‘It’s not just that,’ I protest. I open my top drawer and put my phone in there so I can’t see it. It nestles in on top of some used-up notepads and promotional postcards we give out at student unions. ‘I just don’t want him to think I’ve spent my whole day checking my phone to see if he’s messaged.’
‘Even though you have …’ Matt puts forward.
‘Yes, but I’ve done other interesting things and had other interesting thoughts too.’
‘Like …?’
‘Well, we just had that meeting.’
‘Which you brought your phone to … and spent the whole time looking at your lap.’
I shake my head and take a slurp of my unwanted tricking-the-Love-Gods coffee. ‘OK, OK, so I’m a pathetic mess and Simon’s going to find out how crazy I am and dump me and then I’ll die alone in my flat, and my cat will eat my face because cats have no loyalty.’
‘You don’t have a cat,’ Katy reminds me, still typing.
Matt points at me. ‘Write all that out to him and send it back.’
‘What? Say “please don’t dump me when you find out I’m crazy. You’re the one chance I have to not have a cat eat my decomposing face”?’
He points harder. ‘Yeah. Go for it. Stress-test it. See what happens. If he’s the guy, he’ll get it.’
Katy and I shake our heads at one another. Katy has been with Jimmy so long she’s completely out of the game, but even she knows that’s wrong.
‘You know that’s not how it works.’
Here’s the thing: I really don’t understand why love has been so hard for me. I am pretty. I am smart. I have a goodish job. I have friends. I have hobbies. I am funny. I am self-actualized. I dress well. I don’t have particularly high standards. I am not expecting to be rescued. I am realistic about what relationships are like. I know they take work. I know nobody is perfect, let alone myself. I know I have to ‘put myself out there’ and I have been doing that. I am a good conversationalist. I am happy on my own. I am.
But, like, I still want a relationship.
I really want a relationship.
Not because I think it will complete me or solve all my problems. Not because I want a big wedding and to look pretty in an expensive dress. Not even, really, because I want to have children because, if I had to, I could survive not having them.
I want a relationship because it’s a really normal and natural thing to want. And yet, it’s not been happening for me. It’s so exhaustingly hard. I don’t understand why it’s so hard …
But maybe it won’t be hard any more. Not with Simon.
God, I really, really like Simon.
I attempt to lose myself in my work. My important work in my important job in my independent life. I try to be better than this. Less needy than this. Less obsessed than this. It’s my shift answering the inbox this afternoon and that’s always a traumatic ball-ache, so I need to be efficient and get through my emails and be all the things I know I’m capable of being. I type up the notes from the meeting about safeguarding procedure. I plan next month’s buddy timetable and send it out to the volunteers. I go to another meeting about budget cuts, how to make it work on much less than we have and how we will probably get even less next year but we are positive that actually it will be OK. I’m hyper-aware of my phone in my top drawer, however. The unread message thumps through the oak like it’s the still-beating heart of a murdered body I’ve tried to bury, like the Poe story. I stare into nothingness for many a moment to obsess about the contents of the message. He won’t be cancelling tonight, will he? He seemed really up for it last night. He explicitly used the words ‘looking forward to seeing you’. He put a kiss on the end. But what if he’s changed his mind? What if his ex rang him randomly last night and told him she still loves him and they’ve been up all night rampantly shagging and he’s only just remembered he’s got a date tonight?
‘Whoops, I should probably let her know,’ I imagine Simon saying, laughing with carefree abandon as she wraps her arms around his neck. Her name is Gretel, I’ve decided. For some reason, whenever I