Thank You, Next: A perfect, uplifting and funny romantic comedy

by Sophie Ranald

  I was wearing dark skinny jeans, a silky black top I’d had for years and never worn because it had scratchy beading on the neckline, and a pair of kitten-heeled mules I’d bought in a charity shop ages ago for a party, then discovered that they slipped off my feet with every step.

  I didn’t feel even slightly like me. I felt like someone daring, alluring and sexy. At least, I would, once I’d got half this cocktail down me.

  Seth had suggested a swanky cocktail bar in North London for our date. It was near to where he lived, he’d said, and I knew that what he meant was, convenient for going back to for a shag afterwards. The thought made my stomach turn a somersault, and I saw my hand trembling slightly as I lifted my glass for another sip of what was basically cold, neat gin.

  Zoë the femme fatale would feel entirely comfortable perched on a bar stool sipping a dry martini while she waited for her date. I just wished she’d hurry up and take over from the regular Zoë, who was twitching with nerves and whose arse was slowly going numb from the bar stool’s slippery marble top.

  ‘Hello, Zoë. There you are. Did you find it okay? Sorry I’m late – I got held up at the office.’

  I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting Seth to do – greet me with a sleazy, ‘Hey, baby,’ and stare down my cleavage or something – but this totally normal, casual greeting surprised me and put me a bit more at ease.

  ‘That’s okay. I haven’t been waiting long.’

  He slipped onto the stool next to mine and looked at me for a moment, smiling. His teeth were slightly crooked, with a bit of a gap between the front ones. He was wearing jeans and a white shirt, the top button undone, and I could see that his brown leather belt had recently been let out a notch.

  Liam Hemsworth he was not. He was just an ordinary, decent-looking guy in his mid-thirties, average height, average build, average everything – everything except his eyes. They were the most amazing colour. Light brown? Hazel? Whatever you called it, they were almost golden, and a fine black line surrounded each iris, as perfect as if it had been applied with liquid eyeliner (at least, by someone who could apply liquid eyeliner perfectly, so not me). And when he looked at me with that curious, smiling stare, I felt something happening inside me – a loosening, melting feeling that made me even more worried that I might slide off the bar stool. It was like he’d sprayed himself with some mysterious pheromone-boosting cologne, or clicked on one of those emails that always go into your junk folder saying they’ve got the secret that will make you irresistible to women.

  Or maybe I was so desperate for a shag I’d imagine anyone as the next Casanova, so long as they weren’t actively repulsive. But that wasn’t the case, I told myself – I hadn’t felt this way about Paul or Justin. I wasn’t accosting random men in the street and begging them to come back to mine and bump uglies.

  Whatever it was Seth had, he had it in spades, and I was in no fit state to analyse it.

  He ordered an Old Fashioned for himself and another martini for me; the first one seemed to have mysteriously disappeared. We drank our drinks and we talked about perfectly ordinary things: his job doing something complicated involving buying online advertising space, my job in the pub, places where we’d travelled and books we’d read. He asked me stuff about myself like he was really, genuinely interested. Everything I said seemed to make him laugh, and when he did, those amazing eyes sparkled like shards of amber glass in the sun.

  But afterwards, I could hardly remember a thing we said, because it seemed like every word was about something else. When he lifted his drink, I found myself staring at his hand, looking at his blunt fingers wrapped around the glass and wondering how it would feel when he touched me. When he took a sip, I wanted to run my finger over his bottom lip. When he rubbed his shorn head, I wished it was my hand doing it, and I could almost feel the suede-like smoothness on my palm.

  What the hell is wrong with you, Zoë? I asked myself, but my brain wasn’t able to engage even in that simple question. It was like I didn’t even have a brain any more, only a body that wanted to get as close as possible to this irresistibly sexy man.

  As if Seth sensed my feelings, he nudged his chair closer to mine, so that our denim-clad knees were just an inch or so apart, and when I uncrossed my legs to cross them back the other way, my thigh touched his. Our eyes met again, he smiled and I felt his hand on my leg, resting there, heat spreading through my jeans and my skin and my whole body.

