We’re friends. He’s a nice person.
I just need to act very normally, nothing-to-see-here around him the next few times I see him, and then he will hopefully think that he was mistaken and I was just gazing at the moon or something. I mean, who doesn’t love a full moon? Or a crescent. Or whatever it was.
I don’t know what it was because for me at that moment the whole world was about Tom.
Pathetic.
I finish clearing up the water and run the tap very gently to fill the kettle before deciding that actually I just want to crawl into bed and pretend the eager-for-a-kiss madness never happened.
* * *
Sometimes it’s a blessing to be really busy with work, and today is one of those times. I still keep getting flashes of embarrassment, but they’re really quite spaced out (I mean no more frequently than one every five to ten minutes rather than one long gaaaaah moment) and by the time I’m having lunch with my university friend-client I’ve felt a tiny moment of positivity, which is that, actually, these thingsdooccasionally happen between people and in fact how would Tom know about my paranoia about initiating kisses on first dates? (It wasn’t even an actual date.) For all he knows, I didn’t really want to kiss him but was too polite to break the moment. Or was indeed staring at the moon.
What I need to do is act entirely normally so he’ll think I was definitely cool about everything.
Maybe I’d already decided that.
‘Nadia?’ Holly, my friend, is staring at me. ‘Are you okay? Do you have Covid again? Is it your foot?’
‘Sorry, no, nothing.’ Eek. I donotwant to be rude to a good friend. Or anyone. I’m behaving like a teenager. ‘Tell me about your holiday.’
* * *
My phone’s stalking me, as they do, and articles about pies have been popping up all day in my feed. One of them – ‘How many pies is too many?’ – which I see as I’m lugging myself and my boot onto a train after a long day at work, makes me think of Tom, because, according to the writer,anynumber of pies is too many. I begin to forward it to him, before stopping and worrying that I’m stalking him. And then I worry that uncharacteristic silence would be weird. And then I decide that I’ve gone mad because I’m overthinking everything to do with Tom.
And then I play a quick game of Brawl Stars to calm myself down and decide that I just need to act normally and the normal thing to do in this situation (if the non-kiss had never happened) would be to forward the article.
Tom comes straight back with his response:
Rude. And wrong.
Which makes me smile. And just like that I feel a little bit better. I’ve been normal and now I can simply – very normally and totally relaxedly – not send any more messages for a bit, and all good. Even if he knows that in that moment I would have been up for a kiss (gigantic understatement) he’ll probably think – from my extreme normality and relaxedness – that it was very much just in that moment and not atallwhat I usually think when I’m with him.
It’s all fine. Definitely.
* * *
By Saturday, I almost believe that I’m over any stupid infatuation I had with Tom.
I could even see him again without feeling embarrassed.
I’m on the bus on my way to meet friends at the cinema when I get a message from him:
My grandmother LOVED the video. Thank you again!
And then a second one a few seconds later:
Sorry, sorry, I should have asked – how’s New Zealand?
Clearly your grandmother has excellent taste because there could not have BEEN a better video. New Zealand is beautiful. A big change after London but I’m really enjoying it.
Ha.
I wait for a minute (okay, fine, probably – to my shame – quite a few minutes) but that’s it.
* * *
And, it gradually turns out, that really is it. When I sent the pie article, Tom’s reply was a conversation-closer. And our polite conversation about the video ended with another conversation-closer from him. So for my own self-respect I’m not initiating any more text conversation.
