Page 63 of Take a Moment

‘No, I’m not. But you’ll have to ask again. Properly.’

‘Right. Of course.’ He clears his throat, humour glinting in his eyes. ‘Can I see you again on Sunday?’

Lips twitching, I repeat my original question. ‘What did you have in mind?’

‘I thought we could go for a nice walk somewhere.’

‘Up a hill?’ I ask, sincerely hoping not.

‘No.There’s a nice, relaxed forest walk I know and a great gastropub we could grab some lunch at after.’

‘That sounds lovely.’ I beam at him, my insides doing cartwheels at the thought of seeing him again so soon. It definitely makes up for the absence of a kiss.

‘Great, I’ll pick you up at ten. Good night, Alex.’

‘Night, Matt. See you Sunday.’

Without looking back, I make my way inside my apartment building, feeling like the cat that cleared out the entire stock of the local dairy.

‘What do you mean you haven’t kissed him yet?’ Sasha almost squeals down the phone. I quickly switch to speakerphone so she doesn’t perforate my eardrum. ‘I was going to ask if he’d stayed over and done the walk of shame this morning.’

It’s eleven a.m. the next day and as I’ve not responded to her three WhatsApp messages asking about my date, Sasha has run out of patience and called me.

‘Sorry to disappoint you.’ I chuckle lightly and lie back on my bed. ‘It just didn’t happen that way.’

‘Was there no spark? Sometimes it’s just not there. Was he boring? Or self-obsessed? They’re a total turn-off, no matter how good-looking a man is.’

‘If you’ll let me get a word in edgeways, I might tell you.’

‘Right, sorry. You go.’

Allowing the memory of the night before to wash over me, I take a deep, satisfied breath. ‘It’s actually the opposite. There’s so much chemistry between us, we can’t function normally around each other. Every time we brush hands or the conversation flows in the direction of anything more than flirty banter, I feel like I’m about to short-circuit. And he seems to be the same. We kept having these ridiculous moments where one of us said or did something stupid and it’s all down to nerves. He’s a confident guy, but he’s got this kind of shyness that kicks in at points, and I seem to be the same.’

‘That doesn’t sound like you at all. When you first laid eyes on Dom, you were like, “mine”, and that was it.’

‘I know.’ I roll over on my side and look out of my bedroom window at the lashing rain, crossing my fingers for a better day tomorrow. ‘That’s what’s so weird about this. I was disappointed that he didn’t kiss me, but I was even more baffled as to why I didn’t just take the lead.’

‘You must really like him. I’m so jealous. I had a Tinder date during the week—’

‘You never said! How was it?’

‘He spent the whole evening talking about bridges, then asked me if he could smell my armpit.’

‘WHAT?’ I let out an involuntary snort of laughter.

Sash sighs loudly. ‘I’m paraphrasing. Obviously. But he did talk about bridgesa lot– did you know that the Millau Viaduct in France is so high it sometimes sticks out above the clouds?’

I quickly do a Google Image search on my phone. ‘Wow. That’s actually quite cool. Have you seen it?’

‘What? No.Is that really the focus here, Lex?’

‘Sorry. So, bridges. What else did you learn?’

‘That’s not funny.’ Sasha sounds exasperated but also amused. ‘He honestly managed to link every conversation to some kind of bridge trivia. Holidays, interests, work. Even the nostalgia route resulted in him telling me about the bridge cake his mum made for his birthday one year.’

‘That’s not so bad. We all had novelty cakes when we were kids.’

‘It was for his twenty-first,’ she wails. ‘And it was apparently a two-foot-high imitation of the Chang-yon Bridge in China.’

---