  And when he finished his drink and said, ‘Shall we go?’ I could only nod, watching mutely as he paid the bill and letting him guide me to the door, a warm, strong arm around my shoulder. He was taller than me but only just, thanks to my unfamiliar heels. If he kissed me, he’d only have to lean down a tiny bit.

  It was still light outside, so bright after the gloom of the bar I felt almost disorientated – although that might have been the gin. Pavement tables were crowded with people eating, drinking and smoking, enjoying what would be almost the longest day of the year. The air was cool against my skin, and I realised my whole body felt hot, as if I’d been lying in the sun.

  ‘So,’ Seth said. ‘Back to mine?’

  ‘Sure.’ I tried to sound casual, like I did this sort of thing all the time, but part of me was terrified. What was I doing? No one knew where I was. This man could be an axe murderer.

  ‘I’m not an axe murderer,’ he said.

  ‘Like you’d admit to it if you were. Imagine. “Come back to mine – oh, by the way, I’m an axe murderer.”’

  He laughed. ‘Not the strongest of pick-up lines. Which is why I stopped using it years ago.’

  It was my turn to laugh. ‘So what line do you use now? When you’re not meeting people online, that is?’

  ‘I don’t. I just rely on personal magnetism.’

  That was it, I realised. This average-looking dude – above average, maybe, but not someone whose picture you’d put on your bedroom wall and daydream over when you were fifteen – had magnetism. Charisma. Some elusive quality which, whatever you called it, made me go weak at the knees and made me self-conscious of my lips in a way that had nothing to do with lipstick, and of my breasts in a way that had nothing to do with the lacy bra I was wearing, which was digging into my ribs and itching like a bastard.

  ‘It’s just down here,’ Seth said as we turned off the main road onto a side street lined with tall stucco-fronted houses, most of them painted white but the occasional one pastel pink or green. The one he stopped in front of was pale yellow.

  He unlocked the front door and gestured to me, and I climbed a narrow staircase, up and up to the third floor. My heart was hammering by the time we got to the top, and not just from the many steps. He followed me onto the landing and seconds later we were in his flat.

  It was a gorgeous room – high-ceilinged, with the evening sunlight streaming in through tall sash windows. But it didn’t stream for long, because Seth crossed the room, lowered the blinds and switched on a lamp, bathing the room in a soft glow like honey and transforming it instantly from an ordinary lounge into a love nest.

  ‘Drink?’ he suggested, and I accepted gratefully. ‘The bathroom’s just through there.’

  A few minutes later, I was sitting next to him on a squashy cream sofa, sipping another martini that was just as expertly made as the one I’d had in the bar. This, I realised, was a practised seduction scene: the lamplight, the gin, Seth’s arm along the back of the sofa almost but not quite touching my shoulder.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘here we are.’

  ‘Here we are,’ I agreed, carefully putting my glass down on the polished wooden coffee table and turning to face him.

  ‘You’re very beautiful, you know,’ he told me, and then he kissed me.

  I wasn’t the most experienced person in the world, when it came to sex, but from that moment on I knew I was in the hands of an expert. Seth’s kiss was perfect: not too hard, not too tentative, not too much tongue and no teeth whatsoever. I kissed him back, my lipstick forgotten,
my hands reaching up around his shoulders, feeling the breadth of his back and the softness of his cotton shirt.

  Expertly, one-handed, he undid the few tiny buttons of my top, and I felt the fabric sliding off my shoulder and his lips move from my mouth to my neck, then down to my chest. I unbuttoned his shirt too, not so expertly, needing two hands, and felt the heat of his skin, smelling shower gel or cologne or deodorant and something more primal that was pure man.

  I slipped my feet out of my shoes and felt the plushness of the rug between my toes, then lost myself again in his kiss, feeling the softness of his lips, the scratch of his stubble, the silkiness of his chest hair under my fingers. His hands brushed against my breasts and I felt my nipples almost painfully hard against the lace of my bra. I opened my eyes and saw him looking at me, and we both laughed, breaking off the kiss.

