Seven days after reconnecting with The Peacock, the man who slutshamed me in bed four years ago by telling me I’d never be ‘girlfriend material’, I hopped off the bus ready to meet him. Ready to give him a second chance. I had an open mind, but low expectations. It was safer that way.
‘Hello, you,’ his Essex lilt whispered behind me, his touch reaching for the small of my back. The skin at the base of my neck prickled to attention as I turned around. ‘Hello.’ We locked eyes. My stomach lurched.
He was on the charm offensive right from the off, buying the drinks and sitting in close and stroking my thigh through the velvet skirt which I may or may not have worn with its tactile encouragement in mind.
‘Don’t rush me,’ I said, not very convincingly, between sips of a Bramble cocktail. ‘Stop looking like you’re going
to kiss me.’ He leaned in closely, his breath on my cheek. ‘Oh, I’m not going to kiss you until you beg for it,’ he said, and I held his gaze from under my eyelashes as I slipped a blackberry from my glass to my mouth, licking the taste of gin from my finger with a raised eyebrow but unsteady breath. We flirted in exactly the same way we always did: daringly, provocatively, unsubtle.
'Stop looking like you're going to kiss me,' I said. 'Oh, I'm not going to kiss you until you beg for it,' he replied.
At dinner, we were the couple everyone wants to be. Holding hands across the table, sharing food, laughing with the waitress almost as much as we laughed with each other – it was him, and me. A new team. Table for two, world for one. I was exactly where I wanted to be, suspended in a moment that was fun and loaded and pregnant with possibility.
‘How does it feel to sit across from the man you’re going to spend the rest of your life with?’ he said, and I knew he
was being stupid, silly, pushing my boundaries to see what would make me blush, or falter, because that’s the game we play. I went to the bathroom and texted Megs: ‘Bloody hell, babe, I’m in trouble with this one.’ I put on more lipstick.
He poured the last of the bottle and told me the Portuguese custard tarts were a must, even though I said I didn’t have
room for another a bite. He ordered for us both, a trait I find startlingly attractive, and as the last course and its paired dessert wine were dispatched my foot rubbed up against his calf under the table.
When we met – four years ago, at a conference – he’d mouthed, ‘I fancy you’ across the group of people we were both talking with. Just like that. We’d never met, and that was his confident, peacock-y introduction. In a moment of prolonged staring and rich silence, that’s what he returned to. ‘I fancy you,’ he mouthed across the white linen tablecloth. ‘I fancy you,’ I mouthed back, and we grinned at each other like fools.
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