‘So .?.?. how was your date last night?’ he eventually asks, shifting his weight and not quite meeting my eyes. Aha! I knew it was coming. While the moralistic part of me thinks that now is the chance to ’fess up and admit that the Instagram post had nothing to do with my date, my wild side does a little flamenco dance. Forget confessing. This isn’t church and I’m not Catholic. Now is my chance to get my own back on him and his secret lover for rubbing their dalliance in my unmarried-at-twenty-nine face.
‘Oh, it was amazing,’ I gush with a huge smile. ‘We had a lovely dinner and even though I made Hamza promise to let me pay, when I went to get the bill, he had already sneakily paid for it. He’s a proper gentleman, you know?’
‘Sounds disrespectful to me,’ he grumbles. ‘If he can’t respect your wishes now, you can bet your life that he won’t respect them later.’
‘We have sooo much in common,’ I continue, as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘The evening flew by, we had that much to talk about. We’re on the same wavelength about everything.’
‘And this is the same guy you told me about before? The one you don’t fancy?’ By his befuddled expression, I can tell that he’s trying to figure out if BAE is Hamza or someone else.
How do I get out of this one? Any woman with even the slightest ounce of oestrogen – no, let me start again – any human, male or female, gay or straight, would have to be blind not to fancy Jordan.
‘Omigod, no, of course not,’ I reply as convincingly as possible. ‘That was someone else. Someone completely different. Whose name also starts with H.’
‘It all sounds too good to be true,’ he concedes grudgingly, staring morosely into his mug.
‘It’s perfect,’ I fib, beginning to feel a bit sick, the lies leaving a slight bitter taste in my mouth. This suddenly isn’t so fun anymore.
‘Well, I hope you know what you’re doing,’ he says ominously, walking over to the sink and rinsing out his mug without scrubbing it with liquid. No wonder he has a black mug; he doesn’t want anyone to see the thick tea stains defacing it. As he opens the door to leave, he turns around and adds, ‘I bet he wasn’t that good. You’re not even glowing.’
The door closes and I stare at it slightly confused as I try to decipher what he said. What did he mean by ‘I’m not glowing?’ Why would I be glowing right now?
Realisation dawns on me and I lean against the kitchen cabinets and take a deep breath. He thinks I slept with Jordan?
All the knowing looks Adam and Francesca have been sharing all day make sense now. They’ve obviously been talking about me and what they think happened last night. Did I say that I was enjoying the attention? I’m not anymore. And when I get home and face my mum’s wrath, it’s going to get worse.