‘If I had caused the cloud, it was my duty to make an effort to dispel it.’
Nina would have sworn that she knew her way around Soho blindfolded, but as they walked along Old Compton Street, Noah guided her left then right then down a tiny alley she’d never noticed before.
Very soon they were seated opposite each other in a booth in a burger joint called Mother’s Ruin. The jukebox was playing Elvis, the burgers were dirty and piled high and they each had an Old Fashioned in front of them.
‘This might be my new favourite place in the world,’ Nina told Noah and he raised his glass and clinked it against the side of hers.
‘I passed this place a couple of weeks ago and I remember thinking then that it would probably be your kind of thing,’ he said, making sure to look Nina in the eye so she couldn’t mistake the intent of his words. ‘Because I’ve been thinking about you a lot these past couple of weeks.’
Nina blushed, which was starting to become a nasty habit, even though she’d had many similar compliments. Not once before had she blushed.
‘So, my awesome sales technique has been keeping you up at night?’ Never before had Nina had to try so hard to come up with cheeky banter.
Noah’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Not that your sales technique isn’t awesome but that’s not what was keeping me up all night.’ He screwed his eyes tight shut like he was in pain. ‘I mean, I haven’t been up all night thinking about you. Just …’ He shook his head. ‘Let’s look at the menu. Are you hungry?’
If this were a proper date then Nina would probably have said lasciviously, ‘I’m starving and not for food,’ but it wasn’t a proper date so she settled for a truthful, ‘I could eat.’
It was much better with their menus open so they could talk about the merits of a dirty burger versus buttermilk fried chicken and if they should get a mac and cheese on the side to share along with their rosemary-and-thyme fries and deep-fried onion rings. ‘And a side salad,’ Nina decided. ‘Just to show willing.’
‘Yeah, we should probably have something green and leafy on the table,’ Noah agreed. ‘And what do you want to drink? Another Old Fashioned or do you want to get a bottle of something?’
‘I never mix grape and grain, it makes for the worst hangovers.’ Nina shuddered at the memory of all the terrible hangovers she’d suffered. ‘I think I’ll stick to the Old Fashioneds.’
She felt more at ease now, and boiling enough to slip off her leopard-print cardigan and push up the sleeves of her matching leopard-print jumper. Noah mirrored her movements, unbuttoning the cuffs of the navy-blue (big surprise) shirt he was wearing so he could roll up his sleeves, and that was when Nina saw it: the large, elegant, black type, a series of numbers and letters marching up the soft skin of his left forearm.
‘What’s that?’ Nina demanded. ‘What’s that on your arm?’
Noah grinned. ‘It’s a tattoo, Nina,’ he said evenly. ‘Have you never seen one before?’
‘Of course I have!’ Nina held up her inked arms as proof. ‘You! You have a tattoo?’
‘I do.’ He grinned again. ‘Is there going to be a copyright problem?’
‘What? No! I just … I just can’t believe that you have a tattoo. You don’t seem the sort.’
Noah wagged a finger at her. ‘You work in a bookshop, you must know all about not judging books by their covers.’
‘True. Sorry. So,’ Nina gestured at Noah’s arm. ‘What is it?’
Noah held out his arm so Nina could have a proper look at the letters, which made no sense. In fact, they were giving Nina alarming flashbacks to GCSE maths.
‘Is that … is that algebra?’ she asked.
‘It is,’ Noah admitted cheerfully. ‘It’s my favourite equation. Bayes’ theorem.’
‘Bayes’ what ’em? Can you explain it to me in words of less than three syllables?’
‘I’m sure I could.’ Noah wrinkled his brow in thought. ‘So, Bayes’ theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event.’
‘OK,’ Nina said slowly. ‘Right.’
‘For instance, I knew that you liked vintage clothes and whatnot and I knew you ate meat because we talked about it on the train, so based on this knowledge, I picked this place for our date because it’s a retro burger joint.’ Noah tapped his tattoo with a longer finger. ‘Bayes’ theorem in practice.’
