love, even looking for a Heathcliff, was a numbers game. A girl had to manoeuvre around a lot of frogs to find her prince. In Nina’s experience, which was vast, it was best to get the meet and greet out of the way ASAP and then, hopefully, she and Steven, 31, could get on with the falling in love.
With a renewed sense of optimism, Nina scraped her chair back and stood up. ‘Guys! I have to go now,’ she said. There was a gratifying chorus of ‘No’s and many hand-wringing gestures. Javier, though, just shrugged and stopped making love to his lager bottle, so Nina knew she’d been right to trust her instincts. If Javier had the Heathcliff gene, he’d have thrown himself to the ground to prevent Nina from leaving or at the very least, he’d have offered to buy her a drink if she agreed to stay.
There was just time for a quick primp and spritz in the bathroom to ensure her hair was still immaculately set and that her lipstick was still where it should be.
All was well. Watch out, Steven, 31, writer, get ready to fall madly in love.
Nina left the bar and walked round the corner, took a left, and even now, after years of blind dates and meeting men whose picture was a little avatar on her phone screen, she still got the same feeling in her stomach. A churny, tingly feeling of expectation, excitement and yes, a little bit of dread. It didn’t matter how many times Nina took a walk to meet a man, she never failed to have that colony of butterflies fluttering deep inside her, because she might be about to meet her destiny. This. Could. Be. The. One.
‘You Nina, then?’ asked the man in the suit stood outside the Thornton Arms. ‘You looked thinner in your picture.’
He’d looked at least ten years younger, five inches taller and had definitely had more hair. ‘Steven,’ Nina confirmed with a bright smile, even as the butterflies stopped fluttering and she wondered why she’d bothered to reapply her lipstick for this.
‘Shall we?’ Steven opened the door not for Nina but so he could enter the pub first, which was just bad manners. At least he didn’t let the door shut in Nina’s face, but he was already on one strike.
‘So, let’s find somewhere to sit,’ Nina suggested, but Steven was too busy giving her the once over to reply.
His eyes lingered on what Nina lovingly called her three b’s: boobs, belly, booty. Not with admiration or longing or lust, but with obvious distaste.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘you really should include a full-body shot on your HookUpp profile. Saves a lot of time. I don’t normally contact women who only have a headshot.’
Nina refrained from pointing out that he’d uploaded a picture from the dim and distant days when he’d had a full head of hair. ‘I’m sorry that my curves are too much for you to handle,’ she said icily, drawing herself up so those curves were displayed to their best advantage.
She was a size fourteen. Size sixteen. Size fourteen. OK, she was somewhere between a fourteen and sixteen depending on the time of the month, which shop she was in and how many of the tearoom’s delicious baked goods she’d scoffed that week. And Nina was OK with that. She liked her body. It looked good in her beloved vintage dresses. It looked good with no clothes on at all. It could walk great distances in high heels. It could walk even greater distances on the very rare occasions when she wore flats. If she wanted to feel bad about her body, then she could go and visit her mother. She certainly wasn’t going to let this Steven, with his cheap suit and sweaty upper lip, try to make her feel that she should be something less.
‘You know what, let’s call it quits,’ she said, which was very reasonable of her.
‘Why should we do that? I’ll get you a drink,’ Steven offered but it sounded very ungracious, like he was doing Nina a huge favour. ‘Then you can make it up to me.’
Make what up to him? For failing to have the words I’M NOT A SIZE EIGHT emblazoned on her profile? And how exactly did Steven think she was going to make amends for this dreadful oversight? Well, his eyes had barely left her boobs for the last five minutes so Nina had a pretty clear idea.
‘I’m very good at making up,’ she purred, fluttering her eyelashes at Steven, whose upper lip glistened even more. ‘You go and get me a vodka tonic, a large one, while I powder my nose.’
Steven had the nerve – the sheer nerve! – to pat Nina on the bottom and that was maybe his fifth strike, she’d lost count of just how many strikes, which was why she didn’t go through the door marked Ladies but carried on down the hall until she came to a door marked Private, which she knocked on.
It was opened by a burly, middle-aged man in a One Direction T-shirt who didn’t look surprised to see Nina. ‘Operation Frog?’ he asked.
‘Operation Frog,’ Nina confirmed. ‘I could kiss him from now until the end of eternity and he’d never be anything but a total arsehole.’
‘Say no more, my love,’ said Chris, landlord of the Thornton Arms and self-styled saviour of any customer on a bad date. ‘Follow me.’
He led Nina further down the hall to a door, which he unlocked so Nina could sneak out the back while Steven was still waiting to order her very large vodka and tonic.
‘You’re a real gent, Chris,’ she said gratefully, because this wasn’t the first time, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, that Chris had come to her rescue. ‘I owe you one.’
‘You owe me more than one,’ Chris said with a grin. ‘Time you settled down with a nice bloke.’
Nina pulled a face. ‘I don’t want to settle down with a nice bloke. I want nothing less than mad, passionate love with a man who’d give me the moon and stars if I asked for them.’
‘Good luck with that, sweetheart.’ Chris shook his head then pulled the door shut behind her.
Nina took her phone out of her coat pocket so she could block Steven. She was still logged into HookUpp, the app pinging to let her know there were matches close by, and for a moment, Nina was tempted. The night was still young, after all, and it wasn’t as if she was getting any younger. Or she could go back to the tapas bar and maybe have another crack at Javier. Perhaps she’d written him off too quickly.
Or she could just go home. She was only around the corner from Happy Ever After and, as if they had a mind of their own, her feet were swinging left and down Rochester Street then into Rochester Mews. Nina sighed as she tapped the security code into the panel of the electric gate that prevented undesirables from gaining access to the mews after hours.
Then it was an unsteady, vertiginous wobble across the cobblestones towards Happy Ever After. The shop was in darkness and Nina didn’t bother to turn on the lights as she locked the door behind her then gratefully eased off her shoes.
She padded across the main room, past the shop counter to the door that led to the stairs. There were no lights on upstairs but that didn’t necessarily mean that Verity was staying over at Johnny’s again. She could be home and doing yoga, which she preferred to do by candlelight. Or she could be reading, which was another quiet activity and one she could easily abandon to listen to Nina spin an amusing yarn about her adventures this evening.
‘Very? Are you in?’ Nina called out as she climbed the stairs. ‘Had a lucky escape from a total loser tonight. He had the worst hair plugs of anyone I’ve ever seen.’
‘Roooowwwwwrrrrrrrr!’ came the plaintive reply, not from
