liked declaring out loud that kindness was key. Kindness without being wet. Kindness that meant he knew to let other people off the tube before he got on, and that if he came to the pub and Emma was there he’d let her rant on a bit and then tell her she was absolutely right, no matter what she was ranting about. That was something else her old boss Katherine had told her: that when her husband was still just her boyfriend, he’d been out with her friends and listened sympathetically to a break-up story that went on and on. Katherine had thanked him afterwards for listening, for being as good a friend to her BFF as Katherine tried to be.
‘If she’s important to you, then I want her to be important to me,’ he’d explained to her.
Katherine said that was when she knew she wanted to marry him. Nadia had loved hearing that story. She loved knowing when men had been good and caring. She carried around a mental storybook of all the tales the women in her life had told her, that she opened in her mind when she felt herself begin to go down the all-men-are-the-same path. They weren’t. The good ones existed. Maybe not all of them were good, but perhaps Emma had been right when she said one in fifty was good. Katherine and Naomi had both won in those odds. Nadia forced herself to believe that she could too.
If she had to score the ad out of ten she’d begrudgingly give it an eight and a half. Emma lost a point for the biting thing – Nadia wouldn’t ever forgive that. But. Maybe, possibly, potentially it could have taken Nadia weeks to do it herself, and so at least something was out there.
She allowed herself a little smile.
He could be reading it right now, she thought to herself. He could be thinking of me as I am thinking of him.
The idea of it wasn’t unpleasant. In fact, it felt oddly comforting.
What would he say in return?
9
Daniel
‘I really am going to have to ask you to piss off,’ Daniel said to Lorenzo as he poured boiling water into his favourite Arsenal mug. ‘I am not reading a dating guide. Absolutely not.’
He manoeuvred around his flatmate to the fridge, pulling out the plastic carton of milk and doing a double take as he realized that it was weirdly light. He looked at it, pointedly, sighing dramatically.
‘Lorenzo, did you put an empty milk carton back into the fridge?’
Lorenzo looked from the carton to Daniel’s raised eyebrows.
‘It’s an emergency stash day,’ Lorenzo said with a shrug, opening the drawer where they kept the single-portion pots of UHT milk that they made a game of stealing from hotels and buffet breakfasts. Daniel wasn’t sure how it had begun, but there was now a specific drawer for them, for these long-life UHT milks, which had more recently come to involve UHT milk sachets too.
‘There’s a trend for them,’ Lorenzo had acknowledged knowingly once, as he returned from a weekend wedding in Edinburgh with ten sachets. ‘The sachets are much easier to open. More environmentally friendly too.’
Some weeks they didn’t buy proper milk at all, living off the UHT drawer. What was weirder was that Daniel and Lorenzo didn’t even really talk about it. It was just a thing that they did. No milk in the fridge? Time for the milk drawer, then. It normally happened at the end of the week, on a Friday, so at least today they were consistent with their milk-buying inconsistencies.
By way of a mild apology it was an easy-open sachet that Lorenzo handed over now. Daniel took it, shaking his head. It felt like there was a ‘Joey and Chandler’ dynamic between them sometimes – and that probably wasn’t a good thing.
‘I’m just saying, have a glance at it,’ Lorenzo said, taking a milk sachet for himself and ripping it open with his teeth. He drank it down, on its own, in one gulp.
‘It’s for girls!’ Daniel said. ‘Presumably girls who want to pick up boys! I don’t want to pick up boys!’ He held his tea by the rim of the mug, deciding it was too hot and switching it to the other hand to hold by the handle. ‘If I was a girl picking up boys it looks like a mighty fine book, but as I am not, I shall proceed on my own, book-free,’ he said, adding defensively, ‘I don’t need a