‘I’m impressed!’ Nina was. ‘If my physics teacher had bothered to explain things so clearly at school then perhaps I wouldn’t have abandoned physics at the first opportunity.’
‘My physics teacher was never the same after he had an affair with the B-stream French teacher,’ Noah said as their second round of drinks arrived.
Nina smothered a gasp of genuine shock – not Mr Clark and Mrs Usher, whose French lessons mostly involved anecdotes about what she got up to on holiday in France with Monsieur Usher? ‘Scandalous! How did you find out that juicy morsel of gossip about these two people I’ve never even met?’
Noah quirked his eyebrow at her. ‘One Saturday I went to an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection and I saw them holding hands in the coffee shop.’ He paused to take a sip of his drink. ‘Thought it was best not to say anything.’
With a guilty start, Nina knew that if she’d seen her two teachers canoodling it would have been all around school by lunchtime the next day. Back then, even though he’d had no reason to, and who would have blamed him for lashing out, Noah had been more kind and thoughtful than any teenage boy had the right to be.
Nina rewarded that kindness and thoughtfulness with a smile. She was here, after all, because Noah deserved a good date, dammit, and Nina was a veteran of a good date. The one surefire way she knew to a man’s heart wasn’t through his stomach, though the heaving platters of food that were coming their way should see to that. Oh no, if Nina had learned anything on those thousand or so first dates that she’d been on, it was that no man could resist talking about himself.
‘Your tattoo,’ she prompted as Noah’s chicken and Nina’s burger were placed in front of them. ‘Did you study physics at Oxford?’
‘Well, I’d categorise Bayes’ theorem as more probability than physics and that’s what I studied at Oxford – probability and statistics. How do you feel about condiments?’ he added as the waiter put down a small tray groaning with mustards and ketchups.
‘Love condiments,’ Nina said. ‘One of the major food groups as far as I’m concerned. So, probability and statistics? Why did you want to do a degree in them?’
‘I like solving puzzles and I like to think that things happen for a reason rather than just sheer random luck,’ Noah said, though Nina liked to think just the opposite. That life was about fate and destiny, though there were times you could give fate a little nudge. There was nothing romantic about reason and living your life guided by probability and statistics. What with that and the exclusively navy-blue wardrobe, Nina didn’t think she’d ever met a man who was less likely to be her one true love. Still, she was here, on a non-date with Noah for altruistic reasons, so she’d give it her all.
‘How was Oxford then?’ she asked, as Noah helped himself to an onion ring.
‘It was scary,’ he said. ‘I was two years younger than everyone else because I skipped a couple of years at school, but once I settled in, it was fine. Better than fine really, because I was surrounded by people who wanted to learn. It was an uphill struggle to learn anything at my school: even in the top stream, there was always someone or something kicking off.’ He took another onion ring. ‘And Oxford wasn’t like a normal university. The porters in my college were like over-protective parents and Sebastian, of all people, decided to take me under his wing pretty quickly. Then once I realised that I was studying with people who didn’t want to beat the crap out of me, I started to make friends.’
Nina nodded along, even though every time he mentioned school, her stomach would clench and she’d have to put down her burger and take a large gulp of her drink.
She so desperately wanted to say she was sorry, apologise for what Paul had done, but it was a first date, their only date, a non-date, and it was best to keep the mood light and fun.
‘Did you go to Harvard straight after Oxford?’ she asked and hoped that the change of subject would mean no more oblique references to her brother and the horrible things he’d done to Noah.
‘Not straight after. I was still only nineteen so I decided to take a couple of years out, do some travelling, paying my way as I went. Started off in Thailand …’
Noah had been everywhere. Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, all over South-East Asia, then Goa and India before getting on a long-haul flight to explore South America. He’d trekked through the jungle in Peru, narrowly avoided being kidnapped in Colombia, had inadvertently taken psychotropic drugs in Bolivia and had got to Rio just in time for Carnival.
