Perfect Match: a laugh-out-loud romantic comedy you won’t want to miss!. Zoe May

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СКАЧАТЬ stations,’ he says. ‘People tend to think that they’re all roughly the same distance apart but they’re actually not. It’ll only take us a couple of minutes to walk to Leicester Square, but that’s because the tube stations around here are unusually close together. You’d be surprised to know that the distance between Leicester Square and Covent Garden is actually only a third of the distance between Victoria and Green Park.’

      ‘Mm-hmm…’ I quicken my pace. Maybe if we walk faster, we can get to Leicester Square in one minute, rather than two. Chris carries on talking about tube station geography as I pound the street with my heels. It feels like an hour has passed by the time we finally get there.

      ‘Thanks for a lovely evening,’ I mumble half-heartedly. It’s just one of those things you say, isn’t it?

      ‘I’ll text you,’ I add, edging towards the escalator.

      Chris looks at me with an expression I can’t quite read. Surprise? Cynicism? Dread? Perhaps the date was as bad for him as it was for me.

      ‘Okay, take care,’ he replies.

      He smiles politely and I smile politely and we politely go our separate ways.

Chapter Two

      ‘He can’t really have been that boring?’ Kate tops up my glass of wine.

      ‘Trust me, he was.’ I take a glug.

      ‘But he seemed so sweet, with all those photos of him and his Labrador. So cute,’ she says wistfully.

      ‘Yeah, well, apparently a love of dogs doesn’t necessarily guarantee a good date,’ I sigh, thinking back to all those misleading pictures of Chris smiling with his family’s pet.

      ‘Oh well, you’ll find someone soon.’ Kate sounds reassuring as she opens a message on her phone, but even she must be beginning to doubt it. As my flatmate and best friend, Kate’s witnessed all my dating disasters: the Hugh Grant lookalike who turned out to be an ex-con; the creepy chartered surveyor who kept referring to himself in the third person (‘Isaac would like to take Sophia out.’ For the record, Sophia said no); the gorgeous photographer who seemed like a great catch until he requested foot photographs to masturbate over; the geeky journalist who drank too much fizzy water and then burped in my mouth as he kissed me goodnight… The list goes on and that’s just my dates, don’t even get me started on my exes.

      First there was my university boyfriend, Sam. Six foot two with curly blond hair and an IQ of 130, what more could I want, right? Well, a healthy disregard for vermin would have been nice. Sam ended up getting so wrapped up in his studies that he stopped cleaning his flat; carpets went unhoovered, bins went unemptied, pizza boxes piled up and eventually a couple of rats moved in. Not even mice – I can just about handle mice – I’m talking rats, big dirty rats! I might have been able to forgive him if he’d got rid of them, but when he simply named them Itchy and Scratchy and carried on studying, enough was enough.

      So, I thought I’d go for the polar opposite after that (as you do when you rebound) and what could be more different to a vermin-loving, geeky Aberystwyth student, than a bisexual Italian hairdresser who’d probably need one-to-one tuition to get his head around Spot the Dog? Paulo was so ditzy that my friends dubbed him ‘the himbo’ – the male bimbo. But still, he was great fun. Even though it did get quite annoying how he’d always bang on about how ‘bellissima’ I’d look with shorter hair. He simply refused to accept that I wanted to keep it long so one night, he took it upon himself to gently chop it off in my sleep. And if that wasn’t bad enough, a few weeks later he left me for a man. A man with short hair.

      ‘I reckon it’s a matter of perseverance. You just need to keep looking.’ Kate’s voice snaps me back to the present. I realise I’m twirling a lock of my hair around my finger, as if to console myself that it’s there, all grown back. Nice and long. Kate places her phone on the table.

      ‘Just Max saying goodnight,’ she says.

      She takes a sip of her wine and looks at me with a sweet, hopeful smile. Poor Kate. She really wants me to find love. It must be hard when you’ve been with your boyfriend for four and a half years to see your flatmate so romantically destitute. She probably feels the same sense of guilty awkwardness witnessing my love life (or lack thereof) that rich people get when they scurry past homeless people on the streets.

      But it was just so easy for Kate; meeting Max was effortless. We’d only been living in London a few weeks when we went to see the play where Kate first laid eyes on him. It was a production of A Streetcar Named Desire and Max was playing Stanley Kowalski. He wasn’t a far cry from Marlon Brando himself, with his wife-beater vest and muscles, and Kate was practically drooling the entire show. The second it ended, she hurried over to the stage door and hung about waiting to introduce herself, swapping numbers with him on the pretence that she was an actress and might need tips on getting into the London scene (even though, at that point, she already had a role lined up at the Globe). A couple of weeks later, she and Max were an item and they’ve been smitten with each other ever since.

      ‘Seriously, you just have to keep looking,’ Kate insists.

      I wind my hair up into a bun, wincing at the platitude that I must have heard a million and one times before.

      ‘Do you know what? Maybe it’s just not meant to be,’ I suggest. ‘Maybe I’m meant to be alone. Some people just are, aren’t they? I should probably stop fighting it.’

      ‘Nah, it’s only a bit of bad luck.’ Kate bats the thought away. ‘I’m sure he’s just around the corner. One day, you’ll look back on all this stuff and laugh.’

      ‘You said that six months ago,’ I remind her.

      Kate pulls an awkward expression and plucks at a loose thread on her leggings.

      ‘Well, at least it’s all good material for your novel,’ she chirps.

      ‘Yeah s’pose,’ I grumble. One of the perks of wanting to be a writer is that you can view all your crazy experiences as material, except now I’ve got enough for a trilogy.

      ‘Maybe you’re just looking in the wrong places.’ Kate takes a sip of her wine.

      I roll my eyes.

      ‘Kate, I’ve tried Match.com, eHarmony, PlentyOfFish, Guardian Soulmates, Tinder.’ I rap my fingernails against the table, trying to recall the full list. ‘OkCupid, Bumble, Happn, MySingleFriend, even Single bloody Booklovers. I’ve tried speed-dating, I’ve tried singles nights, I’ve tried—’

      ‘Oh, what about Dream Dates?’ Kate interjects, her eyes lighting up.

      ‘What’s Dream Dates?’

      ‘Saw it advertised today. Massive poster on the tube. It’s a new dating site. It had this really hot guy on the ad,’ Kate gushes.

      ‘Well, he was clearly a model,’ I point out. ‘It’s not like they’re going to use photos of the actual people that use it. The big, fat, hairy, hunchbacked…’

      Kate sighs. ‘Come on, if you take that attitude, you’re never going to find anyone. You should try Dream—’

      ‘Leave it, Kate,’ I cut her off. ‘I can’t СКАЧАТЬ