I pick up the abandoned beer mat in front of me and turn it over in my hands. The edge is damp. Someone has drawn a wonky heart on it in blue biro. Probably Becca. She is emotionally indiscriminate like that.
I should leave.
Instead, I find myself looking towards the bar.
The pub is still busy, though the crowd has shifted older, looser, more intent on the business of a Friday night becoming something slightly less respectable. Couples lean towards each other under low lights. Friends spill laughter into corners.
I smile to myself and then, before I can think better of it, head to the bar for one last drink.
It is not because I am avoiding going home.
That would be absurd.
I weave through the crowd and claim a patch of polished wood between a woman in red lipstick and a man with forearms like he chops wood recreationally. The bartender is somewhere near the other end, pouring Guinness with the concentration of a surgeon. I lean an elbow on the bar and wait.
This is usually the part of the evening where I feel most conspicuously single.
Not in a tragic way. I am too old to turn being single into performance art. More in the quiet, observational sense. A room full of people becomes very obvious in its pairings once you notice them. People arriving together, leaving together, speaking to each other with shorthand built over time.
I date. I am not some monastic figure haunting North London with only a hamster for company. I have apps. I have had short relationships, decent sex, and the occasionalrun of dates that began well and then quietly died of mutual underwhelm.
At some point in the last few years, I seem to have become a man other men like in theory. Intelligent. Funny. Together. Reasonably attractive, provided one is not exclusively interested in gym-sculpted torsos and jawlines that look allergic to cake.
I do all right.
But there is a difference between being wanted and having someone know you beyond the convenient parts. Perhaps I have spent too long making peace with the first because it asks less of me than the second.
The thought annoys me enough that I almost order a whisky instead of a pint.
The bartender finally makes it over. “What can I get you?”
“Another pint of Stella, please.”
He nods and turns away.
I glance down the bar, mostly to give myself something to do, and that is when I notice him.
Taller than most of the people around him. Broad through the shoulders. Dark T-shirt stretched across a body that looks built rather than cultivated, his leather jacket slung over the back of his chair. Ink covers both arms, disappearing beneath the sleeves. His head is clean-shaven, his profile all hard lines and quiet focus as he listens to whatever story is being told.
He laughs at something his friend says and dimples appear.
Dimples.
That feels almost unfair on a man who is otherwise shaped like he could carry a washing machine by himself.
I look away at once, because apparently I am eighteen again.
The bartender sets down my drink. I thank him, reach for my card, and tell myself with great firmness that I am not standing at a bar in Islington getting distracted by a complete stranger who could be married and have four adorable little monsters.
It means nothing. Just one fit bloke in a pub.
Men are attractive all the time. London is full of them. It would be deeply impractical to respond to each one like a virgin with a weak constitution.
I turn slightly to make room for someone passing behind me and catch, in the mirror backing the bar, the exact moment the stranger lifts his head and looks in my direction.
For a beat I assume he is looking past me.
Then his gaze lands, and something in my stomach gives a small, interested turn.