‘You have had some adventures,’ Nina breathed. She was a creature of passion and spontaneity but to be honest, the furthest she’d ever travelled and the biggest adventure she’d ever had was the time she went to Mykonos for a hen weekend and had ended up in hospital with two broken ribs and a broken toe from falling off a podium in a nightclub after too many shots.
‘I was young and completely wet behind the ears, so the adventures found me, but I did discover that I was a bit of an adrenalin junkie. White-water rafting, bungee jumping, being suspended from a great height with a zipline. I never feel more alive than when I’m facing certain death, I suppose,’ Noah said with a wry smile. He pushed away the bowl of chips that he’d been dipping into. ‘Talking of certain death, if I eat anything else then I’m a goner.’
‘Tell me about it.’ The waistband of her jeans felt as tight as a tourniquet. Nina had been mindlessly eating the onion rings and laughing as Noah had kept her entertained with tales of his many near-death experiences while travelling. ‘Could go another cocktail though.’
‘Me too,’ Noah agreed. Once the waiter had taken their drinks order and cleared the table, Noah, after a little prompting, brought Nina up to speed with the last ten years of his life.
After Brazil, he’d met up with a friend from Oxford who was living in San Francisco and had helped him with his tech start-up, then he’d been headhunted by Google who’d paid for him to do his MBA at Harvard. Then after six years at Google, he’d decided to go it alone.
‘I’m not a big fan of routine. I much prefer being my own boss,’ he told Nina, who, if Posy was anything to go by, didn’t think being your own boss was that great. It seemed to involve a lot of responsibility and having to fill in VAT returns every three months or so.
‘But what is it that you actually do?’ she asked as yet more Old Fashioneds arrived. ‘Apart from harassing hard-working employees with your iPad?’
‘If I were you I’d take me to a tribunal,’ Noah said again with another smile because both of them had that glow that came from a lot of good food, four whisky cocktails each and a conversation that had managed to remain almost free of any awkward moments. ‘Specifically, I work with businesses to find a solution to a particular problem, whether it’s not being able to retain staff or how to sell more romantic novels. It’s much easier as an outsider to come in and see the bigger picture.’
‘That makes sense, I suppose,’ Nina said and she was all good to go with some more questions but Noah held up a hand.
‘Anyway, that’s quite enough about me,’ he said firmly. ‘I don’t want to be that guy on a date who only talks about himself. I want to know what you’ve been doing since you left the mean streets of Worcester Park.’
Working a series of unsatisfying jobs and dating a series of unsatisfying men – compared to what Noah had packed into the fifteen years since their paths had crossed, it didn’t seem that impressive.
Oh God, what am I even doing with my life? It wasn’t a new thought. On the contrary it was a very old, much-visited thought that Nina usually had after binning or being binned off by either employer or boyfriend. And she usually had it when she was on her own, in the dead of night, unable to sleep, not in public, not when she was on a date. She really needed to find a direction in life, if only not to have more of these excruciating conversations on first dates.
‘There’s not much to tell,’ she said breezily, because now was not the time to give in to her angst. ‘Got some tattoos, a couple of piercings, endured a few hangovers – that’s about it.’
Noah was not to be put off. ‘I’m sure that’s not it,’ he said. ‘Posy said that you’d always worked in retail. What was your last job before Happy Ever After?’
Nina couldn’t help but pull a face at the thought of where she’d worked before she worked at Happy Ever After. And where she’d worked before that and so on and so on.
‘God, was it that bad?’ Noah asked in response to Nina’s facial contortions.
‘Yeah,’ Nina sighed. ‘It wasn’t retail – Posy just assumed it was and I never denied it – it was more … um, service industry, I think?’
‘My mind is racing with the possibilities …’ Noah widened his eyes. ‘Service industry could mean anything. Were you an arms dealer? Did you run an illegal drinking den? Cat burglar?’
‘I was a hairdresser!’ Nina admitted grudgingly. ‘Colourist mostly, some cutting and styling.’
