Page 30 of Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop
It was much better with their menus open so they could talk about the merits of a dirty burger versus buttermilk fried chicken and if they should get a mac and cheese on the side to share along with their rosemary-and-thyme fries and deep-fried onion rings. ‘And a side salad,’ Nina decided. ‘Just to show willing.’
‘Yeah, we should probably have something green and leafy on the table,’ Noah agreed. ‘And what do you want to drink? Another Old Fashioned or do you want to get a bottle of something?’
‘I never mix grape and grain, it makes for the worst hangovers.’ Nina shuddered at the memory of all the terrible hangovers she’d suffered. ‘I think I’ll stick to the Old Fashioneds.’
She felt more at ease now, and boiling enough to slip off her leopard-print cardigan and push up the sleeves of her matching leopard-print jumper. Noah mirrored her movements, unbuttoning the cuffs of the navy-blue (big surprise) shirt he was wearing so he could roll up his sleeves, and that was when Nina saw it: the large, elegant, black type, a series of numbers and letters marching up the soft skin of his left forearm.
‘What’s that?’ Nina demanded. ‘What’s that on your arm?’
Noah grinned. ‘It’s a tattoo, Nina,’ he said evenly. ‘Have you never seen one before?’
‘Of course I have!’ Nina held up her inked arms as proof. ‘You!Youhave a tattoo?’
‘I do.’ He grinned again. ‘Is there going to be a copyright problem?’
‘What? No! I just … I just can’t believe that you have a tattoo. You don’t seem the sort.’
Noah wagged a finger at her. ‘You work in a bookshop, you must know all about not judging books by their covers.’
‘True. Sorry. So,’ Nina gestured at Noah’s arm. ‘What is it?’
Noah held out his arm so Nina could have a proper look at the letters, which made no sense. In fact, they were giving Nina alarming flashbacks to GCSE maths.
‘Is that … is thatalgebra?’ she asked.
‘It is,’ Noah admitted cheerfully. ‘It’s my favourite equation. Bayes’ theorem.’
‘Bayes’ what ’em? Can you explain it to me in words of less than three syllables?’
‘I’m sure I could.’ Noah wrinkled his brow in thought. ‘So, Bayes’ theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event.’
‘OK,’ Nina said slowly. ‘Right.’
‘For instance, I knew that you liked vintage clothes and whatnot and I knew you ate meat because we talked about it on the train, so based on this knowledge, I picked this place for our date because it’s a retro burger joint.’ Noah tapped his tattoo with a longer finger. ‘Bayes’ theorem in practice.’
‘I’m impressed!’ Nina was. ‘If my physics teacher had bothered to explain things so clearly at school then perhaps I wouldn’t have abandoned physics at the first opportunity.’
‘My physics teacher was never the same after he had an affair with the B-stream French teacher,’ Noah said as their second round of drinks arrived.
Nina smothered a gasp of genuine shock – not Mr Clark and Mrs Usher, whose French lessons mostly involved anecdotes about what she got up to on holiday in France with Monsieur Usher? ‘Scandalous! How did you find out that juicy morsel of gossip about these two people I’ve never even met?’
Noah quirked his eyebrow at her. ‘One Saturday I went to an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection and I saw them holding hands in the coffee shop.’ He paused to take a sip of his drink. ‘Thought it was best not to say anything.’
With a guilty start, Nina knew that if she’d seen her two teachers canoodling it would have been all around school by lunchtime the next day. Back then, even though he’d had no reason to, and who would have blamed him for lashing out, Noah had been more kind and thoughtful than any teenage boy had the right to be.
Nina rewarded that kindness and thoughtfulness with a smile. She was here, after all, because Noah deserved a good date, dammit, and Nina was a veteran of a good date. The one surefire way she knew to a man’s heart wasn’t through his stomach, though the heaving platters of food that were coming their way should see to that. Oh no, if Nina had learned anything on those thousand or so first dates that she’d been on, it was that no man could resist talking about himself.
‘Your tattoo,’ she prompted as Noah’s chicken and Nina’s burger were placed in front of them. ‘Did you study physics at Oxford?’
‘Well, I’d categorise Bayes’ theorem as more probability than physics and that’s what I studied at Oxford – probability and statistics. How do you feel about condiments?’ he added as the waiter put down a small tray groaning with mustards and ketchups.
‘Love condiments,’ Nina said. ‘One of the major food groups as far as I’m concerned. So, probability and statistics? Why did you want to do a degree in them?’
‘I like solving puzzles and I like to think that things happen for a reason rather than just sheer random luck,’ Noah said, though Nina liked to think just the opposite. That life was about fate and destiny, though there were times you could give fate a little nudge. There was nothing romantic about reason and living your life guided by probability and statistics. What with that and the exclusively navy-blue wardrobe, Nina didn’t think she’d ever met a man who was less likely to be her one true love. Still, she was here, on a non-date with Noah for altruistic reasons, so she’d give it her all.
‘How was Oxford then?’ she asked, as Noah helped himself to an onion ring.
‘It was scary,’ he said. ‘I was two years younger than everyone else because I skipped a couple of years at school, but once I settled in, it was fine. Better than fine really, because I was surrounded by people who wanted to learn. It was an uphill struggle to learn anything at my school: even in the top stream, there was always someone or something kicking off.’ He took another onion ring. ‘And Oxford wasn’t like a normal university. The porters in my college were like over-protective parents and Sebastian, of all people, decided to take me under his wing pretty quickly. Then once I realised that I was studying with people who didn’t want to beat the crap out of me, I started to make friends.’
