Читать книгу Perfect Match - Zoe May - Страница 14

Chapter Seven

Come Friday night, I’m at a West End bar. Kate has just got out of the Globe and is still wearing her heavily contoured stage make-up, which always looks odd when paired with black leggings and a baggy jumper. A group of us have gathered to celebrate our friend Cassie’s twenty-ninth birthday.

‘So, this is Mike,’ Cassie says, introducing us to her new boyfriend. He looks round the group, blushing a little, before he’s swept up in a frenzy of hand-shaking and hugs. Cassie grins. Kate and I shared a flat with her briefly after university until her habits of burning sage, chanting spells and leaving handmade wands (aka tree branches) everywhere began to get a bit much. Then when our tenancy ran out, Kate made up some elaborate excuse about landlords and council tax or something so that we wouldn’t have to endure any more amateur witchcraft. Still, we both felt a bit guilty, especially when Cassie moved into a miserable basement studio in Elephant and Castle, so we’ve always made an effort to keep in touch.

‘Nice to meet you all,’ Mike says, shrinking back towards Cassie. She clutches his hand.

‘So how did you guys meet?’ Laura, another old friend, asks over the music.

Mike and Cassie smile awkwardly and I notice Cassie squeezing Mike’s hand a little tighter.

‘Online,’ Cassie admits. ‘OkCupid. I saw this little thumbnail of Mike. He looked so adorable! I sent him a message and then that was it, we started messaging 24/7. We were on the phone every day for hours. Even before I met him, I just knew,’ she insists, giddily.

‘Awww…’ Kate and everyone else gushes.

Mike smiles sheepishly.

‘So how long have you been together?’ Kate asks.

‘About three months now,’ Mike tells her, taking a sip of his pint.

‘Yep, we had our three-month anniversary on Tuesday,’ Cassie adds. ‘Mike even got me a ring for it.’ She holds out her right hand, brandishing a silver Celtic ring featuring two little hands cupping a heart.

Kate inspects it. ‘Pretty,’ she squeaks in the slightly high-pitched voice she always uses when she’s lying.

‘It’ll be an engagement ring next!’ John, one of our other university friends, adds.

Cassie and Mike laugh, brushing off the suggestion, but not without exchanging a quick, meaningful look as if they might have already discussed it. They seem so close. They even look similar with their dark choppy hair, thick-framed nerdy glasses and big green eyes. I smile awkwardly. All of my university friends are now either married or on track towards getting married. John got hitched to Rose, his girlfriend of four years, recently. Laura married Simon last year. Rich got engaged to Jack a few months ago. Lucy’s still going strong with her childhood sweetheart, Ahmed, and, of course, Kate’s got Max. Thankfully, he’s still on stage tonight, because then I’d well and truly be the thirteenth wheel.

‘What about you, Sophia?’ Rich pipes up and in one horrible swoop, everyone looks round.

‘Yeah, how’s the love life?’ Jack adds.

‘It’s all right,’ I grumble. I’m half-tempted to tell them all about Daniel, but I haven’t confessed to Kate that I didn’t delete my Dream Dates profile, let alone admit that I arranged a date.

‘There just don’t seem to be any decent guys out there,’ I sigh.

‘That’s not true.’ Rich shakes his head defiantly. ‘There are plenty.’

Jack shoots him a look, but Rich carries on, oblivious.

‘Your problem is you’re too fussy.’

‘I’m not, there just aren’t—’ I start to protest but Rich cuts me off.

‘Remember when I set you up with James from work? Then when you and me met up the next day, you said you wouldn’t go on a second date with him because he didn’t pronounce his Ts properly?’

‘I think you mean, “when you and I met up the next day”,’ I say.

Rich slowly shakes his head.

‘Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with fancying well-spoken people!’

‘Or the time you turned down that guy after he told you his entire outfit cost ten pounds,’ Cassie adds, grinning naughtily.

‘He was a cheapskate! Anyway, disposable clothes, disposable man.’ I take a swig of my G and T.

‘Oh yeah,’ John pipes up. ‘And then there was that Jim Morrison guy you thought was the dog’s bollocks, then when you went on a date, you ran a mile.’

‘I sobered up. Beer goggles. I didn’t expect him to actually look like dog’s bollocks!’

Lucy joins in. ‘What about when you broke up with that really hot guy, Corey, after two weeks because you didn’t like his feet,’ she reminds me.

‘They were Hobbit feet,’ I insist. ‘Anyway, guys, can you stop giving me a hard time!’

‘Oh!’ Kate slaps the bar, recalling something. ‘Remember last week you refused to message that really nice guy on Match.com because he wrote that he was looking for his “partner in crime” and you said you couldn’t stand that.’ She grins wickedly.

‘I can’t! I’d honestly rather die alone than match with yet another guy looking for their “partner in crime”.’