‘That’s probably why your own hair looks so good,’ Noah said, with a nod at Nina whose hair was still a very sherbet pink and currently arranged in a French twist, the front section quiffed and pinned back. ‘What made you decide to swap hairdressing for bookselling?’
There was no judgement in Noah’s voice. He sounded as if he were genuinely interested to hear what had prompted Nina’s career change, and it was rather a leap: to swap her scissors and her foils for books and bookmarks.
‘Well, like I said, I left school after my GCSEs, which I aced by the way,’ she added a little defensively. ‘Then it was a done deal that I’d go and work for my aunt who has a salon in Worcester Park, Hair by Mandy – maybe you know it?’ she said, knowing full well he would.
‘My gran goes there. I think you’ll find it’s Hair and Nails by Mandy,’ Noah corrected her and Nina smiled.
‘You must never forget the “and Nails”,’ Nina said gravely because Mandy went ballistic if any of her staff did.
‘I still can’t believe we’ve never crossed paths before,’ Noah said, shaking his head. ‘You must have done my gran’s wash and set at least once while you were there.’
Nina tried to smile breezily. ‘Maybe. But there were so many wash and sets, with so many old ladies, you know what I mean?’ Noah nodded, even as he looked slightly disappointed.
‘Anyway, I started there as a trainee and also went to college to do my NVQ. I mean, I have qualifications.’ That same defensive note crept into her voice. ‘I worked there for four years but I didn’t want to spend my whole life in Worcester Park doing the same cut and colour on the same customers week in and week out, so I got a job in town …’ Nina tailed off and shook her head.
‘How did that go down with Aunt Mandy?’ Noah asked.
‘Like a lead balloon,’ Nina said baldly. ‘I’m amazed that I wasn’t officially excommunicated. I got a job in a salon in the West End, which was a bit more happening and I moved around, worked in some quite edgy places, I did balayage, ombré, dip-dyeing, colour melding, so it wasn’t as if I was always doing the same thing.’
‘I have no idea what any of those things are,’ Noah said. ‘Ombré? Isn’t that a painting technique?’
Nina nodded but she was too far down memory lane to stop and explain how she achieved an ombré effect on someone’s hair. ‘My last salon even specialised in vintage and retro styles but I’d been doing people’s hair for the last twelve years and it just … I just … I wasn’t enjoying it and I kept getting the sack because of my attitude – there was this whole incident in my last-but-one salon where I ended up having a barney with the mother of the bride about a wedding package. I won’t bore you with all the details.’ Nina sighed again. ‘Then I met Lavinia. She owned Bookends … that’s what Happy Ever After was called before the relaunch.’
‘I know about Bookends and I knew Lavinia. She and Perry would come up to Oxford to take Sebastian out for lunch and he’d drag me along in the hope that they wouldn’t give him a telling off in front of company.’ Noah laughed. ‘It was a case of hope over expectation. I witnessed some pretty epic bollockings.’
Nina laughed too at the thought of Sebastian, the Rudest Man in London, getting a dressing down from his grandparents.
‘I forgot that you and Sebastian go way back,’ she said.
‘Way, way back, but we were talking about you, not me,’ Noah said quietly but in a way that made it clear that he wasn’t to be deterred from his goal of learning more about Nina’s chequered path through life. She imagined that the same quiet determination was a very effective way of dealing with Sebastian too. ‘The thing about Lavinia was, she could immediately see right through to the heart and soul of someone, couldn’t she?’
‘Oh, yes! She absolutely could. I met her by accident and after ten minutes I felt as if I’d known her forever and, more than that, she knew me. Saw a side to me that nobody else ever could.’ Nina raised her glass in a silent toast to her late mentor. ‘I miss her so much.’
‘Yeah, so do I.’ Noah raised his glass too. ‘To Lavinia. So, she saw the secret bookseller in you?’
