with a napkin? I’d never been much of a make-up wearer, but tonight I’d gone full femme fatale. My eyelashes were curled and mascaraed to within an inch of their lives. My freckles were blotted out with foundation. My eyebrows – normally almost invisible – had been pencilled in with countless tiny strokes and gelled into place.
I was wearing dark skinny jeans, a silky black top I’d had for years and never worn because it had scratchy beading on the neckline, and a pair of kitten-heeled mules I’d bought in a charity shop ages ago for a party, then discovered that they slipped off my feet with every step.
I didn’t feel even slightly like me. I felt like someone daring, alluring and sexy. At least, I would, once I’d got half this cocktail down me.
Seth had suggested a swanky cocktail bar in North London for our date. It was near to where he lived, he’d said, and I knew that what he meant was, convenient for going back to for a shag afterwards. The thought made my stomach turn a somersault, and I saw my hand trembling slightly as I lifted my glass for another sip of what was basically cold, neat gin.
Zoë the femme fatale would feel entirely comfortable perched on a bar stool sipping a dry martini while she waited for her date. I just wished she’d hurry up and take over from the regular Zoë, who was twitching with nerves and whose arse was slowly going numb from the bar stool’s slippery marble top.
‘Hello, Zoë. There you are. Did you find it okay? Sorry I’m late – I got held up at the office.’
I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting Seth to do – greet me with a sleazy, ‘Hey, baby,’ and stare down my cleavage or something – but this totally normal, casual greeting surprised me and put me a bit more at ease.
‘That’s okay. I haven’t been waiting long.’
He slipped onto the stool next to mine and looked at me for a moment, smiling. His teeth were slightly crooked, with a bit of a gap between the front ones. He was wearing jeans and a white shirt, the top button undone, and I could see that his brown leather belt had recently been let out a notch.
Liam Hemsworth he was not. He was just an ordinary, decent-looking guy in his mid-thirties, average height, average build, average everything – everything except his eyes. They were the most amazing colour. Light brown? Hazel? Whatever you called it, they were almost golden, and a fine black line surrounded each iris, as perfect as if it had been applied with liquid eyeliner (at least, by someone who could apply liquid eyeliner perfectly, so not me). And when he looked at me with that curious, smiling stare, I felt something happening inside me – a loosening, melting feeling that made me even more worried that I might slide off the bar stool. It was like he’d sprayed himself with some mysterious pheromone-boosting cologne, or clicked on one of those emails that always go into your junk folder saying they’ve got the secret that will make you irresistible to women.
Or maybe I was so desperate for a shag I’d imagine anyone as the next Casanova, so long as they weren’t actively repulsive. But that wasn’t the case, I told myself – I hadn’t felt this way about Paul or Justin. I wasn’t accosting random men in the street and begging them to come back to mine and bump uglies.
Whatever it was Seth had, he had it in spades, and I was in no fit state to analyse it.
He ordered an Old Fashioned for himself and another martini for me; the first one seemed to have mysteriously disappeared. We drank our drinks and we talked about perfectly ordinary things: his job doing something complicated involving buying online advertising space, my job in the pub, places where we’d travelled and books we’d read. He asked me stuff about myself like he was really, genuinely interested. Everything I said seemed to make him laugh, and when he did, those amazing eyes sparkled like shards of amber glass in the sun.
But afterwards, I could hardly remember a thing we said, because it seemed like every word was about something else. When he lifted his drink, I found myself staring at his hand, looking at his blunt fingers wrapped around the glass and wondering how it would feel when he touched me. When he took a