But when Javier’s tongue did something quite obscene with his bottle of lager, Nina began to wonder how they were going progress things when she only spoke five words of Spanish. And when he did it again, this time with added and very unsexy slurping at the bottle neck, she found herself go suddenly cold.
Nina knew precisely nothing about Javier, except that he was from Spain (though she wasn’t completely sure about that, he could just be from a Spanish-speaking country), he was Paloma’s friend and, judging from what he was doing to his poor lager bottle, he was angling for a hook-up.
Oh God, she was so tired of this merry-go-round. It was time for Nina to make her excuses and leave because she had a three-date minimum before hooking up. And how could you have three dates with someone when you only understood a few words they were saying? Also, if she and Javier did get past three dates, got intimate with each other, only for things to fizzle out (after all, intimacy was no guarantee of a happy ever after), then things could get awkward between Nina and Paloma. Paloma did make a stellar cup of coffee and Nina would hate it if Paloma started spitting in hers or worse, withholding coffee altogether. This was why dear, beloved Lavinia had been fond of saying, ‘Don’t get your bread from the same place that you get your eggs,’ or as Nina’s father would say more brusquely, ‘Don’t shit where you sleep.’
What Javier was doing now with his tongue was actually starting to make her feel a bit nauseous and weary with it all. Since when had hooking up become so … boring? If there was one thing that Nina didn’t do, it was boring. ‘Boring’ wasn’t the reason why she’d upgraded her daytime make-up to an evening look, which involved yet another lorryload of eyeliner, a more strongly defined brow and industrial amounts of red lipstick. ‘Boring’ wasn’t why Nina had poured herself into a black satin wiggle dress and teetered to the tapas bar in five-inch heels.
Nina had gone to all this effort because she wanted to bewitch and beguile the man of her dreams and she had a very clear idea of just who that man was. Some ten years before, Nina had read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and it had changed her life forever. Heathcliff and Cathy were star-crossed lovers who couldn’t live with each other and couldn’t live without each other. It was all passion and angst and rugged Yorkshire moorland. And though in his worst moments, Heathcliff was one hundred per cent toxic masculinity, in his best moments, Nina had glimpsed the kind of man who would make her happy. A man who was her soulmate. Her one true love. A restless heart to match her own. A man who’d try to beat her at her own game but would only succeed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and alternate Sundays. A man who’d share all the highs and lows of a love that was too great to be contained. A man who loved with everything he was and wouldn’t settle for second best, so why should Nina? And that was why she was holding out for a Heathcliff and would accept no substitutes.
But it turned out that in real life, Heathcliffs were pretty thin on the ground and Nina knew without a shadow of a doubt that a Heathcliff would not be passionately tonguing a cheap bottle of euro-lager on a Tuesday night.
Nina smiled regretfully, tucked her legs under her chair before Javier gave her friction burns, and pulled out her phone.
The night was still young, she thought as she logged into HookUpp – maybe her romantic hero would be lurking in its algorithms tonight. HookUpp was a dating app designed and owned by Sebastian’s company ZingerMedia, so Nina was always slightly terrified that he had access to her login details and might share classified information with Posy over dinner.
‘Wouldn’t expect Tattoo Girl to be on time tomorrow,’ he’d say, poring over Nina’s metadata. ‘She’s just up-swiped on a graphic designer who up-swipes a different woman every evening and never gets less than a four-star rating from any of them.’
Still, Nina wasn’t fearful enough to delete the app. Not when there was every chance of love lurking around the next corner. Or rather Steven, 31, writer, who was apparently 0.3 km away and had already up-swiped Nina and sent her a message: Fancy a drink?
It was quite dimly lit in the tapas bar and Nina had to peer quite closely at her screen to get a good look at Steven’s picture. Not that she was shallow, but she didn’t want to go for a drink with someone who looked like they’d buried their last four HookUpps in shallow graves.
Steven looked all right. He was posed with a Labrador, who was absolutely gorgeous. How bad could Steven be if he was friendly with a dog? Dogs were great judges of character.
Nina up-swiped Steve and sent a message back. Thornton Arms, ten minutes?
Steven messaged back. I’ll be waiting outside.
It wasn’t very romantic, but looking for love, even looking for a Heathcliff, was a numbers game. A girl had to manoeuvre around a lot of frogs to find her prince. In Nina’s experience, which was vast, it was best to get the meet and greet out of the way ASAP and then, hopefully, she and Steven, 31, could get on with the falling in love.
With a renewed sense of optimism, Nina scraped her chair back and stood up. ‘Guys! I have to go now,’ she said. There was a gratifying chorus of ‘No’s and many hand-wringing gestures. Javier, though, just shrugged and stopped making love to his lager bottle, so Nina knew she’d been right to trust her instincts. If Javier had the Heathcliff gene, he’d have thrown himself to the ground to prevent Nina from leaving or at the very least, he’d have offered to buy her a drink if she agreed to stay.
There was just time for a quick primp and spritz in the bathroom to ensure her hair was still immaculately set and that her lipstick was still where it should be.
All was well. Watch out, Steven, 31, writer, get ready to fall madly in love.
Nina left the bar and walked round the corner, took a left, and even now, after years of blind dates and meeting men whose picture was a little avatar on her phone screen, she still got the same feeling in her stomach. A churny, tingly feeling of expectation, excitement and yes, a little bit of dread. It didn’t matter how many times Nina took a walk to meet a man, she never failed to have that colony of butterflies fluttering deep inside her, because she might be about to meet her destiny. This. Could. Be. The. One.
‘You Nina, then?’ asked the man in the suit stood outside the Thornton Arms. ‘You looked thinner in your picture.’
He’d looked at least ten years younger, five inches taller and had definitely had more hair. ‘Steven,’ Nina confirmed with a bright smile, even as the butterflies stopped fluttering and she wondered why she’d bothered to reapply her lipstick for this.
‘Shall we?’ Steven opened the door not for Nina but so he could enter the pub first, which was just bad manners. At least he didn’t let the door shut in Nina’s face, but he was already on one strike.
‘So, let’s find somewhere to sit,’ Nina suggested, but Steven was too busy giving her the once over to reply.
His eyes lingered on what Nina lovingly called her three b’s: boobs, belly, booty. Not with admiration or longing or lust, but with obvious distaste.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘you really should include a full-body shot on your HookUpp profile. Saves a lot of time. I don’t normally contact women who only have a headshot.’
Nina refrained from pointing out that he’d uploaded a picture from the dim and distant days when he’d had a full head of hair. ‘I’m sorry that my curves are too much for you to handle,’ she said icily, drawing herself up so those curves were displayed to their best advantage.
She was a size fourteen. Size sixteen. Size fourteen. OK, she was somewhere between a fourteen and sixteen depending on the time of the month, which shop she was in and how many of the tearoom’s delicious baked goods she’d scoffed that week. And Nina was OK with that. She liked her body. It looked good in her beloved vintage dresses. It looked good with no clothes on at all. It could walk great distances in high heels. It could walk even greater distances on the very rare