‘Kind of. Or rather she saw my tattoos. Was very taken with them.’ It was Nina’s turn to hold her arms out for Noah’s inspection. ‘My Alice in Wonderland sleeve was complete though I’d barely got started on the Wuthering Heights design on the other arm, but she offered me a job on the spot, and I loved reading but I’d never have dreamed that I could work in a bookshop.’
‘Why not? If you love reading then it seems like the perfect job?’ Noah enquired, and Nina wanted to tell him that she wasn’t a problem to be solved, but she didn’t want to harsh their whisky-induced mellow. Besides, Noah was one of those rare people, like Lavinia, that you wanted to say stuff to. Your deep, personal, inside stuff because it seemed impossible that he’d take your words and use them against you. Or judge you for them.
‘Yes but … I’m not clever enough to work in a bookshop,’ Nina blurted out, before she lost her nerve. ‘It’s why the others don’t know that I used to be a hairdresser. They all have degrees. Like, Tom is working on his third degree and all I have are seven GCSEs and an NVQ. Listen to me! I think I’ve had too much to drink. You’d better cut me off.’
‘One for the road?’ Noah suggested with a smile. ‘I will if you will. And you can tell me more about those tattoos while we do.’
Nina could never turn down one for the road. ‘Oh, go on then, twist my arm.’ She did twist her own arm then, so Noah could see her tattoo, Cathy and Heathcliff, leaning against the gnarled tree. ‘Wuthering Heights is my favourite novel.’ Was she going to? She barely knew him. But Noah was leaning forward, his eyes intent on Nina, his expression bright and alert, as if everything she said was endlessly fascinating. Nina couldn’t remember the last time someone had looked at her like that. She was pretty sure that it had probably been one of the last times she’d seen Lavinia, so yes, she was going to share the secret of what made her tick.
‘In fact, Wuthering Heights has been my inspiration for the last ten years of my life. It’s why I quit Hair (and Nails) By Mandy, why I left Worcester Park, why I do most of the things I do.’
‘Why’s that then?’ Noah asked.
‘Passion. Cathy and Heathcliff were ruled by their passions. They didn’t settle for safe or mediocre.’
Noah didn’t respond at first but took a sip of his drink. ‘I’m all for following one’s passions, but I have to say that there are happier books to be inspired by.’ He shrank back a little as Nina stiffened. ‘I mean, things didn’t turn out so well for Cathy and Heathcliff, did they?’
‘Of course they didn’t and I know that Cathy and Heathcliff were both high maintenance and that if you knew them in real life, they’d absolutely do your head in, but if I’ve learned anything from Wuthering Heights it’s that a life without passion is a life half-lived,’ Nina said with all the passion that she could muster, which was quite a lot of passion.
‘So, you’re passionate about working at Happy Ever After then?’ Noah asked reasonably enough.
‘Well …’ Nina dithered slightly. ‘I like working there. A lot. Like, really a lot,’ she insisted, picking up her glass and glaring at it. ‘God, these cocktails are like a truth serum. I’m happy enough, I just thought that at nearly thirty I’d be happier.’
‘I hear you,’ Noah said with great feeling. ‘I really don’t want to be that guy who quotes U2 …’
‘Please, don’t be that guy,’ Nina said but Noah shook his head. He wasn’t to be deterred.
‘I’ve literally been halfway round the world and I still don’t know what I’m looking for. Sometimes I wish I’d followed my childhood dreams and become a fighter pilot.’ He tapped a finger to the corner of his eye. ‘I’d probably fail the sight test.’
‘I did wonder,’ Nina said as delicately as she could for someone who’d drunk five whisky-based cocktails. ‘’Cause at school you wore really thick glasses.’
She froze, face hidden by her whisky glass. Would he pick up on her slip? Thankfully, it seemed five whisky-based cocktails were enough to make Noah a little fuzzy around the edges too.
