‘It’s no company at all, when people know nothing and say nothing.’
Wednesday was Valentine’s Day and the shop was madly busy with people buying romantic novels, completely disproving Nina’s theories that the loved-up wouldn’t need to and the lovelorn couldn’t bear to. Though the bulk of their customers were panic-stricken men who descended in their droves at lunchtime and just before closing to buy cards and romantic gifts and ‘I don’t suppose you sell flowers, do you?’
Happily, Nina had customers to serve and books to pimp and not that much time to dwell on her date that evening but the important question was WHY had Noah asked her out for a date on Valentine’s Day? What was that about?
She had decided to keep it on the down low. Hadn’t told Verity or Posy because they’d make something of it and Tom would sneakily convince Nina to ferret out vital information about their job security. Anyway, Nina had already decided that she’d put Noah straight right from the start. Before they’d even ordered a round. They weren’t on a date date; they were on a non-date; they were just two people having a drink together.
Because although she had a rule that she never turned down a date, on the way back to Happy Ever After on Sunday afternoon, Nina had remembered one of her other rules: not to mix business with pleasure.
For someone who tried to live her life as passionately and spontaneously as she could, she seemed to have a lot of rules, Nina thought to herself with a small sigh as she turned the shop sign to closed. A quick tidy up of the main room, then she had about an hour and a half to get ready.
‘Nina! Are you ill?’ Posy asked in a concerned voice, putting her hands on her hips as she stood behind the counter.
Nina frowned. ‘No, I’m fine. Why would you think I was ill?’
‘Because you haven’t asked if we’re going to the pub,’ Posy replied. ‘You always try to rustle up a pub posse. Are you sure you’re not sickening for something?’
‘I don’t always go to the pub after work,’ Nina insisted, because she didn’t. At least, she didn’t think she did. Not every night. ‘Way to make me sound like a complete alkie.’
‘Not an alcoholic, you’re just sociable,’ Verity called out from the back office. She made being sociable sound like a fate worse than death.
By now Nina was at the office door so she could stick her tongue out at Verity, who stuck her own tongue out in riposte. ‘Anyway,’ Nina said, as she retrieved broom and dustpan and brush from the tiny kitchen off the office. ‘Anyway, I have a date tonight.’ She muttered the last bit and even though she didn’t drag her colleagues to the pub every night, she did have dates most evenings so it wasn’t that much of a revelation. Not even worthy of comment.
‘Oooh! Who? Where did you meet him?’ Posy asked. ‘On HookUpp?’
Nina began to sweep the floor. ‘No, not on HookUpp, you know I’ve sworn off it. Just some bloke I met on the train home on Sunday. You absolutely don’t know him.’ She could only hope that Noah hadn’t mentioned it to his good friend Sebastian either. There’d be endless questions, teasing, speculation and it was only one date. Not even a date – a non-date.
‘So, come on, tell us more. Is he in a band?’ Verity had left the office and was now standing in front of the till, fingers entwined as she stretched her arms in preparation for cashing up. ‘What does he look like? How many tattoos does he have?’
‘What is it with all the questions?’ Nina demanded, as she viciously attacked the bottom of one of the display units with the broom. ‘Do I interrogate you about your love lives?’
‘Yes! All the time! Even when I didn’t have a love life,’ Posy scoffed. She was meant to be reshelving the books that browsing customers had unshelved but had given that up in favour of sprawling on one of the sofas in the centre of the room, her legs dangling over the arm. ‘You are the queen of unsolicited dating advice. When Very had her third date with Johnny, you pretty much demanded that she have sex with him.’
‘I didn’t demand. And we agreed that she could have sex with him on a fifth date on account of her being a vicar’s daughter, didn’t we, Very?’
‘Yes, there have been many times we’ve discussed my previously non-existent sex life,’ Verity said in a deadpan fashion. ‘Usually in front of a shopful of customers and now you’re being strangely coy about a first date when you must have been on a thousand first dates.’
‘Not a thousand,’ Nina said automatically, crouching down to sweep up a day’s worth of crumbs, receipts and other detritus into the dustpan. Then she thought about the last ten years of her life. In that space of time she’d had two semi-serious relationships that had lasted roughly six months each. A handful of not-serious relationships that hadn’t made it to the three-month mark. So, that took care of about two and a half years, which left seven and a half years of dating.
Nina did some rapid mental arithmetic, which made her head hurt. Three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. So in seven years that was er, let’s call it two thousand and five hundred days. Two thousand and five hundred days of internet dates and HookUpp dates and friend of a friend dates and meeting eyes with a stranger on the other side of the bar dates and yeah, God, she probably had been on, at the very least, a thousand first dates.
‘What am I even doing with my life?’ Nina muttered under her breath as the futility of trying to find love – passionate, fulfilling, the-beat-of-his-heart-matches-mine love – when you’d already been on at least a thousand first dates, suddenly struck her.
