Year of Being Single (14 page)

‘Hello!’ said the girl at the podium, faux-brightly.

‘Hi, erm…my, er, date is already here. Over there. He’s at the table.’ She made to point at him then realised that looked appalling and lowered her finger.

‘Mr Powers?’

‘Er…yes?’ Mr Powers?
Greg
Powers
? It sounded made up, yet it suited him. He was so handsome he could easily be James Bond, or some dashing spy hero from those TV series in the sixties.

‘I’ll take you over.’

Grace followed the girl who was like a gazelle with a swingy ponytail. The girl was gliding. Grace was stomping slightly, not sure where her centre of gravity had gone. At one point she had to steady herself on the corner of a passing table.

As they neared him, Greg took off his glasses and smiled. She noticed his eyes were very blue and his teeth were very, very white. Yep, he was gorgeous. He stood up, walked round to where she was standing, awkwardly, her bag over her shoulder, and leant over and gave her a kiss. He was so tall. Really tall. And God, he smelt good. A pleasant musky scent whooshed up her nose as he kissed her. His lips felt soft. And he was exceedingly good-looking close up, in just the way that Mr Kipling said it.

‘Are you okay, Grace?’ His voice was deeper than she expected.

She knew she was standing there like an absolute lemon. ‘Yes, fine thank you.’

‘Shall we sit down?’

‘Okay, then,’ she said, ‘seeing as we’re here.’ What a stupid thing, to say, she thought. She was a dork. They both sat down.

‘What would you like to drink?’

‘A white wine please. Large one.’

He smiled. ‘Need a bit of Dutch courage?’

‘What do you think?’

She quickly placed the folded white napkin in front of her on the lap and grabbed the menu. She gripped it to stop her hands shaking.

‘It’s really nice to meet you, Grace,’ smiled Greg. ‘Been to this restaurant before?’

‘No,’ said Grace. ‘Have you?’ This was a very good question. Had he already sat at this restaurant with a long succession of women? Was he
known
here? Were all the staff, at this very moment, sniggering at her – the latest on the ever-looping conveyor belt of the sexually desperate? Then she remembered how bad the food was rumoured to be, via TripAdvisor. He hadn’t been here before.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Would you like me to order for you?’

‘Order for me? Is that all part of the service?’ She finally dared to look up at him.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps it should be.’ He looked at her with those blue eyes. The triangle of skin she could see under his shirt collar looked warm and tanned. ‘You’re nervous,’ he told her. His voice really was deep. Not gravelly, just low. Great for pillow talk, she expected.

‘Very,’ said Grace, with a small smile.

‘Me too,’ he said.

‘You?’

‘Yes.’

‘How come? Aren’t you an old pro at this? If you excuse the pun.’

‘No,’ said Greg. He leant towards her and lowered his voice. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you,’ he said, ‘but you’ve got the kind of face that makes me want to. I’ve got a small confession to make.’

‘Oh?’

‘You’re my first,’ he said.

‘Your
first
?’

‘My first client.’ He laughed a little. ‘Jeez, it sounds weird saying that!’

‘Oh!’ said Grace. ‘Your first client. Really? But your photo must have been up on that website for at least a month.’

‘Yes, it has. I’ve been biding my time. Waiting for the right person to be my first client.’

‘Oh.’ She was the right person for him. Interesting. Strangely it made her feel even more nervous. ‘So you’re
new
. What did you do before?’

‘I’m in between jobs. I want to start my own marketing business and I need to raise some capital. A mate of mine suggested I do escorting. A female mate, actually. She suggested I had all the right credentials.’

‘I bet she did,’ said Grace, raising her eyebrows. ‘So you’re planning to fund a whole new business from women like me. Investment angels.’

‘Yes,’ said Greg. ‘I suppose you could put it like that.’ He was unflinching in his gaze. His very blue eyes looked into hers without blinking.

The gazelle returned to the table.

‘Can I get you guys some drinks?’

He hadn’t been here before and Grace was his first client. They could just be your average couple having a meal out. A real couple. For the first time, Grace smiled at the gazelle and didn’t mind her long-limbed perfection quite so much.

Greg ordered drinks, and rattled off their food order, too, in an accomplished manner. He said things in what she assumed was the correct Italian. With the accent and everything. She was sure he had even pronounced
focaccia
properly.

