the rate I’m going.’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’ He shook his head.
‘No?’
‘You’ve only got the one cat, you see. Hard to be surrounded by one of them.’
I laughed. ‘I’m going to have to start dating again, aren’t I?’
‘What, you mean you’re not? I mean, no offence, but I kind of assumed you were just being discreet about your love life, on account of being my boss and all.’
‘There’s nothing to be discreet about,’ I said wearily.
Robbie shook his head and tutted. ‘And there I was thinking you just had high standards, and that’s why you weren’t seeing anyone.’
‘Well, I do have high standards. Doesn’t everyone?’
‘Not me. I mean, sometimes a shag is just a shag. And I seem to have worked my way through most of the hot guys on Grindr who live close enough for a booty call, so…’ Robbie did a gesture that made him look exactly like the shrug emoji.
I felt a wave of envy for this boy, so casually, confidently in charge of his sex life. How much had I missed out on, all those years when I’d been longing and waiting for Joe to somehow magically reappear in my life? Never mind in the months since he had.
‘And you don’t even have to lower your standards!’ he went on. ‘I mean, come on. You’d be starting from scratch. You’d have your pick of the crop. I could help you write an online dating profile, and Archie who runs the beer shop next door is an ace photographer, I happen to know. You could have a new bloke every day for months without running out.’
I thought, I don’t want a new bloke every day for months. I just want one. One special one.
But I said, ‘You might be on to something. Let me give it some thought. But in the meantime, we’ve got the bean burgers to make for lunch, and those carrots that were on special are looking a bit sad, so we should turn them into soup. And I’m not sure those avocados are ripe yet, so we might have to do hummus instead of avo smash on the snack menu.’
‘On it,’ Robbie said, doing a brief juggling performance with three of the bendy carrots, keeping the limp vegetables together in the air as easily as he managed his multiple men.
Three
You’ve been thinking. Made up your mind yet? Remember, fortune favours the brave and love will only find those who look for it.
For the next few hours, I successfully managed to avoid thinking about my love life – or rather my lack of one. I made a batch of sourdough bread and left the loaves to prove. I seared a mountain of mutton for a curry and ground a load of brick-red spice paste to flavour it. I made breakfasts, brunches and lunches to order.
And when three o’clock came and it was time for my break, I was determined not to start thinking then, either, if I could possibly help it.
‘I’m heading to the gym,’ I told Robbie.
‘Cool,’ he said. ‘I’m off to get my eyebrows threaded.’
And so we left the pub together, but then went our separate ways, Robbie to Alina’s chichi salon on the high street (which I kept meaning to visit myself to get the untamed jungle of my bikini line sorted, but then kept not bothering because, really, what was the point?), and me to the Dark Arch, the gym under the railway tracks.
I’d never been much of a gym bunny before. Well, to be honest, I’d never been one at all. The idea of joining a Zumba class set my teeth on edge, spin bikes left my bits so bruised I couldn’t sit down for a week and, like I said, my enthusiasm for yoga had petered out after about three classes. So when I’d been working with Sean, my ex, at our food cart at the local market and a guy asked if I’d mind him leaving a few flyers on our stand for the new fitness studio he was opening, I’d agreed, with no intention of ever going there myself.
But then I’d picked one up, just out of curiosity. And, just out of curiosity, I’d dropped in later that day to take a look. At first I wasn’t sure I’d come to the right place. The signage was spray-painted like graffiti on the metal roll-up shutters that covered the front of the railway arch. The entrance was a small door to the side, with a threshold