Page 36 of Stella is Starting Over

Maybe he was on his period, I reply. She doesn’t reply because she thinks laughing emojis are millennial, even though much to her chagrin she is – by one single year – technically a millennial.

I don’t know whether Richard is insane or not, but I message him to thank him for the flowers and he asks if I’m free this Thursday. I should play it cool, obviously, but I don’t. I say I’m free and he invites me to dinner at his flat. Only he calls it an apartment, which is what people do when their flat is really fucking fancy. I relay this information to Lou.

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘But let’s not get sidetracked. Mantourage, yes?’

She’s annoying, but she’s right. My monogamous little heart finds the whole idea confusing, but I’ve made a lot of very big promises about how I’m going to handle my love life going forward and Louella is not going to let me get away with reneging. So I pick up my phone, open Tangl and swipe on everyone who looks like they might be a poet, a thinker, an artist or a dreamer, which results in a stream of men asking me what my star sign is or whether I’m into surfing. But eventually it also turns up Beau, a photographer-creative, who is unbelievably beautiful. He’s got blonde curls, blue eyes, a tan that cannot be from living in the UK full time and a dog called Ace who wears a bandana. After exchanging a handful of messages, he asks for my number and while I’m usually pretty fussy about making the transition from app to WhatsApp, I need to prove Lou wrong, so I say yes. He sends me a voice note while I’m washing Rose’s bottles and I hit play without thinking, and then stop completely in my tracks. He’s got the sexiest voice I’ve ever heard in my entire life. I literally freeze washing the bottles, and then replay the message.

‘I don’t know if you’re a voice-note person,’ he says. If I wasn’t before, I am now, Beau. ‘I feel like it’s somehow more intimate? Also, you can’t date someone if you don’t like their voice. Anyway, I’m thinking we should go out. How’s Wednesday?’

Obviously, Wednesday is shit; I can only do Thursdays. I replay the voicemail again, cursing Gavin and the entire universe for this arrangement. Then I do something that I never, ever do. I ring my mum.

She sounds alarmed to hear from me. ‘Is everything all right?’ she asks.

‘Yes,’ I say, steeling myself. ‘I want to go on a date with a very attractive man I’m talking to on the internet, and he’s suggested Wednesday, which isn’t Gav’s night, and I was thinking maybe you could babysit.’

‘Fine,’ she says, after a pause that sounds suspiciously like she’s dragging on a cigarette. ‘What time?’

I’m genuinely shocked that she said yes, but there’s no point in lingering and I’ll have second thoughts if I think about it too much. I press record on a voice note in response. ‘I mean, I really hope you don’t hate my voice,’ I say, trying to not sound like I’m trying. ‘Because I’d love to hang out on Wednesday.’

In that moment I feel like the fifth character in Sex and the City. But when Wednesday arrives, everything about this experience feels painfully wrong. Beau messages me about a club in Brixton where his friend ‘likes to play’. I don’t ask what instrument, and I’d like to ask what the dress code is, but Beau is surprisingly hard to pin down on anything specific. When the date gets closer, I ask him for various details about the evening and he says he’ll ‘drop a pin’ when he gets there. He says we can go for drinks ‘before’, but doesn’t give me a time, and then redirects the conversation to a dream he had last night where he was a spinning arrow made of coral.

I sort of want to cancel. In fact, I really want to cancel, but then he sends me a voice note telling me that he can’t wait to see me, and that he’s hoping that he might be able to do more than see me, and, to my total shame, I melt. Look, isn’t the idea of the mantourage to experience lots of different things? And if I’m totally honest, I’ve never had sex with someone really, deeply attractive. Hot guys were never my thing. I’ve been with Gavin since I was basically a child bride, but even before that I was always more interested in the funny, sarcastic sort of men who had childhood allergies and trauma from being in the bottom set for sports at school. I’ve literally never seen a body like Beau’s (which I’m familiar with both from his profile and the series of semi-nude pictures he sent me this week) in live action. Is it really the worst thing in the world if I want to find out what abs feel like?

On the night of the date, my mum arrives on time, not smelling of cigarettes or overpowering French perfume, which will inevitably get all over Rose and make her smell like a mean Parisian lady. Mum tells me I look nice (which means I must look fantastic, or just slightly thinner than usual) and sends me on my way. Beau hasn’t actually ‘dropped the pin’ yet, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to admit this to Mum, so I walk out of the house, marvelling once again at the feeling of leaving with one tiny handbag and no nappies, and I go to the station, not totally sure what I’m doing. I’m going to head towards Brixton, because that’s the only concrete location that Beau has mentioned, and happily I know exactly who can entertain me between home and Brixton.

Dom arrives at the pub, on the fancy side of Brixton, looking sleep-deprived. I’ve already got a bottle of wine and he gratefully pours himself a glass.

‘You look terrible,’ I say.

‘Thanks.’

‘Honestly, I have a baby and you look like you’ve slept less than I have. What’s going on?’

‘I went for a weekend away with Florrie and her friends and they didn’t go to bed until 8 a.m. every night.’

‘Jesus,’ I say.

‘Do you know about “afters”?’ he asks.

‘Christ, no, what’s that?’

‘So, you know how we had drinks before we went out, when we were younger? Well, now they do that, then they go out, then they come home and they do more drinking and more drugs, and they call it “afters”.’

‘You literally could not pay me to be twenty-six again,’ I say. ‘All the uncertainty and the insecurity—’

‘Sorry, aren’t we waiting in a pub so that some guy can send you the location for a date that was supposed to start an hour ago?’

‘Fuck off,’ I say cheerfully.

I’m starting to think that Beau is going to be the first man to ghost me, and while I obviously don’t want to get ghosted, the idea of going home after a few drinks with Dom honestly feels like the exact way I’d like to spend tonight. But, lo and behold, a message. He sends me his location, I send him mine, and a quarter of an hour later he’s standing outside the pub on a battered bike.

‘Hey,’ he says, even more beautiful in real life. ‘Stella?’

I stand up, kiss him on either cheek, which makes me feel like a great aunt. ‘So great to finally meet you,’ I say. ‘This is Dom, he’s just leaving.’

‘Nice to meet you,’ he says, tipping his head at Dom. ‘You can totally hang with us too if you like?’

‘No, you’re all right, mate,’ Dom says, with a slight sneer. ‘Where are you two heading off to?’