Page 36 of Big Nick Energy
As for second dates, Old Nick (his official name) has done well here. He remembered my strange fascination with ice skating and booked us a slot at Somerset House, by the river, one of the most perfect places to spend Christmas in London with its towering golden Christmas trees, the ice rink framed by the old stone buildings of the house, a perfect starry night sky above us. Nana would adore this. She wouldn’t skate. She’d sit by the side wrapped in a blanket and take it all in, heckle me, shout bravo for any flourishes of decent skating. I need to take a thousand photos of this for her, throwing poses, and buy her something from the gift shop for when I next see her. I’m not sure why recalling her in this very moment feels so warming if bittersweet.
‘All OK?’ Nick asks, his hand still firmly in mine.
I snap back to the rink, smile and nod. It’s bizarre to see Nick finally out of formal dress. He’s in jeans, a blue woollen jumper with a white shirt underneath and a Canada Goose coat. ‘So do we go round and round?’ he asks.
‘Yeah, for the full hour, unless you had a routine you wanted to dance out?’ I ask.
‘I could try and lift you,’ he says. ‘You might have to take your coat off though.’
I pull up to a railing to steady myself. ‘People tend to go in circles, stand around, chat, fall down, get up.’
‘Right,’ he says. ‘Have you ever stacked it before?’
‘Plenty. Once you get past the shock and the embarrassment, it can be funny. Physical comedy is always a winner.’
We wait for a moment, watching everyone else whizz past us. There are a number of families enjoying an evening out, kids with penguin aids, their faces full of joy at gliding across the ice, wrapped in matching hats and mittens. It’s also very much a date-night kind of destination – there are lots of couples in different stages of dating – the hand holders, the newbies, the ones who may have been at odds about being here tonight, oneof them skating around furiously and the other standing with their arms crossed by the skate exchange.
‘I feel I should have opted for the knee pads?’ he mentions.
‘And look like that…?’ I say, my eyes guiding him to a man near us who is a tentative skater, padded up to the hilt, with a helmet and elbow pads – his date looking at him curiously, wondering how she’s going to survive the next fifty minutes.
‘You’re fine as you are,’ I say, kissing him softly on his cold cheek. He looks at me and kisses me on the lips, softly. If we’re rating romantic moments that I’ve experienced in my lifetime, this is up there – the stars, the tree, the lights all seem to glow as he kisses me on the ice. I am not immune to romance and it’s hard not to be affected by the magic of it all, so I close my eyes to take it in for a second.
‘You OK there, miss?’
‘Uh-huh,’ I say, looking up at him and basking in the full beam of that warm, crinkle-eyed smile. In this moment, it feels as though he’s come into my life and swept me off my feet. The big Christmas party in the tux, the roses, the uninhibited and familiar sex, and now this – it’s all romance as it should be, someone getting everything right. And I think of other dates where people have failed to achieve this, rookie mistakes like the guy who gave me supermarket flowers with the price tag still attached. Not just a price tag either – a yellow sticker to let me know he’d got them out of the bargain bin. And that bloke who thought a meal deal was a nice dinner out. Nick has climbed to the top of some imaginary dating ladder beating them all. I feel spoilt and incredibly cared for, impressed by the thought he’s putting into everything.
Nick reaches up to my black wool hat and pulls it down a little over my curls. ‘We went ice skating in Bath that time, remember? I think that’s where you taught me to skate.’
I laugh at that memory, intrigued that he would want to recreate it. ‘You had that woolly hat with the ear flaps,’ I remember.
‘God,’ he remembers with horror. ‘I was a sartorial disaster then, please try and forget a lot of that.’
‘Do you still have your leather bomber jacket?’ I ask.
‘Well, fashions come and go. This time in ten years when we’re still skating in circles, we’ll joke about this again.’ My pause must tell him that what he’s just said comes as a minor surprise to me. We’re keeping this incredibly casual. Maybe he’s talking about the ice skating feeling monotonous and never-ending. ‘That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, would it?’
‘Ten years’ time?’
He shrugs. ‘I doubt we’d be alone though, right? Most likely we’d be ushering kids around the ice.’ He draws my attention to a family zipping around, the dad picking a boy up and making him explode in hysterics as he floats around, kicking his legs. Words like those should fill me with joy. This is a man who’s projected this date into the future. He wants to have kids? With me? I’m assuming that, rather than us escorting random children around this ice rink. ‘I’ve said too much, right?’
I shake my head. ‘You’ve caught me by surprise, that’s all. Let’s just take this slowly, Mr Coles. Maybe live in the moment.’ He smirks: I think because when we dated before, the roles were very much reversed. I was young and in love and thought about our life beyond university, and he was possibly the reverse. I won’t lie. I signed my name with his surname for practice. I imagined our kids. I even named them: Mabel and Benjamin. They would have really loved ice skating. ‘I’m just… it’s been nice to be back in touch. It’s felt…reassuring.’
I wonder if I’ve said the wrong thing. I’m not sure if that’s what great love is built on. Reassuring is a word you’d use to describe a nurse or a mortgage advisor. But I mean it in a goodway; this does feel familiar. We’ve done all the legwork to get to know each other. It feels, for want of a better word, easy. ‘It’s been an unexpected week. I don’t hate it,’ I say jokily, leaning into him as I skate.
‘The opposite of which means you love it?’.
‘No comment.’
‘None needed. Here, reach into my pocket,’ he says.
‘I think that goes against the code of conduct,’ I say, smiling, but I reach in and pull out sweets in a striped paper bag. I untwist the paper and peer in.
‘Red strawberry laces, your favourite,’ he says.
‘You remembered?’
‘I remember things too,’ he says, shrugging his shoulders, and I put one in my mouth to mask my shock. He used to show up at my student flat with bags of these and we’d race to see who could eat one the quickest, the strings hanging down from our mouths and us both in hysterics. I offer him one and he untangles a strand. ‘We probably both need the sugar too if we’re going to be going round in circles for an hour,’ he says, using his tongue to sweep the string into his mouth.
