Page 65 of Our Stop

A million unkind thoughts crept into Nadia’s mind. Logically, rationally, she knew her friends had a secret that of course they’d eventually tell her. But right now she was locked out of the world they were creating, whatever world that was, and mostly Nadia didn’t give two hoots if they were dating or sleeping together or in love – she just wanted her buddies back. She wanted to be part of the gang again. She wanted to be happy for them, but being iced out was costing her her happiness, so it made it really hard to be excited for them. Nadia was angry, and resentful, at being put in this position. They didn’t need her permission to do whatever it was they were doing, that isn’t what she meant. But damn if her two best friends hadn’t come together to form something that meant nowshefelt left out. And it really wasn’t her place to sit them both down and say what she’d seen. She believed that implicitly. It was no big deal and a total game-changer both at the same time, and not just because they were both women. Her friends were gay – at least for each other. So what! But two friends becoming more meant the dynamics shifted, and it meant that Nadia sat on the 73 bus looking at Instagram and making the very conscious decision to keep on scrolling, without hitting like or commenting, like she would normally 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 withThe Lust Villaon. 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. Shecouldjust 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 tooFatal Attraction.She didn’t want him to think she’d boil bunnies to get his attention. He was cute, but notthatcute.

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 left the changing rooms at the other side of the doors, and they both reached for the door handle at the same time.

‘Oh, pardon me, let me get that for you,’ the guy had said. He pulled the door open and let Nadia walk on ahead. She picked a spot towards the back of the room – over her dead body would she enter a middle row, let alone a front one – and threw down her water bottle and face towel. She stood to queue at the weights section to pick up her bar and a few dumbbells when they were called for, queuing behind the man who’d just held the door for her. He looked up and around at her.

‘Oh, hey again,’ he said.

‘Hey again,’ Nadia replied, slightly puzzled at his friendliness.

‘Can I pass you something?’ he said.

Did he work here?she wondered.

‘Oh, you’re very kind. Yes. Sure. What about a pair of the sixes, and maybe of the eights as well.’

The guy wore a gym vest and as he leaned across to pick up her weights his back muscles rippled and she stared too long. He caught her. He smirked.

‘There you go,’ he said, a pair in each hand.

Nadia’s hands weren’t as big as his so he offered to follow her back to her mat. She walked ahead of him, self-consciously, wondering:was he flirting?

‘Thank you again,’ she said, and he put down her weights beside her water bottle and stood up, pulling himself up tall, shoulders back and neck elongated, and smiled broadly.

‘Any time,’ he said, winking at her. And then he was gone.

Nadia had caught sight of herself in the studio mirror. She looked flushed and silly, and she was smiling. He walked in front of her to get to his own mat, smiling at her again, and Nadia felt self-conscious for the whole session.

‘Have a good one,’ he shouted across the room to her as she left, sweating and red-faced.

Nadia had taken that class at least once a week for a year and never been hit on, but suddenly with the spring in her step of having flirted the night before, another man had flirted with her today. She wanted to tell Emma, ‘That was it! That was the law of attraction!’ She’d probably have been deeply suspicious of the guy helping her even two days ago. But with a different mindset came different reactions to the world. She believed romance was imminent, and so everything seemed more romantic.

I’m going to see this guy again, she told herself, after she left the gym and walked halfway home before getting the bus, to get rid of her excess energy.I am. I am going to see Waistcoat Guy again.

She had to tell somebody what was going through her mind, so she texted Naomi to see if she was about and arranged to call her when she got home, after her shower.

‘And I don’t mean to sound like a total stalker or anything, but … I found him on Instagram.’

Nadia could hear Naomi raise her eyebrows. ‘You found the mystery man from last night on Instagram?’

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