‘Well, you do always say that you have to snog the face off a hell of a lot of frogs before you find your prince,’ Posy said. She held up her hand so her wedding ring and the huge sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring Sebastian had bought her caught the light. ‘God, I’m so glad I didn’t have to snog hardly any frogs at all.’
‘You’re a dear friend, Posy, and that’s why I have to tell you that you’re starting to sound like a smug married,’ Very said sternly, wagging the pencil she was holding in Posy’s direction.
‘We’re only pointing that out because we care,’ Nina added, but she was a little cheered at Posy’s reminder of her own advice.
Yes, there had been a lot of frogs in Nina’s life but all it took was one date, one man, one kiss to turn the tide; to be a prince and not some kind of low-life amphibian. And it was too bad that Nina was wasting a date on Noah when he was never going to be her ‘heart’s darling’ as Emily Brontë put it, but once she’d established that they could never be anything other than friends, he might have some good-looking mates he could set her up with.
Ninety-three minutes later, Nina hurried down Shaftesbury Avenue. She was late, she was always late, but the nerves were a brand-new experience and Nina didn’t like them at all.
Because there was nothing to be nervous about; it was Noah. She’d spent two weeks being silently observed by him. Had been to the pub with him. Had sat on a train with him. In fact, she’d been at school with him and witnessed various incidents involving Noah that probably still gave him nightmares, not that he was ever going to know that.
So, Noah was far from an unknown quantity and yet on all those other first dates with men she hardly knew, a lot of them just a tiny pic on a phone screen and a couple of messages, she hadn’t been nervous. There’d just been that delicious champagne tingle of excitement, of what if-ness, but now as she crossed over to Charing Cross Road, fighting her way through the crowd of people spilling in and out of Leicester Square station, Nina felt quite sick with apprehension and despite the chill of the February night she was sweaty in places she didn’t want to be sweaty: her hands, her armpits, and, despite the fact that she’d spritzed her make-up with fixing spray, there was a tell-tale clamminess on her forehead and upper lip.
‘It’s only Noah,’ she told herself, as she waited at another set of lights. Their meeting point was just across the road and like a teenager on her very first date, Nina was too scared to look to see if Noah was already waiting for her.
But as soon as she crossed the road, before she had time to scan the faces of other people waiting for their dates to arrive, she felt a hand on her arm.
‘Nina,’ said a voice, Noah’s voice, and she sucked in a breath before she turned round with a smile that was completely faked.
‘Hi,’ she said in a peppy voice that was faked too. ‘Hope you haven’t been waiting … long.’
‘I only just got here,’ Noah said and he leaned across so he could kiss her cheek, which quickly became awkward when Nina offered Noah the other cheek, because didn’t everyone do two kisses?
Apparently Noah didn’t because he was already stepping back. ‘Look, when I asked you out, I didn’t realise that today was Valentine’s Day,’ he said with genuine distaste so that Nina immediately felt embarrassed that she’d ever suspected otherwise. ‘But anyway, hi. Hello. You look nice.’
Nina pulled a face. ‘Well, I don’t but thanks anyway.’ To go along with the nerves, she’d also had a wardrobe crisis. Most of her first-date outfits involved tight dresses with plunging necklines but she didn’t want to give Noah the wrong idea or false hope and so she’d had to scrap that and go with a plan B. Plan B was jeans though Nina rarely did jeans; a high-waisted, dark-denim, fifties-cut jean with a wide turn-up, which she was wearing with a leopard-print twinset and motorcycle boots. No wonder she was hot and sweaty and felt as covered up as a nun, so nice didn’t even come close. ‘You look good though.’
It was Noah’s turn to pull a face. ‘Oh, this old thing!’ he said tugging at his navy peacoat. ‘So …?’
‘So …?’ Nina echoed and wondered whether she should launch into her ‘this is not a date’ speech. It couldn’t make things any more awkward than they already were. But where to start? ‘So, look … Noah. You seem like a—’
‘So, I was thinking—’
Oh God, now they were both talking at the same time. Noah pinked up and Nina was sure that her make-up, despite the very expensive fixing spray, was now completely sliding off her face.
‘Sorry.’
‘No, I’m sorry.’
‘You were saying—’
‘What were you saying—’
They were talking over each other again. Nina held up her hand. ‘You go first,’ she said a little desperately.
‘Are you sure?’ Noah asked.
Nina shut her eyes because she couldn’t look at the doubt on Noah’s face a moment longer. Like, he was regretting his decision to ask her out in the first place. Which was fine, she felt the same way, but he didn’t need to make it so obvious. ‘Yes,’ she gritted. ‘What were you going to say?’
She opened her eyes to see Noah swallow hard and mutter something she couldn’t catch. ‘Right,’ he said more decisively. ‘What I was going to say was that I don’t know about you but I really need a drink. To clarify, a drink that contains alcohol. Does that sound like a good idea?’
Nina had never heard of a better idea. ‘Yes,’ she said fervently. ‘For the love of God, yes.’