Obsession

“What’s weird?” I ask, sipping my wine carefully.

“According to his location, he’s right where we are.”

Alice turns her phone slowly towards me.

“Is this seat taken?”

My eyes go slowly from the screen on Alice’s cell phone to the origin of the question. It’s the same man, wearing the exact same T-shirt as though the photo has only just been taken. I have a tiny little heart attack and let out a weird little shriek my hand is too late to my mouth to stop. Alice snaps the phone against her belly so hard it’s bound to bruise, covering the action with a weird smile.

This is the kind of strange coincidence you read in the creepy column of the free subway newspaper, right before someone gets killed. I wonder if they’ve been stalking us all night, following the location on Alice’s cell phone and they’re about to good cop bad cop us for the location of the microfilm.

I tap the table in sequence, take a sip of each of my glasses of wine and count out the first seventeen prime numbers in my head, while Alice continues to smile weirdly, neither one of us really sure what to say.

“If it’s taken-”, Mike says, looking around the room.

“No”, Alice says, starting into action. “Sit down, please.”

Mike slides into the booth and someone else slides in alongside him. This guy wasn’t on Mike’s Tinder page so how the hell am I going to know who he is without asking? If that isn’t progress, I don’t know what is, and he isn’t all that bad looking either.

I wonder how long it’ll take me to put him off. I mean, after all, I’m sat here tapping the table repeatedly, drinking equal amounts of wine from two glasses and working out the square root of the year in which I was born, while I stare at them both inanely.

Chapter Three

It doesn’t take long before we strike up conversation, and for a while I feel like a perfectly normal human being. I do imagine us all on the orient express hurtling towards an exotic destination, while someone somewhere else on the train is getting brutally murdered, but that’s still fairly normal for me, and at least it’s comforting to know that if we share absolutely nothing else tonight, at least we’ll share an alibi.

Mike’s friend is another junior doctor called Charlie. He’s got soft hands, a slight overbite from where he used to suck his thumb and charming blue eyes that have probably seen way too much pornography. Alright, my mom’s not the only Sherlock Holmes in the family.

He’s not exactly my usual type, but at least he gets a plus point for not wearing plaid. Mike looks like a grown up version of the boy that used to steal my dinner money at school. He’s got an oddly cherubic face, which he either can’t grow a beard on or keeps extremely closely shaved - I can’t decide which - and piercing brown eyes like raisins pushed into dough. He listens along atently to the conversation like a basset hound waiting to be tossed a cream bun and has a weird habit of tapping the table before he’s about to speak. Okay, I’m the last person that should be criticising people on their weird habits, but believe me, there’s OCD and there’s just plain odd.

Alice has just finished explaining what she does for a living when Mike moves his hand towards the centre of the table and gives it a stiff little two finger tap. I can see it coming a mile off even before he’s launched out the words.

“So, why the two glasses?” he says, pointing those same fingers at me like a pistol. “Did we miss the offer?”

We’ve done names, professions, small talk on the bar itself, which, by the way, is way less divey than either of these two med school graduates want it to be, and now Mike wants to tap his way straight to the nitty gritty. I don’t blame him, it’s kind of impossible to avoid asking.

“I’m just greedy”, I say, shrugging. “I like things to come in twos.”

Mike leans back into his seat, his raisin eyes twinkling with what is undoubtedly a dirty thought. Men are so predictable. You give them a thread of innuendo and they run away and make up a blanket.

“That too”, I add, just to see how he’ll react. He smiles so widely beer almost falls out of the corners of his mouth.

“I buy things in twos all the time”, Charlie says. “At least you don’t have to go up to the bar so often.”

“They do table service here”, Mike adds, tapping the table briefly before he speaks. “No one has to go up to the bar.”

I sip my glasses of wine one by one, pretending someone has slipped poison into one our drinks and we’re secretly playing russian roulette. I’m hoping it’s Mike’s. Watching him choke and then keel over the table would liven up the night a little bit. Alright, I suppose that’s a little unfair. I know I’ve got high standards in men and Mike doesn’t make it even half way there, but watching someone choke to death would be absolutely awful. To be fair, this night is already livelier than a lot of my normal ones, and anyway, he might knock my wine over on his death roll, and that would be disastrous.

“So”, Alice asks, with the elongated o of international communication, about as subtle as a rhino in a lift, “are you guys up to anything good for the rest of the night?” She falls just short of adding the nudge nudge wink wink of desperation all lonely single ladies must reek of, but it’s far from necessary. There’s a chance I’m just being overly sensitive and because I know Alice so well I know what she’s really asking, until Mike and Charlie look at each other with a knowing smile to confirm they heard it too.

We are looking to hook up, she’s saying, it won’t get any more obvious than that. Take your best shot.

Mike taps the table, over and over again while he thinks. “Not really, you?” he says eventually, and I get the feeling he’s even worse at this than I am.

“Shots?” Charlie says, with his arms spread out as though channeling a divine spirit, and you can almost hear the sound of my already low expectations finally hitting rock bottom.

“Sounds like a plan”, Alice says, seemingly excited by the prospect.

“I have to work tomorrow”, I remind her.

“Shots of wine?” Charlie offers, and I can’t help smile at his thoughtfulness.

“Even that’s a bit too weird for me, but thanks for the offer”, I say.

While Charlie orders shots for everyone else, I drag Alice to the restrooms.

“Are we sticking with the doctors?” I ask when I’ve got her back to myself.

“I think they’re cute.”

“They’re not exactly my type”, I say.

“No one is your type, Penny. We can ditch them if you want but I think they could be fun. Why don’t we take it to its natural conclusion, wherever that might be. You might surprise yourself.”

“I told you I’m not sleeping with anyone.”

“You said you weren’t going to get drunk either.”

I narrow my eyes at her.

“What’s the worse that can happen?” Alice asks. “We have a few shots, we talk some more and each of us goes our separate ways. It’s been ages since we’ve done this. Or you loosen up, let your hair down, forget about your hang ups and have a good time. If you want we can have this round and go. It’s your call.”

My record for meeting men is atrocious. I’ve had my fair share of relationships but all of them have been disasters. I haven’t met the man of my dreams yet and I’m ninety nine percent certain we haven’t just left him at the table. But Alice is right, what’s the worst that could happen? At least it might give me enough confidence to start chatting to men I do like.

“Okay”, I say, sort of reluctantly.

“Okay?”

“Let’s go and have some fun, even if it’s with the pillsbury doughboy and Nucky’s little brother.”

Alice puts her arm around me. “You never know, they might fuck like rabbits.”

The thought sends a shiver down my spine. Is this the best it’s going to get for me? Sculling shots of sambuca with people I can’t even imagine as superheroes? Where’s my Indiana Jones or Prince Valiant? Is it really time for me to com

e to terms with the fact that my imagination is always going to be better than the world I’ve found myself in, that there aren’t huge Xs all over the world with buried treasure underneath and there never were dragons listed on maps?

Back at the booth, Alice slides in first so I’m now sat in front of Charlie. The shots have already arrived and as I pass over the one that’s now in front of me, I see two on the table in front of Alice.

I know it’s coming before Mike’s finger is even raised. He taps the table sharply. “We got you two”, he says, passing them over clumsily. “Just in case you changed your mind.”

I adjust them quickly without response, and then tap the table a number of times in sequence it’s impossible to cover it up as anything other than an obsessive twitch. I have to touch each of the other shot glasses too, just because I’m suddenly feeling nervous.

“What the hell was that?” Mike says.

“You forgot to tap the table”, I say and quickly down both shots.