‘How about you?’ he asked, after the gazelle had glided off. ‘What do you do?’

‘I work in a hat boutique.’

‘Oh, interesting. Married, kids?’

‘Well, if I was married I’d hardly be here.’

‘You’d be surprised.’

‘Oh. My husband and I have separated. I have a son. I’m a single mum.’ Ugh, it sounded awful saying that. She hadn’t said it before. The ‘mum’ bit she didn’t mind, the ‘single’ bit she hated with a passion.

‘Well, good for you,’ said Greg, disappointing her for the first time. What did he know? It wasn’t good for her at all.

They sat in silence for a few moments. The gazelle returned with their drinks and Grace fell on her glass of wine like a desert wanderer arriving at an oasis. She took an almighty glug. That was better.

‘So,’ she said. ‘I’m the first person who’s hired you. The first person you’ve gone out for dinner with.’

‘Yes.’ Greg smiled. ‘First victim.’

He hadn’t slept with anyone for money yet, she thought. There was yet to be anything seedy about him. He wasn’t a seasoned pro who’d already shagged thousands of sad, lonely old spinsters, dripping with gold jewellery and lost baggage and bitterness.

The wine was warming her stomach. She took another gulp. ‘Do I get a discount, as you’re obviously still in training?’

‘Ha. I hope it doesn’t show.’

‘It doesn’t. I wouldn’t have guessed, on first seeing you.’

‘But you like the fact I’m an amateur.’

‘I guess I do. It makes you seem less smarmy.’

‘I hope never to be smarmy.’ Greg laughed.

Grace laughed too and drank some more of her wine. It was going down very well. She began to relax a bit. This man didn’t have loads of well-worn clients he was wearily doing the rounds of. He wasn’t putting his bow tie in his trouser pocket night after night as he gambolled down the plush steps of one glamorous apartment building after another. He was as new to this as she was.

‘But you are
going
to have sex with people?’ she blurted out, a little too loudly. She looked around, but nobody seemed to have heard her. There weren’t many people there.

‘Probably, later on,’ said Greg. ‘I will earn more money that way.’ She admired his honesty. He was someone who knew what he wanted and how he was going to get it.

‘Are you going to train for that?’ she asked glibly, looking sideways out into the restaurant, vaguely focusing on the dessert trolley, which was rumbling past their table. Ooh, tiramisu. She might have that later. She couldn’t look at him.

‘I don’t need to,’ said Greg. She looked back at him. She couldn’t help it. ‘I know what I’m doing.’

Grace was no stranger to
frisson
. She’d had lots of
beginnings
to lots of relationships. Loads. But she’d never experienced frisson like this, not even with James. Frisson sizzled up and down her body, an electric cattle prod playing over her skin in a figure of eight. Frisson took her by the hand and led her down the garden path with a rocket in her knickers.
I know what I’m doing
. Good Lord. He was incredibly sexy. He was looking her right in the eye. Please don’t wink, or anything corny, she thought, or you’ll spoil this very enjoyable moment. Please don’t ham it up.

He didn’t wink. He didn’t ham it up. He just sat with his eyes not moving from hers. She would like to say she was torn between being repulsed and turned on, but that wouldn’t be right – she was just turned on. Quick. She had to divert her mind. Where had the bloody dessert trolley gone?

She grabbed the passing gazelle and tapped her somewhere near the knee.

‘Could we have another bottle of white, please?’

‘Sure.’

‘You drink fast, for such a small person,’ commented Greg, after the gazelle had gone.

‘I know, sorry. Will it be women only that you sleep with?’

‘Women only. I like women.’ She wished she hadn’t asked. He was looking at her intently, again, as though he found her the most attractive woman in the world. Pull yourself together, she willed. Divert your energy from the front of your pants! He’s an
escort
! He may have practised that look in the mirror. And it wasn’t going to matter
who
he looked at. Any age, any size, any kind of woman. As long as they had money in their purse.

She stared into the bottom of her empty glass as though it held the meaning of life. She briefly thought about getting up and leaving. Then, she realised, this man couldn’t hurt her, he didn’t have the
power
to hurt her. It was all fine.