  ‘Come on.’ He helped me to my feet, which was just as well because I was sure I wouldn’t have been able to stand otherwise. He unbuttoned my jeans and slid them down my legs, then gently lowered me back onto the sofa and pulled them over my feet, kneeling on the carpet in front of me.

  My bare thighs looked slender and pale against the cream velvet; my skin was very white against my black lace underwear. I could see myself through his eyes and, for the first time in what felt like forever, I felt potently sexy, desirable, desired. He unhooked my bra and bent his head to kiss my breasts, and I closed my eyes again, losing myself in the sensation as his lips found my nipples and his hand moved lower to ease my pants down over my hips. I felt like my whole body was melting, becoming boneless, liquid with pleasure.

  He was kissing my thighs now, his hands easing my legs apart so he could see me, open me for his tongue. I heard myself gasp with pleasure, then almost cry out as his mouth found the perfect spot.

  It had been so long – too long – since I’d last been given an orgasm, but in the next hour I more than made up for lost time. Seth brought me to the brink over and over again, then let me slip over it once, twice and a final time before he even took off his jeans. By then I was limp with longing, and when he slid his cock into me I legit thought I’d arrived in heaven.

  I know, right? A bit of a fuss about what was, after all, just a shag (well, three shags, strictly speaking – Seth didn’t exactly stint on the orgasms for himself either). But as shags go, that night was right up there. It was a Michelin-starred dinner of shags, a shag Oscar winner, the kind of shag that would earn Olympic gold. It really, really was that good.

  It was almost midnight when we finally admitted defeat, too satiated and sore to attempt round four. We’d moved to Seth’s bedroom by then, and I was lying in his arms, both of us sweaty and panting and entirely satisfied.

  Reluctantly, I eased myself out of his arms.

  ‘I should really go,’ I said.

  ‘Sure? You could stay.’ He smiled at me, one arm behind his head instead of a pillow, because we’d knocked them all to the floor.

  I shook my head. ‘I have to get home to my cat. And I’ve got work at seven in the morning.’

  He stood up and pulled on his jeans. ‘I’ll order you an Uber and see you out.’

  He waited until the cab came, one warm, strong arm around my shoulders, and when we said goodbye he gave me one last, lingering kiss that felt like – and surely must be – a promise.

  My elation lasted all the way home. I slept like I’d necked a handful of Xanax but woke up in the morning feeling alert and rested. I actually found myself singing in the shower, and I skipped downstairs to the kitchen and was already two coffees down by the time Robbie arrived for work. He didn’t ask me how my date had gone – he didn’t need to, I suppose, because my face must have said it all.

  As I worked, I imagined what it might be like to have sex like that all the time. If I was Seth’s girlfriend, would I wake up every morning feeling like this? Would people look at me in the street and guess that I was a woman who had multiple orgasms every night, because how else would I get that glow on my skin, that spring in my step, that secretive smile?

  Would our friends say knowingly, ‘Of course, he’s a Scorpio, isn’t he?’

  Or would it get old after a bit? Would I find myself turning away from him in bed and saying I was tired, or had a headache, or thought my period was about to start? I had no idea. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to be his girlfriend. Nowhere near sure. But I did know that when he messaged me and suggested meeting up again, I wouldn’t be able to say no.

  But he didn’t message me. As the day passed, I felt my elation draining away. When I checked my phone after my workout and there was still nothing, I felt suddenly weary in a way I hadn’t even when I’d been caning it on the rowing machine. It wasn’t surprising after barely any sleep, I told myself, and somehow I struggled through my evening shift, thinking that he was clearly a night owl and would message me later, even if I was asleep when he did.

  But there were no messages from Seth that night, even though I waited up until two, restlessly hoping. And the next morning when I woke up, there were none either. And when I went onto Tinder to find him, I couldn’t. His profile wasn’t there. The messages – and the pictures – we’d exchanged weren’t there. I switched my phone on and off again, but nothing changed. I deleted the app and reinstalled it, but that didn’t work either.

  I stared at my phone in bafflement for a while, and then I realised with a thud what had happened. He’d blocked me.

