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So I’ll stomp out these unnamed emotions, no one will know, and we’ll continue exactly as we were. I’m not going to let my feelings make a mess. We started with a handshake and a verbal contract, and I can’t let it get any more complicated than that.
18
the lady doth protest too much, methinks
A V A
Drunken encounter very muchignored, Finn and I get into a loose routine with his bucket list. Some weeks we squeeze in two items, other weeks one of us is too busy and we have to skip. We hit a pop-up vintage shop in Dalston, have a pint at London’s oldest pub, and I reluctantly agree to take Boris bikes out for the shortest possible ride around West London. Apparently you can, in fact, forget how to ride a bike.
One day we go to Greenwich with Julien and Finn crosses off two items in one fell swoop. First, we visit the Prime Meridian, where Finn takes an impossible amount of joy standing on both sides of the line and being in both the eastern and western hemispheres at once.
Then I leave the pair of them to it, letting Julien be Finn’s companion when they climb the O2. Heights haven’t agreed with me since a particularly painful experience when Max and I were seven involving a wall and, soon after, the pavement.
As I’m walking back to the flat from the station, Finn texts me a selfie from the top, eyes scrunched up in a smile with the satisfactionof someone who’s just summited Everest. His joy is infectious and I have to make a conscious effort to press my lips together so that I don’t turn into the idiot grinning at her phone. That iscategoricallynot the kind of person I am.
This is swiftly followed by a photo of Julien, who looks more like a model than anyone should in this situation, and an accompanying text.
My favourite view <3 <3 <3
get a room
You would have loved this
let’s not lie to each other Finn
Fine fine
I just wanted you to be jealous
impossible
Julien’s upset he couldn’t be your knight in shining armour
He was hoping to protect you from the big scary heights
Your height knight
unless Julien has asubstantial supply of Xanax he may need to put his chivalric dreams aside
He sends a photo of the actual view then. London sparkles under the sun, the Thames a ribbon of pale grey running through the city, the few skyscrapers poking out of the ground like they were dropped there by aliens. I’m not mad I skipped out; I’d have been embarrassing up there, and I have a stoic reputation to maintain. But my heart swells just seeing the whole city from above. The more time I’ve spent exploring it recently, the more it’s felt like the place I could build something. The place I can really live.
I swipe back through the photos and land on the selfie Finn sent, and I’m sure it’s just some weird secondhand vertigo that makes my stomach fill with butterflies.
Somehow, even as we cross items off the list, I notice it isn’t getting any smaller.
‘This is new,’ I’d said to him as I was closing up yesterday, half putting things away, half looking at the list.
He grinned and in that moment I realised he was definitely one of those kids at school who the teacher said had “a lot of potential, but distracts others”. ‘I know, I know, but I’ve had two dreams about bagels recently and then someone mentioned that shop in the office yesterday and it just felt like fate. I have to believe the universe was sending me a sign.’
So, this morning we squeezed in a visit to the Beigel Bake Brick Lane Bakery before I had to be at work. As expected, Finn made appreciative noises with every bite of his bagel, and as expected, I had to politely ask him to shut the fuck up.
Somehow, just hours later, Finn’s ready for another item already. ‘What abouteat at a popular local restaurant?When can we do that?’
‘I have an idea. There’s this restaurant in Covent Garden I went to once when I third-wheeled a date with Josie and Alina. But we need to wait for a day I’m on an early finish, because if you don’t get there early enough you end up at the shitty tables crammed against the wall. You want the window booths. They look across the whole piazza, which means you can people-watch.’ A new customer steps through the door and I say in a low voice, ‘And you’re nosy as fuck, so you’d love it.’
His eyes light up in confirmation, before he steps aside to let the other customer place his order; a young guy who’s barely out of uni and always shifts on his feet while he’s talking to me.
Unfortunately for him, after I’ve pushed his drink across the counter, he stumbles over his words; starting to say “lovely”, but switching to “thank you” at the last second. So, as he picks up his cup, he gives me an enthusiastic, ‘Love you,’ instead.
