Page 26 of Stella is Starting Over

‘That stupid book? From that insane talk? Oh, come on,’ I sneer.

Lou points at a pile of papers on the kitchen table, under which is a cream book with a bright pink title on the spine: The Mantourage.

‘So stupid that you kept the copy you got in the gift bag and read it?’

I stare at the floor and curse Lexie Leung. ‘I wanted to see if it was as stupid as it sounded.’

‘Sure,’ says Lou, giving me a kiss on the cheek and hanging up her tea towel. ‘Well, look, I know shit about fuck when it comes to your life, but I think you should do it. What have you got to lose?’

Dominic

I’m not averse to ghosting people. I’ve got a sort of personal ghosting code, in fact. If we haven’t slept together, and it’s been fewer than three dates, then it’s permissible to just stop replying. Anything more than that, I’ll grind out an excuse before muting, archiving and eventually blocking. I know that doesn’t sound brilliant, and it’s the big crime of my generation, but honestly my pro-ghosting stance is mostly based on my preference for being ghosted. In a world where I’ve spent time with a woman – having seen the literal best version of me for a couple of hours on a Thursday night, wearing an outfit I look good in, talking about subjects I’m interesting on, really giving it all I’ve got – and she’s decided nope, the sum total of his human existence isn’t enough for me, I don’t want to know. I mean, if she ghosts me then I’ll know, but I don’t want to hear why. I don’t want an explanation about us not having the right ‘vibe’ or the chemistry ‘not being there’. I just want to walk away into the night and pretend that she’s been summoned for military service in a far-off country, or got amnesia, or had an arranged marriage. I want to maintain the polite fiction that I was great, and something else happened to get in the way. Which is why I’m grateful that Stella is ghosting me, and why despite having drafted six – yes, six – messages to her, I’ve landed on sending nothing. The woman’s got a half-finished house and a small kid, the last thing she needs is the emotional labour of writing me a nice long message about why she didn’t want to shag me. As if she owes me an explanation. Admittedly I would really like to know what I did to turn her from ‘let’s have sex’ to ‘let’s open a box of Kleenex’, just so I can never do it to anyone else ever again. But we are where we are.

Anyway, onwards and upwards, tonight is my second date with Florrie. I had to message Ed, the younger brother from the stag do and the only one still living in London, to ask for a restaurant recommendation that might impress, in case my favourites had all become TikTok-viral disasters. He’s sent us to some Italian place, tiny and pretty, on the edge of Soho. Inside I can see a blackboard of specials and I think there might even be bottles with candles jammed in them.

My phone buzzes, and I assume it’s going to be Florrie telling me she’s got noro and won’t be turning up, but instead it’s from Stella. I open it with embarrassing speed.

Huge excitement in SE19, she writes, with a picture of her sock drawer, perfectly organised.

Please stop, I reply. I thought we’d agreed to just be friends.

My apologies, she replies. Thank you for stopping me before I showed you how I’d colour coordinated the wardrobe.

I don’t have a change of trousers so it’s for the best.

What are you up to tonight?

Date, I say.

Fun, she replies. Who with?

Florrie, I say. It’s hard to know exactly what to say about Florrie, because a lot of the things I could say about her make me sound like a bit of a twat. She’s six years younger than me, which is just young enough that I am starting to worry about reading a bit creepy, and comprehensively younger enough that she uses slang I don’t understand. She was born in the 1990s (a good thing) but after the Spice Girls broke up (a bad thing). Possibly after S Club 7 broke up, though I’m too scared to check. She’s also, and I don’t want to sound like a massive misogynist, but it’s got to be acknowledged, heart-stoppingly fit. Like, I can’t believe she’s talking to me, has there been some kind of mistake, beautiful. She’s five foot ten (she breathed a sigh of relief upon learning that my six foot one is an actual six foot one, not the five foot nine it usually means on apps) with long blonde hair, a tan that has got to have come from a bottle, freckles all over her arms and the prettiest, meanest, poutiest lips I’ve ever seen in my life. She’s Estella from Great Expectations, Cathy from Wuthering Heights, Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy. When she turned up on our first date, outside the natural wine bar she’d selected (to my relief – picking venues is clearly not my strong suit) I genuinely couldn’t believe that there was any prospect that I might get to touch her. And yet, at the end of the evening, after she’d asked me in enormous detail about my job and seemed genuinely interested in planning restrictions, which I honestly find interesting too but people aren’t supposed to know that, she’d kissed me. That way around – I wasn’t going to risk trying it on and her suddenly laughing at me for dreaming that I’d be allowed to. We waited for her Uber, then she went on her tip-toes, pressed her lips to mine and told me that we’d do it again.

She seems fun, I say, because I can’t work out what else to say. But obviously until someone invites me for a Mormon sleepover and lets me meet their ex-husband, you’ll still be the gold standard.

She starts typing. Then stops. Then starts again. Then stops. Then Florrie arrives. I look down once more at the screen to see if Stella’s replied. She hasn’t.

‘Hi,’ I say, as Florrie parks her Lime bike. I sort of wait for her to apologise for being late, because I’ve been waiting outside the restaurant messaging Stella for twenty minutes, but there’s no apology and I sort of feel like an idiot for thinking she might. It’s a Friday night, what’s twenty minutes?

She’s wearing a pair of low-slung jeans with her midriff on show, her T-shirt stopping just below her tanned waist. She wraps her arms around my neck and looks searchingly into my face. ‘I find time management really difficult.’

I note a man walking past us looks at her. Looks at me. Gives me a look of begrudging approval. I want to hate this, but obviously I don’t.

‘Oh. Same,’ I say, following her as she goes into the restaurant.

‘This is so cute,’ she says, taking out her phone to snap a picture of the restaurant. ‘I can’t believe we’re having dinner – this is so vintage.’

Is that good? I really don’t know what to say to that.

‘I guess that’s the perk of dating an older man?’ She giggles.

Six years older? Is that an older man? Am I an older man? Oh my god, I’m an older man. Am I going to have to offer her some kind of advice? I’m definitely going to have to pay the whole bill.

The waiter shows us to our table and leaves us with menus. ‘Would you like a glass of wine?’ I ask. ‘Or we could share a bottle?’

She looks at the list and wrinkles her nose. ‘Oh. None of these are biodynamic.’

‘Ah,’ I say. ‘Right.’