Or so I’d thought. I felt a bit guilty about how distracted I’d been for the first half of my walk with Isaac, forgetting my own coffee order and accidentally ordering one without sugar, and then walking off before we’d even paid for our doughnuts. My conversation with Maeve had completely thrown me off. I’d almost missed the stop on the Northern line on the way over here.
‘So’ – I took a swig of my coffee and winced at the bitterness – ‘tell me about the kids you teach. I have no idea how you have the patience.’
As soon as I mentioned his job, Isaac beamed. ‘They’re not that bad. We’ve all been 14, haven’t we?’
I winced, harking back to pre-puberty Penny. ‘Braces and frizzy hair. The worst.’
‘Classic. Mine was acne and being the shortest in my form. Devastating. Being 14, and 15, and 16, is the worst thing in the world. You don’t want to stick out too much, terrified of saying the wrong thing. Unless you’re the kid acting out for attention, which is a crisis in itself. It’s the most confusing time, being a teenager, so I think they can be forgiven if sometimes they struggle to annotate the first line of the periodic table. Is it really the end of the world if they didn’t get the chance to do their homework? Probably not. I’d rather win them over with genuine joy than threaten them with detention. You should have seen their faces last week when we tried electrolysis.’
I wracked my brains to remember anything at all from my own Chemistry GCSE. I came up blank, and my expression must have said it all.
‘I’m not expecting you to know what electrolysis is.’ He nudged me. ‘But seeing their faces light up when they produced something out of nothing, that’s the magic. It’s why I wanted to teach. I remember my high school chemistry teacher because he made us want to learn how things worked. I’d like them to remember me for the same reason.’
Why was hearing someone talk about the things that they were passionate about so sexy? Isaac’s cheeks were flushed, so happy and willing to talk about his students and the progress they were making. It was a rare thing in adulthood to find people who were so excited about their work. Ambition was one of my non-negotiables.
‘I really like how much you like your job.’
He grinned. ‘I really like how much you like that I like my job.’
I scrunched my paper bag in my hand, popping it into a bin as we passed. When I turned back to walk with him, he’d come to a stop, a small smile on his face. We were halfway down the Southbank, the Thames glittering in the April sun. It was a perfect location for a first kiss and I was surprised to find that I actually wanted it to happen.
‘I’m really glad I met you, Penny,’ he whispered in my ear, closing the space between us before he finally pressed his lips against mine.
I kissed him back.
12
Isaac: So, do I get a chance at date three?
Me: Mm maybe, I’ll think about it if you make it worth my while …
I typed out a wink emoji and then thought better of it. There was flirty and then there was thirsty, and you should never risk giving a man that kind of power over you. I’d felt unexpectedly hopeful after date number two, and I was still acclimatising. My WhatsApp immediately sent me a notification. Maybe I wasn’t the thirsty one.
Rory: Look at this thread. Made me think of the debriefs. Can almost taste the chocolate chips and you shouting at me for getting crumbs on your duvet.
I followed the link to a Twitter thread about a really bad first date, where a woman had been told she looked a little too much like his sister. I snorted. People were ridiculous.
‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t Little Miss Smitten. I don’t think I’ve seen you smile at your phone like that since you got a fully stamped Nero card.’ Joe came out of his front door, closing it behind him. His hair was damp and he was wearing a tracksuit, an overnight bag of clean scrubs thrown over his shoulder. Today was his final night shift, and he looked exhausted.
I shoved my phone in my pocket, choosing to let him believe he was right, and that Isaac’s texts had been what I was smirking at. Why ruin Mr Know-It-All’s day? ‘I’m just a girl, begging her big brother to shut up.’ I knocked my shoulder against his, noting his eye bags and feeling a rare wave of affection.
‘Luckily for you, I might. Isla warned me not to tease you about it, said you’re like a rabbit in the headlights and must not be startled.’
I glanced up to the street-facing window in the living room of their second-floor flat. Sure enough, she had her face up against the glass, waving when we made eye contact. She had green goop all over her face, which I could only hope was a face mask.
‘How’s the wedding planning going?’
Joe raised an eyebrow as we started walking. ‘Excellent deflection there. But yes, who knew wedding planning would be more stressful than working in A & E? Give me appendicitis and sutures over seating arrangements any day.’ He exhaled. ‘Who knew so many people wanted to rent a photobooth on the same day? I spent an hour and a half on the phone this morning only to be told we couldn’t have it. Sorry. Rant over.’
I waved him on encouragingly. ‘No no, rant away. You have approximately six minutes until we get to Dad’s. Lay it on me.’
Joe didn’t need telling twice, talking a mile a minute about wedding breakfasts and canapés and several other phrases that I could never have imagined him using. The menu was almost nailed down, and the cake was in hand with Mum. The venue was booked, but it was a blank canvas and everything inside it needed to be hired. It sounded like a logistical nightmare.
‘And trying to cram conversations with Isla about all of these things around my night shifts is an absolute pain in the arse.’
That language was more like him.
‘I very wrongly assumed that Isla would just get on with it.’
I shot him a withering look.
‘I know, I know. Apparently, me choosing table names for the reception is going to smash the patriarchy. I’ve got samples of the bloody ravioli for my 1 a.m. dinner.’
This made sense. One of Isla and Joe’s main love languages was food; right from the off, Isla had identified night-shift packed lunches as the way to support my brother through a career that was worlds away from her own. She made a weekly menu that she stuck to the fridge, and you could pretty much always guarantee that Joe had been sent off to work with lasagne or a burrito or something else that he loved. Today, it was his wedding dinner for breakfast. For Joe, twenty minutes in the break room with his headphones in to scoff his dinner was the glorious marker of a night shift halfway done. He religiously listened to the same radio station he’d been following since we were teenagers, battling it out for the radio in Mum’s car. It used to drive her mad – first, the argument over who got to sit in the front (always Joe), and then the argument about what we listened to for the ten-minute journey to drop us off at Dad’s flat. Life had been easier when we’d both been given portable CD players for Christmas, and I could happily hum along to Girls Aloud’s ‘Sound of the Underground’ from the backseat.
‘Anyway, enough about ravioli. Which is excellent, all rants aside. How is Maeve doing?’ His jaw clenched slightly. Even though he’d considered Adrian a close friend, he’d adopted Maeve as an extra sister a long time ago.
‘She’s getting there.’ I filled him in on the postal delivery of her belongings. ‘Ups and downs.’
‘Wow.’ He let it sink in. ‘Just full of surprises this guy.’
Although he hadn’t vocalised it (at least not to me), I knew Joe had been hurt by the breakup too, after reaching out to Adrian and getting nothing back. It terrified me, the thought of a breakup splintering my group of friends. There had been no question in this case about where the chips would fall, but what if it happened to someone a few years down the line? If it happened to Joe and Isla? We didn’t have a protocol.
‘Her confidence has definitely been knocked. But fear not, I have stepped up.’ I told him about yoga in the park – from which I still had a bruise on my bum cheek. I spared him the details about that.
He shook his head as he pressed Dad’s intercom. ‘Penny Webber. You’ve had a serious personality transplant lately. I would have paid good money to see you trying to stay upright in a tree pose.’ He clocked my expression. ‘What? I’ve been known to do a yoga class. Have you got cake in there?’
Joe gestured to the tote bag I was carrying, which contained a lemon drizzle loaf from Mum. It said a lot about our parents that even though they didn’t live together and rarely spoke, we always arrived at Dad’s flat with some sort of treat.