‘Contact lenses. Bifocal contact lenses. But could you even imagine how horrific military training might be? At least at school, I got to go home each afternoon.’ Noah swatted his own words away as if he couldn’t bear to dwell on them. ‘What about you? What did you really want to grow up to be when you were a kid?’
Nina couldn’t help the shudder that rippled through her. ‘Honestly? I wanted to be married by the time I was twenty because that’s what my mum and my gran and my great-gran all did, like it was this grand family tradition.’ She shuddered again at the thought of her lucky escape. ‘But I loved art. Maybe even more than I loved reading. I had such a crush on my GCSE art teacher.’
‘I didn’t do art,’ Noah said. ‘I got special permission to take an extra maths class instead.’
‘You freak,’ Nina said without thinking but Noah laughed.
‘Haven’t got one artistic bone in my body. Maybe half a bone.’ He held up his little finger. ‘Half of this bone here. So, this art teacher, was she a goth? All the ones at my school wore way too much black.’
Ms Casson had been a bit of a goth. She had long black hair and wore long floaty black dresses and to stop her students throwing paint and X-Acto knives at each other, she’d kept them enthralled with tales of art college. But more than that, she’d seen something different in Nina, even though Nina had dressed the same and acted the same and behaved the same as all the other girls in her year. Ms Casson had told Nina that she had real talent and that she should stay on to do her A-levels, maybe even go to art college, but by then Nina was already working Saturdays in Hair (and Nails) By Mandy and going steady with Dan Moffat from the year above who’d already left Orange Hill and was studying engineering at the local college, and her future was set.
‘Yeah, she was a bit of a goth,’ Nina said to Noah. ‘But she’d gone to the Royal College of Art and she painted when she wasn’t teaching. One time she had an exhibition in a gallery up in town and our class went and that made me think that I’d love to be an artist. To create things that made people feel something. That’s quite an amazing thing to do, isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ Noah agreed. ‘There’s no reason you couldn’t go to art class now. Life drawing or something?’
‘Everyone in the class would be so much better than me,’ Nina stated with absolute certainty. Also, there was nothing more tragic than someone constantly harking back to their school glory days. ‘I haven’t picked up a paintbrush in years. Wouldn’t have the first clue what to do with a stick of charcoal. Anyway, I get to do my window displays at the shop and I’ve designed all of my own tattoos so I still get to be creative.’ Nina caught their server’s eye. ‘Shall we get the bill then?’
Noah must have got the message that Nina wasn’t up for any more self-improvement because he changed the topic to the company he was working with that week. They had a room you could only reach by rope ladder, called The Birdhouse, designed to encourage ‘blue sky’ thinking. And another room painted yellow called The Egg but no one could remember why.
‘Maybe it’s where they hatch new ideas,’ Nina suggested with a smile because somehow Noah had managed to turn the non-date around again. ‘Or crack a few yolks.’
Noah groaned as if he was in pain. ‘Egg puns? I expected better from a chick like you.’
The bill arrived on a saucer that was placed in the dead centre of the table because this was a modern establishment that had no truck with outmoded conventions of dating. Much like Nina herself. She reached for the bill, about to suggest they go Dutch, but Noah’s reflexes were much quicker.
‘My treat,’ he said firmly, barely glancing down at the total.
‘We’ll go halves,’ Nina said just as firmly. ‘You’ll be bankrupt with the amount of cocktails we’ve just drunk.’
Noah clutched the bill to his chest. ‘Hardly. Look, I asked you out, so I get the bill. That’s how it works. It’s common courtesy.’
Nina had been to this rodeo before. Quite a few times. You let the man get the bill and he expected something by way of return. There had even been a few charmers that Nina had met on HookUpp, who’d demanded that Nina reimburse them for the one measly drink they’d bought her after she’d messaged them to say that it had been lovely to meet up but she didn’t want to take it any further.
‘I always pay my way,’ she said tightly. ‘My look might be 1950s but my outlook certainly isn’t.’
‘This is my way of thanking you for a lovely evening,’ Noah said, as he produced his credit card. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you put in the tip?’
