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‘Oh, definitely,’ I say with a sharp nod. ‘I also love asking people how their day’s been eighty-seven times in the space of an hour. Small talk is my passion.’
‘Okay.’ Finn raises both hands in surrender, a short chuckle bursting out of him. My stomach dips—probably because I haven’t gone on my lunch break yet. ‘I promise I won’t give you small talk. I’ll give you big talk instead. What are your goals, Ava? Mine are eternal glory and to learn how to make balloon animals.’
‘Could we get two flat whites please?’ Julien interrupts, earning him an eye roll from Finn. ‘Before he starts telling you about his greatest fears.’
‘Abandonment and death, in that order.’
Julien puffs up his cheeks and blows the air out abruptly. ‘He does grow on you, I promise. It’s taken me almost twenty years but I think I’m finally warming to him.’
‘Please, it took you eight at most,’ Finn says. He looks back at me, lowering his voice conspiratorially, ‘He acts like he’s too cool, but he forgets I was there the day he opened a limited-edition Hot Wheels set when we were ten and was so excited he cried. Then cried every day that week at school whenever he remembered he had it.’
‘I’m going to sit down so that I don’t have to listen to you torching my reputation any more. And Ava,’ Julien says my name as a question, not quite sure if he remembered it correctly, ‘I wouldn’t dream of telling you what to do, but I vehementlyrecommend you don’t let him get started on dinosaurs. He genuinely will not shut up.’
He walks away, leaving me slightly thrown by the entire interaction. I grab their cups from the shelf and start making the coffees, multitasking by setting up the payment on the till for Finn as the espresso extracts.
And yet, he’s still going. ‘Would you consider me a regular?’
‘Not yet,’ I respond. By the decisive way he nods, I’m concerned he’s taking that as a challenge.
I focus on listening to the milk aerate, and when the metal of the jug is too hot for me to touch, I start the process of swirling the liquid into latte art. Finn watches closely, just like last time.
‘I’m adding that to my list,’ he says with a dose of finality. He elaborates, unprompted, ‘I have a London bucket list to complete and learning how to make those milk patterns is going on there.’
I finish the first drink and he pulls it towards him to take a photo of it from above, his full lips pursing as he concentrates.
‘When I think of London, I do always think of latte art,’ I say flatly, finishing the second cup.
He glances up from his phone to meet my eyes with a smile. ‘I’m always on the hunt for new things to try. Do you think you could teach me?’ My brain zooms through professional, not-awkward ways to sayabsolutely the fuck notbut he saves me from answering by continuing, ‘Maybe Julien will come to a class with me.’
After he’s picked up the cups and thanked me, he goes to find his friend, who’s chosen the table next to the grumpy customer from earlier. Unfortunately, Finn reaches the table at the precise moment she stands up, and when she bumps into him, it’s only his fast reflexes that prevent him from spilling both drinks all over her. It was definitely her fault, and I expect her to snap a rude remark or shoot him a withering glare like she usually does to me. But to my utter consternation, after a few moments of Finn saying something I can’t quite hear, shebeamsat him.
5
work besties and future house guesties
A V A
‘So you really didn’tknow he was only eighteen?’ Josie asks, shovelling her penultimate slice of pizza into her mouth in a rare moment of gracelessness.
I shudder as I cast my mind back to the disaster of last night’s date. I wentbowling.With a man who still lived with his mum. ‘No, Josie, funnily enough, I did not.’
He was attractive in that artfully lazy, design-school boy way, and I’d planned on fuelling his ego by praising his bowling skills throughout the evening. And then, because there’s nothing sexier than the stench of stale popcorn and the sight of a man in sweaty bowling shoes, the tension would rise in the heat of that intimate moment, and would inevitably lead to a bland but moderately pleasant fornication at his place, immediately followed by me getting an Uber home so I wouldn’t have to sleep in his flat-pillowed, navy-sheeted bed.
Instead, in an impressive display of creativity, he managed to throw the ball in the gutter while the barriers were up. Then he told me he was eighteen. Unsurprisingly, this extinguished the fire in my loins.
Josie has the audacity to ask, ‘And you just ran away?’
‘You think I should have stayed until A Level results day? Saw if he got into the uni he wanted? Unfortunately, eighteen-year-oldsaren’t really my type.’
‘Since when do you have a type?’ Her eyebrows draw together in confusion. ‘The only thing the men you’ve dated have had in common is that they could all breathe.’
‘Not all of them,’ I point out. ‘Remember Congested Connor?’
‘The guy who left all his used tissues on the table? With the… residue all over his hands?’
‘That’s the one,’ I say, dipping a dough ball into a pot of garlic butter that now looks significantly less appetising. The patio of Il Pulcinella is packed with lunch-goers and we’re squeezed onto a little table by the ivy-covered wall, Rudy tucked by Josie’s feet on the floor. It’s a little Italian place by Clapham North station that we found a couple of months ago, and our go-to spot when romantically-stable Josie wants some gossip about my shenanigans.
I move the pieces of pepperoni around my slice so they’re more evenly spread. ‘Believe it or not, I do havesomethings I care about when it comes to the men I go home with.’ Josie snorts at this and I ask, ‘Are you slut-shaming me?’