They all tut and shake their heads, but they just don’t get it. They’re coupled up – oblivious to the daily struggles of the dating scene. Thankfully, ‘I Bet You Look Good On the Dance Floor’ by Arctic Monkeys comes on, a classic song from our university days, and everyone forgets about my shambles of a love life and runs off to dance. Arctic Monkeys blends into ‘Hey Ya’ by Outkast and everyone’s dancing and happy. Rich twerks against Jack, who keeps pretending to spank him. Cassie’s twirling around in her dreamy ethereal way as if she’s not at a busy London bar at all but seeing in the morning sun at a summer solstice party, while Mike cuts shapes around her like a malfunctioning robot. Lucy’s smiling to herself as Ahmed plants a kiss on her neck. John’s dancing close to Rose and Laura’s got her arms around Simon’s neck. Thank God for Kate, who’s singing along and grooving with me like the old days.

The DJ puts on a slower song, one that Kate and I don’t know the words to, and as we dance, my mind begins to wander to the hard time my friends always give me about my pickiness with guys. I get that they think I’m picky, but I feel like when I meet the right guy for me, I’ll just know and so far, I’ve never really had that feeling. In fact, I’ve not even come close. With my uni boyfriend, Sam, I gradually got to know him through friends and realised he was cool, and then with Paulo, it was more a matter of having instant chemistry, rather than love. My dad says the moment he first saw my mum, he instantly knew she was the woman he was going to marry and I keep waiting to have that type of revelation too. But none of the guys I’ve dated have inspired anything like that kind of passion in me; most of the time I don’t even want a second date, let alone marriage.

‘I’d better head home,’ Kate says, shouting over the music, after the seventh or eighth song. ‘Need my beauty sleep.’

She gets her phone out of her handbag and orders a taxi. Kate always has to be home reasonably early on Friday nights to make sure she gets a good night’s sleep before her matinee performances.

‘Cool, I’ll come with you,’ I shout back. We say our goodbyes to everyone and then head outside, where we get into the car.

‘What do you think of Mike?’ I ask Kate as I fasten my seatbelt.

‘He looks like a thirty-year-old Harry Potter, but he seems nice. I reckon he’s good for Cassie,’ she remarks.

‘Yeah…’ I murmur as we drive away from the bar. ‘I know it sounds sad, but I never thought I’d be the last singleton standing.’

‘You thought you’d find someone before Cassie, you mean?’ Kate asks.

‘Well, yeah! I’m not into Wicca or chanting, I’m normal and yet…’ I trail off.

‘And yet you’re holding out for a Robert Pattinson-lookalike multimillionaire who doesn’t exist!’ Kate quips.

Our taxi driver shoots a curious glance at the rear-view mirror.

‘You never know,’ I say knowingly, but Kate just scoffs.

‘Seriously, Sophia!’

I gaze out the window. I want to tell her about Daniel, but I know she’ll burst my bubble. Yes, I’m aware that Daniel could turn out to be a catfish, or if he’s the real deal, then he’s more than likely to be an arrogant nightmare, but I can’t help hoping that perhaps he’s not only going to be gorgeous and successful, but charming and kind too. Our date tomorrow feels like a special little secret I’m keeping close to my breast. A nugget of faith that maybe I have managed to find a dream man.

‘You know, the moment you get real and stop expecting to be whisked off your feet by some ridiculous man-god, I bet you’ll find a boyfriend and you’ll be happier than you ever imagined,’ Kate says.

‘Hmmm…’ Maybe she’s right, but I at least want to meet Daniel first, just to see.

‘There are plenty of things I don’t like about Max,’ she insists. ‘The way he makes these snotty snuffling noises in his sleep, the fact that he reads tabloid newspapers, his habit of eating peanut butter by the spoonful, his love of U2!’ She shakes her head morosely. ‘Not to mention his obsession with comic books and the way he calls his friends by their surnames and—’

‘Do you actually like Max at all?’ I interrupt.

‘I adore him,’ Kate insists dreamily. She takes a deep breath.

‘“Let me not to the marriage of true minds, Admit impediments”,’ she intones, switching into her loud crisp stage voice. I shrink into the seat; I should have known talking about love after a few drinks would lead to a full-on Shakespeare rendition.

‘“Love is not love, Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark, That looks on tempests and is never shaken”.’ Kate shakes her fist defiantly as the car weaves through the traffic.

Our driver eyes her curiously as she recites the sonnet, clearly not used to having RADA-trained actors belting out Shakespeare in his car. She grows more and more impassioned by the time she reaches the final lines.

‘“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom”,’ Kate says, with an impassioned, sweeping gesture.

‘“If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”’ She clutches her heart.

The driver draws to a halt at the traffic lights and breaks into applause.

‘Hear, hear!’ he cheers.

I clap weakly.

‘Encore!’ he adds.

‘No! Please, no!’ I groan.

Kate grins and does a little bow in the back seat.