have done, eventually uploading the photo of her and Naomi from last night, captioning it, My ride or die and I, as a pair of Capulets last night, adding in three love hearts afterwards and hashtagging it #girlsnightout
Reviewing her work, and with the bus sitting in traffic, Nadia clicked on the geo-tag she’d put on the event – the marker that said what her location had been. It pulled up all the other photos that people had uploaded at the same location, and because she was bored, and mad, and above all else, nosey, she scrolled through a bunch of strangers’ photos, stopping only when she recognized a set of arms.
Waistcoat Guy! she thought. Gah!
He was handsome, the only one in a bunch of friends not looking directly to the camera, but looking off, just slightly, to something out of frame. Everyone he was with was attractive, and Nadia recognized the friend he’d been talking with too.
The photo had been uploaded by a girl called SabrinasLife, and from following through on her handle and scrolling down on her profile, Nadia could ascertain that she was in a relationship – married to, it looked like – one of the other guys. Waistcoat Guy was peppered in the odd group photo on her grid, mostly at what looked like kids’ birthday parties in the suburbs, and holidays to places where the sea was so blue it was turquoise.
Nadia scrolled back up to the top of SabrinasLife’s page and looked at the photo from the night before again. She tapped on it, and up came everyone’s tagged usernames. She clicked on that. Suddenly, she had a full window into DannyBoy101’s life.
He didn’t post often, and he never used captions or hashtags. There was a photo of him in a navy suit, stood next to what Nadia presumed was his mum, and a photo of him in the downstairs of Sager + Wilde, drinking a pint with his face half obscured by the glass. He’d photographed his feet by some train tracks, wearing trainers and coloured socks, and in the summer he’d been with a handful of mates in Oxfordshire, walking in the country fields and drinking pints in a pub garden.
He’d recently read Michelle Obama’s memoir and had also photographed something at the Wellcome Collection. There was an old record of Frank Sinatra’s and a photo of the TV with The Lust Villa on. Inexplicably, there was a photo of the paper on a coffee table too, one day back in the summer.
This is my kinda guy, Nadia thought. I like how he sees the world.
Nadia continued to think about him all day. She wondered how to go about it all – how to somehow bump into him again. She could just DM him on Instagram, but was that a bit desperate? What if that was a total turn-off for him, being tracked down on social media? If the shoe was on the other foot, Nadia wasn’t sure how she’d respond. She’d discovered him in an innocent enough way, but explaining that, even to herself, sounded a bit too Fatal Attraction. She didn’t want him to think she’d boil bunnies to get his attention. He was cute, but not that cute.
Emma had once taught her about ‘The Secret’. It was based on the Law of Attraction, and Emma had tried to tell her that if a person changed their thoughts, they could change their life. Emma had been utterly convinced that’s why she’d been given the restaurant review column in the paper – that she had visualized it, and made it come true. Nadia had written it off as mumbo-jumbo before, but in this new context – the context of desperately wanting a cute man she’d talked to for five minutes to cross her path again – she chose to believe. All day she told herself, I am going to see this man again. Soon. This week. She tried to picture it: bumping into him at the gym, or on the train to work. Maybe that was a hangover from when Train Guy wrote to her. She still half-heartedly thought there was something staggeringly romantic about meeting somebody on the underground: two people coming from different places, going to different places, chance putting them in the same place at the same time for mere minutes.
She wished she could tell Emma about it all. Especially when she walked into the gym space for her class that night, just as a friendly looking blond man