmate.”

Audrey recognized the flicker of something territorial in Harriet’s arm around Josh. She wanted to say, “You can have him, love, I’m not interested in the slightest,” but instead she nodded down to her drinks on the bar and said, “Well, it was nice to meet you both, I’d better get these to my thirsty friends.” She thought she saw a flicker of disappointment cross Josh’s face. He told her later he’d been racking his brain for something to say, that he’d kicked himself for making such a bad first impression. But in truth, he hadn’t made much of an impression at all.