AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter Thirty-Two
Ifluffed up the cushions on the sofa and chaise longue, checked my new photo canvases were straight on the living room wall, then went in the fridge to make sure the wine and prosecco were chilling nicely. All good.
Roxy and Bella would be round any minute. I’d called an emergency meeting. As much as I had tried to be independent and not continually ask them a million and one questions about men/dating/my love life, sometimes you had to admit defeat and rally the troops.
Thursday night was my third date with Charlie and we werestillat the peck-on-the-cheek stage. I just didn’t get it and wanted a second opinion from two of the people that I trusted the most.
We’d all been super busy these past two weeks. Bella with juggling Paul and her teaching, Roxy with the normal stresses that come with running a sales force, and me working on various projects. That meant that, apart from the odd ‘good luck with your date tonight’, ‘what are you wearing?’ and top-line-summary-of-each-date WhatsApp messages, they weren’t fully up to speed on what had been going on.
The bell went. Right on time. I walked to the front door and let them in.
‘Hello, Soph!’ they said in unison as I gave them each a massive hug.
‘Come in, ladies,’ I said, directing them to the living room.
‘Oooh, new photos!’ commented Roxy instantly.
‘That’s a lovely canvas of your mum, dad, Harrison, Marilyn and Jasmine. Gorgeous. Was that from your birthday dinner?’ asked Bella.
‘It was indeed,’ I replied.
‘You might be bloody irritating, always asking everyone for photos, but I admit, you definitely know how to take a great picture,’ said Roxy.
‘Thanks, Rox. So what are we drinking?’ I said, walking through to the kitchen and opening the fridge. ‘Prosecco? As you’re staying over, I’ve got plenty of booze. It’s Saturday night, so we can let our hair down. No work tomorrow!’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Bella, rolling her eyes. ‘Two-year-olds sadly don’t differentiate between weekdays and weekends. They want to be entertained and waited on hand and foot 24/7. As soon as I walk through that front door tomorrow lunchtime, I’ll be back on mummy duty.’
‘Poor thing!’ said Roxy. ‘And, yes, to answer your question, Soph, prosecco sounds good.’
‘Me too,’ conceded Bella. ‘Screw it! I will worry about my hangover tomorrow. Mike can help out if I need to sleep it off. Thanks, Soph.’
I picked up the bottle along with three glasses and headed back to the living room.
They filled me in properly on what had been going on in their lives. Paul had recently started nursery part-time, so Bella had increased her teaching to three days a week. Whilst Mike’s job as an English professor meant he earned enough for her to stay at home and look after Paul full-time, as someone who had always made her own money, she’d always wanted to retain some financial independence. But at the same time, Bella admitted she was finding it exhausting juggling the demands that come with looking after a toddler, plus lesson planning and rushing from one big firm to another across London to teach each of the high-flying foreign city executives, who’d booked her to help them improve their English.
Roxy’s work was going well. Colette, the MD of the company she worked for, who Roxy credited as helping her get back on her feet after her divorce by offering her a job and a place to stay, was expanding the company, so she had offered Roxy the role of senior sales and marketing director. In terms of her love life, or rather her sex life (Roxy doesn’t do ‘love’), she had called it off with the twenty-six-year-old fuck buddy because he was starting to ‘catch feelings’, which wasn’t part of her ‘no-strings’ agenda.
When our Chinese takeaway was dropped off by Deliveroo, we all got stuck in, shunning the dining table and just eating whilst sitting on the sofa instead.
‘Sooo, Sophia,’ said Roxy with a glint in her eye. ‘Tell us about Charlie. What’s the emergency, then? Not that we don’t love to see you, but we rarely organise a catch-up with just a forty-eight-hour turnaround, so it must be pretty urgent.’
‘Well. I’ll cut to the chase. Would you consider it weird if you’ve been on three dates with a guy and at the end of the date, he’s still just giving you a peck on the cheek?’ I asked, still feeling confused.
Bella and Roxy both gave each other puzzled looks.
‘A peck on the cheek?’ clarified Roxy.
‘Yep,’ I confirmed.
‘Maybe he’s just being a gentleman,’ suggested Bella.
‘At first that’s what I thought. On the first date, he nearly went to shake my hand, which would have been super weird, but he must have realised what he was doing at the last minute and then did the one peck on the cheek. I thought maybe it was because we were outside Sexy Fish and it was busy and he wasn’t into PDA.’
‘PDA?’ queried Bella.
‘Public displays of affection,’ clarified Roxy.
‘But then on the second date, it happened again. His ritual is that he flags down a taxi, pays them to take me home—which is very sweet and did take me aback the first time as I went to pay and the driver said it had already been taken care of—but then he just kisses me on the cheek. And for the second date, the street was very quiet, so that can’t have been the problem.’
