Page 15 of The Love Hack

I said a hasty goodbye to Astro, assuring him I’d be home as soon as I possibly could, and waited for everyone to file out before locking the flat behind us.

Dinner passed in a blur of small plates, smiling waiters and cocktail after cocktail. Nush settled the bill, saying she’d do a spreadsheet afterwards and share what everyone owed on WhatsApp, because obviously we were all picking up Amelie’s share. Then Eve produced a carrier bag and dished out shocking pink sashes emblazoned with ‘Amelie’s Hens’ for all of us and ‘Bride to Be’ for Amelie, and pink deely boppers with – of course – cocks and balls on the end of the springs.

‘No one – but no one – is to tell Zack about this until after the wedding,’ my sister shrieked. ‘I’d get dumped for sure – he still thinks I’m classy!’

Through a haze of alcohol, as I slipped the headpiece behind my ears, I wondered whether this, rather than its proximity to Shoreditch, was why Nush had volunteered my flat as the getting-ready location. I tried to imagine Amelie’s friends giggling and dropping glitter eyeshadow and crisp crumbs all over her and Zack’s immaculate kitchen, and failed. I tried to imagine him watching benevolently from a corner, or making himself scarce in the bedroom, or making cocktails for everyone, and that didn’t work either.

But there was no time to try and jump-start my mind back into working order – the bill was paid and we were moving on.

All thoughts of my future brother-in-law vanished from my mind as we all piled, giggling, out into the street. One of the blonde woman, who was apparently pregnant and therefore designated The Sober One, got her phone out and checked the directions to our next destination, and after a false start (sober or not, clearly she was no Christopher Columbus), we set off on the short walk.

There was a queue outside the club, but we had VIP tickets so were able to swan smugly to the front and get let in straight away. Inside, I found myself battered by noise and blinking rapidly as my eyes fought to adjust to the sudden darkness.

I hadn’t been clubbing for a long time. Literally years. Maybe back when I was at uni it had been a regular thing – probably not, though, as I’d been too skint for anything much apart from beans on toast to be a regular thing. When I’d had my first job and been living in a house share, we’d had wild nights out in town sometimes. But I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to a place like this – if I ever had.

The clubs I could remember had been dingy, sticky-floored warehouses with massive banks of speakers against graffitied concrete walls, lights suspended from steel girders on the ceiling and fearsome bouncers on the door. This, in contrast, was positively civilised. There were waitresses flitting about holding trays of cocktails aloft. Tall white leather stools were grouped around shiny-topped tables and, apart from the dance floor, which looked like it was made of glass, or some sort of translucent perspex, there was carpet on the floor.

I was willing to bet there’d be loo paper in the toilets, and probably even soap.

‘Shall I get a round of drinks in?’ I suggested, emboldened, turning towards the bar.

‘Don’t be daft.’ Nush lent in close so I could hear her over the music. ‘We’ve got a reserved seating area and table service. Come on.’

A woman in a black dress with a name tag let us through the crowd to the back of the room, where a roped-off area held two tables, each with a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket waiting on it. There was a great view of the dance floor and the bar, where two bearded guys and a woman with a full sleeve tattoo and scarlet undercut hair were doing complicated things with cocktail shakers. The bar was topped with beaten copper and rows and rows of bottles lined the illuminated glass shelves behind it. A small crowd of people were waiting to place their drinks orders, studying the menus, discussing the options with their friends, pointing at potential choices, then leaning in to give their order when they reached the front of the queue.

As I watched, a man in a white shirt reached the bar, leaned in to speak to the women with the red hair like everyone else, tapped his phone on the card reader, then turned to face the room while he waited for his cocktail order to be made, a long-necked bottle of beer already in his hand. He hitched his elbows on to the copper counter top, crossed one leg in front of the other and leaned back, relaxed and graceful, his eyes scanning the room.

I froze in shock and then turned around so quickly I almost fell off my tall stool. It was Ross.

Shit. Ross. Seeing him here shouldn’t have come as a surprise really – I knew he lived locally, and I knew he had a penchant for trendy bars as well as bargain-basement pubs. But seeing him out of context was weird – even weirder than seeing him carrying Astro down the road had been. This wasn’t a place where people rescued cats or checked each other’s work or swapped quotes from old sitcoms while they made coffee.

This was a place where people came to drink and dance and hook up.

A waiter was hovering by my elbow, and Eve nudged me and asked what I wanted to drink. Blindly, I ran my eyes down the cocktail menu and chose at random – something involving Grey Goose vodka and plum saké. Then I drank what was left in my champagne glass and filled it up along with everyone else’s, finishing the bottle.

When my drink came it was a clear, pale pink and lethally strong, but I drank it as if it was pop and ordered another the same. Around me, my sister and her friends were caning the booze, too – it was a hen night, after all, with no place for moderation. But as they got more and more giggly and raucous, groups of them leaving the tables to hit the dance floor, taking their handbags with them and putting them by their feet in time-honoured fashion, I found myself retreating back into my shell, longing for invisibility.

The barely-there back of my dress made me feel horribly exposed, as if at any moment Ross would clock me, perhaps by recognising my shoulder blades. I felt like there was a target painted on my skin in between the criss-crossed silver straps. It was very, very important that I didn’t turn around.

So I didn’t. I sat there and drank another cocktail and then another. When Amelie’s friends came to talk to me and make sure I was okay, I made myself smile and nod and say how much fun I was having.

But all I could think of was Ross behind me. The way the line of his throat had looked when he lifted his beer to take a swallow. The breadth of his shoulders when he stretched his elbows out over the bar top. The easy way he’d crossed one ankle over the other as he leaned back, his legs long and lean in his faded jeans.

He was probably behind me on the dance floor right now, surrounded by his mates like they thought they were some kind of big deal. His hair was probably flopping down over his face and getting all sweaty. He was probably making comments about all the women in the room and he and his blokey coven were rating them out of ten.

He was probably dancing like he thought he was good at it.

And there was no way I was going to be able to pluck up the courage to go over and talk to him – not wearing a fuck-me dress and bobbing male genitalia on my head.

I glanced at my watch. It was half past midnight; I’d been sitting there for almost two hours and I realised I was absolutely desperate to wee. If I got up, Ross might see me. But the illuminated sign for the toilets – a male and a female figure, their legs crossed in discomfort – was directly in front of me. I could get up, walk straight there and then return to my seat – although admittedly I might have to do that backwards.

But either way, I couldn’t sit here any longer – the discomfort was too much.

I slid off my stood and then clutched the rim of the table as the room swooped and tilted around me. Shit. I was very, very drunk. Drunker than I could remember being in years. Getting to the loo was going to take some doing.

I took a deep breath, forcing my eyes to focus on the sign and my feet to move steadily forward, one in front of the other. And I made it.

Washing my hands at the basin, I saw that my face was swimming in and out of focus, my lipstick smudged by eyes still huge and luminous from the make-up, my skin glowing. I pointed a finger at myself in the mirror, and it connected with my reflection’s finger.

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