The gazelle brought their starters and another bottle of wine. It was
more
fine the more wine she sipped. This man was good-looking and good company. He was exactly as advertised. He’d be perfect to take to Nana’s do. And this was
nice
. It was nice to be sitting opposite a nice man in a nice restaurant, not side by side on a silent sofa, with a man’s smelly feet up on a footstool, or, more usually, alone on that sofa while that man was out shagging another woman.
No, stop that.
She didn’t want to think about James.

They finished their starters and had their mains. Their conversation was easy and flowed as freely as the wine. Greg was charming, attentive and those blue eyes had her captivated. He was spectacularly good-looking. She knew the gazelle fancied him too; as she cleared their plates away she smiled at him for just a little too long.

‘Dessert?’ he asked.

‘Why not?’ In for a penny, in for a pound, she thought.

They ordered one tiramisu, to share. She hoped he wasn’t going to spoon food into her mouth, like they did in the movies. Wouldn’t that be a cheesy, escort-y thing to do? Perhaps he was saving that for further down the line. Perhaps there was a whole list of things he was yet to employ. A wink with every smile, a stroke with a finger down a speckled forearm, an exaggerated look up and down a body as a client arrived. She took a slug of wine and imagined more. A hand placed on a shoulder, another reached across a table to take a variety of women’s being held out eagerly – from smooth and pale, to wrinkled and over-tanned, or those women’s hands that were chunky, like men’s, with loads of rings. Would he help women into their coats at the end of the night like they did at the hairdressers? Gyrate opposite them in nightclubs, in a horrible Michael-Douglas-in-
Basic-Instinct
V-neck jumper? Would he have a
repertoire
?

At the moment he was still fresh and green. She liked the fact he wasn’t yet a practised, jaded, cynical
escort man
. And thank goodness she had suggested this awful restaurant and it wasn’t his choice – she didn’t like to think of him in weeks and months to come, sitting opposite a succession of random women at the same table. She was his
first
.

She pulled herself up short. She shouldn’t be jealous of future women who would be paying for his company. Get a grip, girl, she thought. This is
not
a first date!

She’d drunk too much; she knew it. As they dug into the tiramisu with a spoon each (thankfully), she started telling Greg all about James and what he had done, despite promising herself earlier that she wouldn’t. How he’d cheated, how unreliable he was being. Greg was sympathetic, angry on her behalf and seemed to champion her in her strength to go it alone. He even expressed amazement at the age of her son, when she looked so young. She didn’t bother telling him about Frankie and Imogen and the whole single for a year vow, since she was breaking it so spectacularly.

He was so nice. So understanding. She didn’t know whether all this
niceness
was the act of a fledgling escort, but she hoped not. She hoped he was just a genuinely nice man. Grace began to imagine again this was a real date, but at the same time revelled in her bravery that it wasn’t. She was out for dinner with a male escort. It thrilled her that no one, not a soul, knew about this. It thrilled her that James would be so
surprised
if he knew about it. Even more thrilling was the thought of turning up with this man, at James’s family do, and giving James the shock of his life.

‘Some men are just programmed to be bastards,’ Greg was saying. Her vision and hearing were slightly blurred now. ‘But not all. You may feel like that at the moment, but you won’t always. There’ll be someone for you, at some point in the future. When you’re ready for him.’

‘No,’ said Grace, putting down her spoon. But she said ‘no’ quite happily, easily almost. ‘There won’t be a
someone
. No more men for me, unless I’m paying for one! Ha ha!’

She was a little more than drunk, now. She looked at his lovely face. Well, she hadn’t stopped looking at it. She wished he would stand up again so she could get a better look at all of him. She wanted to see his legs, his stomach, his bum. Perhaps she should spend a little bit more of Gran’s money. Perhaps she should sleep with him. Be his
first.

‘So what’s the drill now?’ she asked, slurring slightly, and fiddling with the salt and pepper. ‘Do I have to tell you what additional services I require? Have you got a menu?’ She picked up the wine list and started thumbing through it as though scrutinising his price list. ‘Ooh, is it like
Pretty Woman
? Do you charge, like, £2000 or something, to stay overnight with someone? Can I chain you to a bed for a week, for a million pounds?’

‘No one’s chaining me to a bed,’ said Greg, shaking his head with a smile. ‘As for an over-nighter – I’m not sure if that’s a technical term, by the way – I don’t know yet. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.’