socialising and staring pleadingly at the customers until they gave him scraps of food off their plates.
‘I won’t be late,’ I said. ‘Mind you be a good cat, okay?’
I hadn’t bargained for just how not-late I would be, however. It was before eight when I returned to the Ginger Cat, strangely rattled by the revelation I’d had about Brett. I hadn’t felt unsafe at any point. Nothing bad had happened. But still, the whole experience had been the worst of my dating life thus far – a new low. One day, I hoped, I’d be able to look back on the time I thought I was on a date with a spy, only he turned out to have been recently released from gaol, and have a good laugh about it. But I wasn’t there yet – not by a long shot. And the prospect of going up to the flat and spending the evening alone made me feel weirdly insecure.
So instead of climbing the stairs and going home, I pushed open the door to the pub. I could sit on my own and have a drink, or help Alice out behind the bar, or maybe Archie and Nat would be there and I could join them for a bit. Or, if all else failed, I’d go into the kitchen, pull rank on Robbie and tell him that I could decide to cancel my evening off any time I liked.
But the first person I noticed was Adam. He was sitting alone at a table, not working on the Dungeons & Dragons game or tapping busily at his laptop but reading a book, a half-finished plate of food in front of him, Frazzle snoozing on his lap.
I needed company, and he was going to have to put up with me.
Alice poured me a glass of red wine and I asked for a mint julep as well, and took the two drinks over to Adam’s table.
‘Hi,’ he said, glancing up from his book.
‘Hi. Mind if I join you? I brought you a cocktail.’
Adam shook his head and closed his book, putting a paper napkin inside to mark the place. ‘Thanks.’
I sat down and took a sip of wine, and noticed that my hands were shaking so hard my teeth rattled against the glass.
‘Are you okay, Zoë?’
‘Yes. Yes, I am. I’m fine. I just had a really weird experience and I’m not sure what I think about it.’
Adam raised an eyebrow. ‘Want to talk about it? I’m good at telling people what they should think about things.’
I took another big gulp of wine and found myself blurting out the whole story of my date with Brett.
‘I’d kind of persuaded myself that him being all weird and secretive about his life was a good thing. Like it made him more interesting, mysterious and stuff. I’d even half-convinced myself that he was a secret agent. And then when I saw the tag on his ankle, I realised how wrong I’d been.’
‘Must’ve come as a bit of a shock, realising he’d been doing porridge instead of sending undercover messages to his fellow spooks.’
I managed a shaky laugh. ‘Exactly. Less of the designer dinner jacket and more of the orange jumpsuit. Except they don’t wear orange jumpsuits in prison here, do they?’
‘I have no idea. Never having done time in one.’
‘But then part of me is like, was I being really harsh and judgemental? I mean, I always think of myself as being super open-minded, and here I am completely writing someone off as a date because of something that happened in their past. And I don’t even know what he’d done. It could’ve been murder or it could have been – I don’t know, committing some sort of victimless white-collar crime to pay for his grandmother’s life-saving surgery or something.’
‘Zoë, there’s being open-minded and then there’s being so open-minded you let your brain fall out. You’re allowed to decide who you date and who you don’t, for whatever reason. It’s not an equal-opportunity situation. If you don’t like someone’s face or they give you bad vibes or you’re just not feeling it, you can walk away and you don’t have to feel bad about it. And I bet you were getting bad vibes before you even noticed the tag thing, right?’
‘I… yeah, to be fair, I was. Not least because he smelled like he’d had a bath in tequila before he came.’
Adam grimaced. ‘Oh no.’
‘Oh yes. Right then, I should have called it a day and told