out in Olly’s van, like cape-less crusaders, to rescue me from Death By Humiliation in Shepherd’s Bush. ‘Olly is right there beside me when am answering phone. You are expecting me to be lying to him about reason for phone call? When he is currently being my boss? And also, am hoping not to be presuming too much, my friend?’
Well, no, I wasn’t expecting him to lie.
And given that he blurted, ‘Let me be getting this straight, Libby – you are trapped somewhere against your will and only wearing what I am guessing to be some sort of undergarment?’ a couple of moments after my terse explanation over the phone, I suppose it’s only to be expected that Olly would grab his car keys and hurtle to my assistance.
But it’s just one more layer of awkwardness to endure: Olly, who didn’t even know I was dating Adam to begin with, coming face to face with me in that terrible, semi-naked, head-wodged predicament.
Quite honestly, the discovery that my new boyfriend, who I really thought might be The One, is in fact gay … well, it’s almost the least bad thing about the last couple of hours.
I said almost.
Olly has insisted on driving me all the way home, which is nice of him, because I’m feeling a bit too bruised – physically and emotionally – for the rough-and-tumble of the tube just now.
The downside, though, is more of that terrible awkwardness.
Even though – obviously – I re-dressed myself as soon as I was free from the bars, the atmosphere between us is so uncomfortable that I might as well be still wearing nothing but the Ribbony Elasticky Thing and a slick of sesame oil. We’ve sat in embarrassed silence ever since Shepherd’s Bush, and we’re over the river and stuck in a bottleneck of traffic near Wandsworth Bridge when Olly finally breaks it.
‘So. Adam Rosenfeld.’
‘Yes.’ I swallow, hard. ‘Did you know he was gay?’
‘Libby, come on. I only work with the guy. And barely even that, really. He dropped into the restaurant this afternoon for the first time in a week. I mean, I don’t remember pondering, as we pored over some thrilling spreadsheets together, what his sexual orientation might be …’
‘Fair point.’
‘And it’s not like I was looking out for anything in particular, one way or the other.’ Olly changes gear as we finally move up a little way in the traffic. ‘I mean, I didn’t even know you were seeing him, Libby. You kept that one pretty close to your chest.’
I wince, inwardly, at Olly’s mere mention of my chest, given that he’s seen more of my chest this evening than I’d have liked him to do in a lifetime.
‘It was pretty recent,’ I mumble.
‘You could have mentioned something over the weekend.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to shout it from the rooftops in case … well, it didn’t work out. Which has turned out to be pretty prophetic of me, really.’
‘You’re not pathetic.’
‘Prophetic,’ I say.
‘Oh … well, you might be that.’
‘Yeah, except I thought the reasons we might not work out would be because we were both too busy with our jobs, or because we didn’t like each other’s families … I never stopped to think that it might be because he was using me as a beard to hide his true identity from his Orthodox Jewish parents.’
This is based on something that Adam muttered at me, by the way, a few minutes before Bogdan and Olly and the tool kit got there: I’m really sorry, Libby … my mum and dad … it’s an Orthodox thing … they wouldn’t approve …
Which, you know, I can sympathize with. I’ve endured the disapproval of my own mother for the majority of the last thirty years. But I still don’t think it’s reasonable to drag someone else into the middle of it. Someone unwitting. Someone ignorant.
‘I’m just such an idiot,’ I say, miserably, gazing out of the window as unidentifiable bits of southwest London slide by in the gathering midsummer dusk. ‘How did I not realize he was gay? He couldn’t have made any more excuses to avoid having sex with me!’
‘He made excuses?’
‘Dozens of them.’ I never usually talk about sex with Olly, but I feel we’ve crossed that barrier tonight. Actually, not so much crossed as smashed through it. With a ten-tonne truck. ‘He was busy with work. He was tired from the gym. He had a headache … I don’t know. There were a lot of different explanations. And I fell for each and every one of them.’
‘So the … er … dressing up in … er … sexy lingerie was—’
‘My embarrassingly misguided attempt to reverse the situation.’
Olly nods. ‘Got it.’
‘I mean, what’s wrong with me,’ I go on, ‘that I have such crappy awful judgement about the entire male species?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with you.’
‘All right, then, maybe there’s just something wrong with men.’
‘OK, well, that’s a bit of an unfair generalization—’
‘I don’t mean you, Ol,’ I say. ‘I just mean all the others.’
‘Come on, Lib, just because it’s all gone a bit pear-shaped with Adam, and just because you had a hellish experience with a total wanker like Dillon O’Hara—’
At this moment, there’s an angry grunt from the back of the car: it’s Bogdan who, I have to confess, I’d completely forgotten was sitting back there.
He looms forward now, to jab Olly in the shoulder with a large and paint-spattered finger.
‘Do not be saying the impolite things about Dillon,’ he tells Olly. ‘Libby is not having the hellish experience with him. Libby is having the heavenly experience with him. And not just in the bedroom.’
‘Bogdan!’ I turn round and glare at him. ‘That’s none of anyone’s business!’
‘Is being the business of mine,’ Bogdan mutters, darkly, ‘when am hearing the untrue things about the people I am liking.’
(Bogdan is being slightly disingenuous here. He didn’t so much like Dillon as nurse a colossal, simmering, unrequited passion for him, in a tragic, balalaika-accompanied, Moldovan sort of way. Many was the time, in the course of those few heady months with Dillon, that I half expected to open my suitcase in some glamorous hotel room only to find Bogdan stowed away amongst my shoes and my tops and my sexy underwear, all ready to clamber out and hang on Dillon’s every word for the duration of our dirty weekend. I got so paranoid that I even stopped taking the big suitcase, and started cramming everything I might need into the smaller of my two canvas holdalls instead.)
‘My mistake, Bogdan,’ Olly returns, his voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘There’s obviously nothing at all hellish about being
