teeth and bulky shoulders. I was fairly certain I even recognised the mint-green polo shirt he was wearing. But my first impression of the room had been correct: there were no single men there.
Because sitting opposite Sheldon, craning his neck round to have a good old open-mouthed gawp at me, was a little boy in a shirt just like his dad’s with an alligator on the pocket, only coral pink.
Shit. He’d only gone and brought his kid.
His. Kid. On. A. Date.
‘Of course, what I should have done is turned right around and left.’ Dani and I were conducting a post-date post-mortem in the gym, both of us flopped against the wall, sipping water and waiting for our heart rates to drop back to normal. Across the room from us, Fabian Flatley was doing handstand push-ups against the wall, shirtless, the muscles of his back bunching and rippling as he worked, sweat dripping off him onto the floor and rhythmic grunts issuing from him with every press.
‘Yeah, maybe. But you can’t just do that, can you?’
‘I could have. I’m kicking myself for not doing it. But at the time, it just feels so awkward and you don’t want to be rude.’
‘And you’re all invested in the idea of it and you’ve got dressed for it and everything.’
‘Exactly. He hadn’t even mentioned the kid, not in his profile or our messages or anything. Who does that? But then part of me was thinking, I didn’t want the kid to think it was something he’d done that had made me bail out, and be upset.’
‘Which is ridiculous if you think about it for more than about a nanosecond.’
I nodded. ‘If you don’t want your kid to be upset by how your date behaves, there’s a simple solution.’
‘Don’t bring your bloody kid on the date in the first place.’
‘Correct. But I didn’t even have a nanosecond to think about it, because I was already walking in through the door and he was waving at me and the kid was staring and it was like I lost the power of rational thought, so I just kept walking in and sat down. And it went downhill from there – fast.’
‘How so?’ Dani draped her towel over her neck and took a big gulp of water. Fabian had finished his press-ups and had strolled over to the weights rack where he was loading up the bar for deadlifts, making a lot more crashing sounds than were strictly necessary. Dani watched him admiringly, and I resisted the urge to ask her if he was this annoying and attention-seeking, like, all the time.
‘It started right when I sat down,’ I said. ‘The kid had put one of those things on my chair that make a huge farting noise when you sit on them. I was so thrown by the whole situation I didn’t notice. I just sat, and “paaarp”.’
‘No way.’
‘Yes. And the kid – TJ, he’s called – absolutely pissed himself laughing and so did Sheldon and so did the people at the next table and the waitress.’
‘And you still didn’t leave?’
‘How could I? The whole restaurant was staring at me, and Sheldon was looking at me like this was some kind of test. So I had to laugh too.’
‘What a bastard! So he knew it was there?’
I nodded, my face flaming as I relived the moment. ‘He said, “My little man is quite the comedian.” And I was like, “Yes, he certainly is, haha.” And then we introduced ourselves like all this was perfectly normal.’
‘Oh my God. That’s just so weird. What a nutter.’
‘He said, “A central part of my dating journey is finding someone who can fit with me and TJ, and play a part in his life as she does in mine.” He didn’t actually say be a mum but that was so blatantly what he meant. He said how every moment of the time he spent with his boy was precious, which I guess was his way of justifying dragging him along as a kind of wing-child on a Tinder date. And the kid was sitting there the whole time with this massive grin on his face like he was having the best time ever, blowing bubbles into his milkshake.’
‘Ugh.’
‘I know, right? And then when TJ got up to go to the loo, Sheldon got right in there and started slagging off his ex.’
‘I bet he did.’
‘He was like, “Of course I cherish Wanda as the mother of my child, but…” and then he launched