Page 34 of Is She Really Going Out with Him?
“Suit yourself,” Will says with the smallest shake of his head. The chatter of the radio feels too much for my throbbing skull, so I reach to turn it off.
“Sorry, I’m not good company this morning.”
Will points toward a backpack behind his seat. “Can you reach my bag?” he asks, and I stretch backward, then pull it onto my lap. “Open it,” he instructs me. Inside, I find a large thermos and two tin mugs. “Coffee,” he says. “It’s good.”
“Do you take your own coffee everywhere?” I ask, remembering he usually has a thermos on his desk at work.
“Life’s too short to drink bad coffee,” he says as I unscrew the cap and the most wonderful aroma fills the car.
“Oh, wow, that smells amazing,” I say, inhaling deeply.
“Do you want milk? I have hot milk in there too. I wasn’t sure how you took it.”
“I’ll just have it how it comes, thanks. Can I pour you one?”
“Black for me, thanks,” he says.
As I carefully pour two cups of the dark black liquid, I feel myself soften. I am not angry at Will, not today. It’s myself I’m angry with. “Thank you for the coffee, and for driving. I probably wouldn’t be safe on the roads this morning.”
“You’re welcome,” he says, and I turn to watch his face in profile as he drives. He really does have the most stupidly perfect features: a nose that’s delicate but masculine, a well-defined jaw, an expressive mouth, and a full, lustrous head of dark brown hair. It’s so neatly trimmed around his collar—I wonder how often he gets it cut. He starts humming “Build Me Up Buttercup” to himself but then stops, sensing my eyes on him. “What?” he asks, rubbing a palm self-consciously along his jawline.
“I’ve never seen you with a hair out of place. You’re always so put together.”
“ ‘Put together’?” he asks, turning to narrow his eyes at me. “Are you trying to give me a compliment, Appleby?”
“No. I find it disconcerting. You look exactly the same, every day. I’ve never seen you look tired, or like you didn’t have time to shave, or like you slept through your alarm. It makes me think you might not be a real person.”
“I’m not, I’m a simulation,” he says, and I lift my hand to cover a smile. “You only get to see me wild and unshaven when you reach the next level of the game.” I don’t know quite what he means by this, but I feel myself blushing. “Are you going to tell me what you got up to last night, then?”
I decide I might as well tell him about my date, since he’ll need to write a column to complement it. “I went on a date with a waiter I met. He told me he was twenty-seven, but he turned out to be twenty-two.”
“Appleby, I’m shocked,” Will says, his voice soft and low. “How old did he think you were?”
“Thirty-three,” I admit, curling my body in on itself.
“You could be thirty-three,” he says, glancing across at me. “It must have gone well if you ended up ‘moving furniture’ with him.”
“I was not ‘moving furniture’ with him. I was genuinely moving furniture. By myself.”
“Likewise intriguing. Tell me the highlights,” Will suggests. “We can outline your column now.”
So, I sip Will’s delicious coffee and tell him all about last night, about the hash brownies—he feigns shock and disapproval—the bed full of bodies, and the forgotten phone calls to Dan; he bites his lip in sympathy. Finally I mention the accidental tattoo, which sets him off laughing, to the point where we have to pull the car into a lay-by.
“Show me this tattoo,” Will says, holding out his hand. I pull off the plaster and hand him my forearm. His fingers close around my wrist and he gently tugs my arm toward him so he caninspect it more closely. The sensation of his fingers around my wrist sends a tingle up my arm. I must still be fragile, overly sensitive to touch, because now I feel a wave of giddiness.
Will tuts, then says, “What will your mother say?”
I frown, pulling back my arm, cradling it protectively. I think I wanted him to like it, but I don’t know why when I’m not sure I even like it myself.
“So should I find an older woman online? Do we make this week’s column about age difference?”
“What’s your definition of ‘older’? Thirty-five?” I ask, and Will doesn’t respond. “What’s your usual cutoff? Twenty-three?”
“Thirty-three,” he tells me with a slight shake of his head, but I know this already. Kelly once showed me his Tinder profile. His search criteria are someone between twenty-three and thirty-three who’s over five foot eight and lives within a four-mile radius of Bath.
“What happens on the night of a woman’s thirty-fourth birthday that suddenly makes her so undatable?” I ask him as he pulls the car back out onto the road.
“Are you telling me you don’t have an age range? Didn’t you reject this guy last night for being too young?”