  I wasn’t exactly a battle-hardened veteran of online dating, but I knew this stuff happened. I knew that there were people who were just there for sex – if I hadn’t, Robbie would have set me straight. I knew that online dating was fickle and cruel. But knowing all that stuff didn’t stop it hurting like a punch to the ribs when it happened to me. I remembered that night with Seth – how completely I’d let myself open to him, how I’d abandoned any thoughts of playing hard to get the second he’d walked into the bar, how I’d urged him to carry on and on and not stop ever. I cringed remembering how blithely I’d assumed that he would contact me again – why wouldn’t he, since it had been just as good for him as it had for me?

  I didn’t feel a glow of remembered pleasure any more. I just felt disappointed and stupid. I felt like I’d been duped into something I wouldn’t have agreed to otherwise, even though I knew that wasn’t true at all. I picked it over and over in my mind, trying to figure out what had made him behave that way. I couldn’t talk to Dani about it, or even Robbie. Even though I was pretty sure it wasn’t my fault, I still felt strangely ashamed, like I’d been made a fool of somehow. I knew that Dani’s sympathy and understanding would make me feel a million times worse, and Robbie’s kindly but sharp advice to move on was advice I’d already given myself. But I remembered what Robbie had told me about his own online hook-ups – how sometimes, even most times, the whole point of it was that you could have sex with a new person every night if you wanted to.

  I thought of Seth – just your average bloke, not that good-looking or wealthy or even interesting – suddenly finding himself with unlimited girls like me, there for the asking. I couldn’t blame him for it, not really. He was a Scorpio, after all. Every time I opened the Stargazer app, I expected to see a message saying, Don’t say I didn’t warn you, but the app clearly thought I could figure that out for myself.

  And then – I’m not proud to admit it, but it was like my fingers were possessed – I couldn’t stop myself from stalking him. It wasn’t easy, because I didn’t know his last name. But how many Seths could there be in London, working in advertising sales? As it turned out, there were loads. I spent ages looking for companies that sold online advertising and were based near Old Street, where he’d mentioned he worked, and trawled their websites clicking the ‘Our Team’ button over and over again, until I found him. Seth Davidson.

  I looked at his LinkedIn profile, but I couldn’t see much on there because I didn’t have an account of my own, and I wasn’t going to create one in case he somehow knew I’d look
ed. Plus, that seemed a bit too stalkerish, even for me. I found his Twitter feed, but that was full of technical work stuff and retweets of motivational sayings – although funnily enough, ‘Fuck ’em and forget ’em’ wasn’t one of them. I found him on Facebook but his profile was locked down tight.

  Next I found him on Instagram. There was nothing there to torture myself with: no pictures of him with a girlfriend or a wife. Just innocuous photos of him at a rugby match with friends, throwing a tennis ball for a dog, opening a bottle of expensive red wine.

  And then there was a photo of a chocolate cake, crowded with candles, Seth’s face blurry in the background as their flames danced with the force of his breath. The post said: ‘Spoiled rotten by my mum on my thirty-fifth birthday.’

  Hold on. His thirty-fifth birthday? The image had been posted two months before. His birthday shouldn’t have been until late October or early November.

  He wasn’t a Scorpio at all.

  Ten

  Wise decisions made now will bear fruit in the future. The subtle energies in play today may not appear to be placing your dreams within your grasp, but be sure the universe holds the key to your desires.

  Somehow, I muddled through the next morning, feeling sick with disappointment. I tried to tell myself that I was stupid to get so worked up over what had been nothing more than a one-night hook-up. But I couldn’t help it. I felt wounded, angry with myself and with Seth, and ashamed that I’d let myself expect it to become something more. I’d have to go back to the drawing board, I determined, try to take comfort from the fact that I’d had the best sex of my life and move on to the next star sign.

  Robbie had the morning off, so at least I didn’t have to deal with his well-meaning curiosity. I worked alone, as I had for the months before he’d joined, glad to have the kitchen to myself, able to play music loudly through my headphones and not have to talk to anyone or pretend I was okay when I wasn’t.