said a heavily-accented voice from the archway on the right and Nina turned gratefully towards Paloma, the tearoom’s barista who was standing there with a hopeful expression on her face. ‘Alcohol? Nina? Alcohol?’
‘Alcohol!’ Nina gratefully confirmed. ‘Si! Alcohol!’
Paloma was Spanish, from Barcelona, and hadn’t been in London for long. Her English was rather basic, though she said that coffee was pretty much a universal language, and she had more piercings than Nina (who had seven holes in one ear, eight in the other and a metal bolt through her tongue) or even Nina’s friend Claude, and he pierced people for a living. Paloma also had an on/off Cuban boyfriend called Jesus, who wasn’t as godly as his name suggested. It often sounded to Nina like they were having the most tempestuous rows, as it did ten minutes later, once they were settled round the table in a tapas bar just off the Grays Inn Road.
As usual, Paloma and Jesus were shouting at each other and gesticulating wildly as Nina sat there nursing a vodka and tonic to chase away the last dregs of her hangover. ‘Guys,’ she said eventually when there was a pause in the argument. ‘Really guys, I’m a big believer in passion, but can we just dial it down a notch?’
‘Que?’ Jesus shrugged.
‘We just talk about if we need the … the papel de baño …’
‘The papel de whato?’ Nina asked.
‘How do you say …’ Paloma swiped her hand in the region of her crotch where she apparently had quite a few piercings too. ‘For after when you pee.’
‘Oh, you mean loo roll.’
‘Si! Loo roll.’
Just as Nina was starting to despair of her Wednesday night, the door opened, letting in a gust of wind and a group of Paloma and Jesus’s friends. There was much hugging and kissing and shouting and gesticulating. It was a sea of unfamiliar, though smiling, faces.
The friends commandeered two extra tables, ordered what seemed like hundreds of tiny plates of delicious food and shouted at each other in Spanish. They tried to include Nina, to pull her into the conversation with halting English, but in the end she was left to her own devices and a bowl of patatas bravas. This was how Paloma must feel a lot of the time; everyone chattering away in another language, so Nina took it as her due. She also took the lingering looks from one of Jesus’s friends, Javier, and returned them with interest.
Javier had tousled black hair, the kind of hair that was designed solely to be rumpled by a lover’s hand. He had dark eyes that a girl could lose herself in. He also had a smile that was pure sex and seated as he was across the table from Nina, she was pretty sure that it was Javier’s leg that was rubbing against hers.
Nina glanced at Javier from under her lashes, her fingers trailing provocatively along her neckline to highlight her cleavage displayed to best advantage in the tight black vintage dress she’d quickly changed into before they left the shop.
But when Javier’s tongue did something quite obscene with his bottle of lager, Nina began to wonder how they were going progress things when she only spoke five words of Spanish. And when he did it again, this time with added and very unsexy slurping at the bottle neck, she found herself go suddenly cold.
Nina knew precisely nothing about Javier, except that he was from Spain (though she wasn’t completely sure about that, he could just be from a Spanish-speaking country), he was Paloma’s friend and, judging from what he was doing to his poor lager bottle, he was angling for a hook-up.
Oh God, she was so tired of this merry-go-round. It was time for Nina to make her excuses and leave because she had a three-date minimum before hooking up. And how could you have three dates with someone when you only understood a few words they were saying? Also, if she and Javier did get past three dates, got intimate with each other, only for things to fizzle out (after all, intimacy was no guarantee of a happy ever after), then things could get awkward between Nina and Paloma. Paloma did make a stellar cup of coffee and Nina would hate it if Paloma started spitting in hers or worse, withholding coffee altogether. This was why dear, beloved Lavinia had been fond of saying, ‘Don’t get your bread from the same place that you get your eggs,’ or as Nina’s father would say more brusquely, ‘Don’t shit where you sleep.’
What Javier was doing now with his tongue was actually starting to make her feel a bit nauseous and weary with it all. Since when had hooking up become so … boring? If there was one thing that Nina didn’t do, it was boring. ‘Boring’ wasn’t the reason why she’d upgraded her daytime make-up to an evening look, which involved yet another lorryload of eyeliner, a more strongly defined brow and industrial amounts of red lipstick. ‘Boring’ wasn’t why Nina had poured herself into a black satin wiggle dress and teetered to the tapas bar in five-inch heels.
Nina had gone to all this effort because she wanted to bewitch and beguile the man of her dreams and she had a very clear idea of just who that man was. Some ten years before, Nina had read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and it had changed her life forever. Heathcliff and Cathy were star-crossed lovers who couldn’t live with each other and couldn’t live without each other. It was all passion and angst and rugged Yorkshire moorland. And though in his worst moments, Heathcliff was one hundred per cent toxic masculinity, in his best moments, Nina had glimpsed the kind of man who would make her happy. A man who was her soulmate. Her one true love. A restless heart to match her own. A man who’d try to beat her at her own game but would only succeed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and alternate Sundays. A man who’d share all the highs and lows of a love that was too great to be contained. A man who loved with everything he was and wouldn’t settle for second best, so why should Nina? And that was why she was holding out for a Heathcliff and would accept no substitutes.
But it turned out that in real life, Heathcliffs were pretty thin on the ground and Nina knew without a shadow of a doubt that a Heathcliff would not be passionately tonguing a cheap bottle of euro-lager on a Tuesday night.
Nina smiled regretfully, tucked her legs under her chair before Javier gave her friction burns, and pulled out her phone.
The night was still young, she thought as she logged into HookUpp – maybe her romantic hero would be lurking in its algorithms tonight. HookUpp was a dating app designed and owned by Sebastian’s company ZingerMedia, so Nina was always slightly terrified that he had access to her login details and might share classified information with Posy over dinner.
‘Wouldn’t expect Tattoo Girl to be on time tomorrow,’ he’d say, poring over Nina’s metadata. ‘She’s just up-swiped on a graphic designer who up-swipes a different woman every evening and never gets less than a four-star rating from any of them.’
Still, Nina wasn’t fearful enough to delete the app. Not when there was every chance of love lurking around the next corner. Or rather Steven, 31, writer, who was apparently 0.3 km away and had already up-swiped Nina and sent her a message: Fancy a drink?
It was quite dimly lit in the tapas bar and Nina had to peer quite closely at her screen to get a good look at Steven’s picture. Not that she was shallow, but she didn’t want to go for a drink with someone who looked like they’d buried their last four HookUpps in shallow graves.
Steven looked all right. He was posed with a Labrador, who was absolutely gorgeous. How bad could Steven be if he was friendly with a dog? Dogs were great judges of character.
Nina up-swiped Steve and sent a message back. Thornton Arms, ten minutes?
Steven