Nina grudgingly agreed and put in a generous cash tip for their server and when she and Noah staggered outside, almost knocked sideways by the sudden cold wind that greeted them, she touched his arm hesitantly.
‘I did, actually. Have a lovely evening,’ she said, because it had hardly been the ordeal she’d expected. In fact, she’d enjoyed herself for a good seventy-five per cent of the non-date. Which reminded her that she still hadn’t mentioned the non-date status of the time they’d spent together. It seemed churlish to bring it up now when Noah had just paid for their meal. She’d send him her tried and tested ‘great to meet up’ message in a couple of days.
‘Me too,’ Noah said with a note of surprise as if he hadn’t been expecting to. ‘So, did you want to maybe arr—?’
‘How are you getting home?’ Nina quickly asked because it sounded a lot like Noah wanted to lock down a second date. ‘I’m going to jump on a bus at Charing Cross Road. Great thing about living in the centre of town – most buses pretty much take you from door to door.’
‘But it’s quite late. You’re not getting an Uber?’ Her plan to distract Noah had worked.
‘My dad’s a cabbie. The guilt I feel when I get an Uber outweighs the convenience,’ Nina said. By now, they’d emerged from the tiny alley where the burger joint was situated onto Dean Street.
‘Oh dear, maybe I should stop taking so many Ubers.’ Noah took Nina’s arm as they crossed the road, but then removed his hand from her elbow as soon as they reached the safety of the pavement. ‘I’ll see you onto the bus, shall I?’
‘You don’t need to do that,’ Nina said a little desperately because Noah was intent on being a perfect gentleman, the perfect first date, and yet Nina was already planning how she’d bin him off.
‘I don’t need to but I want to,’ Noah insisted as they went down the narrow alley next to The Pillars Of Hercules pub on Greek Street. ‘There could be all sorts of ne’er-do-wells lurking between here and the bus stop.’
‘You quite good in hand-to-hand combat, then?’ Nina asked and for about the fifteenth time that night, she instantly and inwardly berated herself. If Noah had been any good in a fight, then his school days would have been very different.
‘I am quite good in hand-to-hand combat these days. I have a black belt in Krav Maga …’
‘You’ve got a black belt in what?’
‘Krav Maga! It’s a self-defence system developed for the Israeli Defence Forces and includes everything from judo to kickboxing. It was the big thing when I lived in San Francisco,’ Noah explained.
‘Show me some moves then,’ she demanded as they reached the corner of Charing Cross Road. ‘Do a kicky thing.’
Noah laughed and shook his head. ‘I have to have been on at least three dates before I pull out the kicky thing. Talking of which …’
‘My bus!’ Nina had never been so pleased to see a 38 bus, even though, if she let it go, another one would appear in less than five minutes. ‘I’ve got to go. Thanks for dinner.’
She ran towards the stop but Noah easily matched her pace. ‘It was my pleasure. So, shall we do this again?’
‘I’ll text you,’ Nina panted because she wasn’t used to this kind of exertion and then she was at the stop just as the bus pulled in.
‘I don’t think we’ve swapped numbers,’ Noah said as the small crowd of people already waiting got on board. ‘Shall I call you at the shop?’
‘Look, I really have to go,’ Nina said. Normally she absolutely smashed it when it came to end-of-date proceedings. But this was a non-date and she didn’t know whether to kiss Noah on the cheek or hug him; either one seemed appropriate.
In the end, as Noah leaned towards her, she settled for a mash-up of both, patting him on the cheek, then jumped on board the bus.
‘I had fun,’ Noah said, standing there with his hands in the pockets of his navy peacoat, his hair a riotous colour in the glow of the streetlights, a smile on his face like he really had had the best of times. ‘See you soon.’
Nina was saved from having to reply by the bus driver shutting the door, so all she could do was wave then give Noah a thumbs up, like she was a contestant on a cheesy quiz show.
For a girl with all the moves, Nina couldn’t remember a single one of them.