Thank You, Next

by Sophie Ranald

Genres: Holiday books; Humor & Satire; Women's Fiction; Romance; Contemporary Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

Seriously, why do guys on dating apps think I want a picture of what's in their pants? I could open an art gallery with the collection I've got.
Zoe really doesn't want to die alone and surrounded by cats. But it's not looking good: she's had sex precisely twice in the last year, and her feline friend isn't the kind of male company she wants in bed…
Her top dating disasters include:
1) The guy who kissed her hand, took out a violin and serenaded her in public.
2) The guy who force-fed her oysters (she can confirm that they're not an aphrodisiac).
3) The guy who was so hungover he turned up with his t-shirt on inside out, sweating sambuca.
4) The guy who brought his actual kid on a dinner date.
And don't even get her started on the dick pics, or how on earth you're supposed to know whether a total stranger is an axe murderer or not.
Zoe's ready to give up on the search for love, until her friend has an idea. Robbie lives by his horoscope, and he's sure she's got this dating stuff all wrong. He dares her to work her way through the zodiac until she finds The One.
Usually Zoe would laugh at such a suggestion, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Could love be written in the stars? Or is she destined to end up alone, eating take-out in bed and watching endless re-runs of Friends?
A feel-good, fresh and fabulous listen for anyone who has torn their hair out over their love life, drunk their weight in wine to survive an awful date, or stared at their phone, willing it to ring. Fans of rom-coms by Sophie Kinsella and Lindsey Kelk and TV shows like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Jane the Virgin will absolutely love this laugh-out-loud tale.

Release date: November 30, 2020

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 241

Sample

It was a Friday afternoon and I was sitting in a South London pub, sipping my rioja, waiting for a date with a spy.

As you do.

Of course, I couldn’t be sure he was a spy. It’s not like his Tinder profile said, ‘My name’s Smith. Brett Smith. Licensed to ghost.’ But all the evidence pointed to it. Brett’s profile was bland to the point of invisibility: a photo of him in a nondescript suit outside a pillared, official-looking building; another of him in a white T-shirt and camo pants against a background that looked like desert, so could have been Afghanistan or somewhere; a third showing him lying in bed, leaning back on a thin pillow, a blank wall behind him that could have been anywhere.

But Brett himself wasn’t bland at all. He was downright hot, in fact, with a chiselled jaw, bright blue eyes and a cleft in his chin. I could just imagine him in a dinner jacket, ordering a dry martini with a beautiful woman in a sparkly dress on his arm. If I did the mental equivalent of squinting, I could even make that woman be me.

When I’d asked him what he did for work, he’d just said he worked for the government, but it was ‘all a bit hush-hush’, and he was abroad right now, so our date would have to wait until he was, as he put it, ‘back in circulation’. When I asked where he was, he’d joked, ‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.’

And even after that, when I’d had a text – from a different number this time; he’d explained that his phone had been stolen, but I assumed he’d been using a burner – to say he was in London now and we could make a time to meet up, it had proved surprisingly tricky to arrange. He’d suggested breakfast, but since a key part of my own job was cooking breakfast in the pub where I worked, that had been almost impossible. The same went for lunch. And so here I was, at five in the afternoon, waiting for Brett to turn up at a bar in Vauxhall that was right in the shadow of the MI6 headquarters.

If he was trying not to let on that he was an intelligence agent, I thought, he hadn’t done a particularly good job of it. But what did I know?

Anyway, a date was a date and I hadn’t been on one for a while, so I’d made sure I had my A game on.

My mate Dani had persuaded me to go and have my eyelashes tinted and lifted, which she’d assured me was a low-maintenance option, perfect for someone like me who could rarely be arsed with make-up, but which I thought made me look permanently surprised.

I’d bought a new, puff-sleeved black top for the occasion – well, it was off eBay, and I’d got all caught up in a bidding war with another buyer and paid well over the odds for what was only Topshop, after all, even if it was organic cotton. But it was new to me, and that counted, right?

I’d been to the salon down the road from the pub where I worked and had my nails done. I’d had an argument with the manicurist when she’d wanted to put acrylic extensions on and I’d had to explain that I’d only chop one off by accident and it would end up in someone’s bean burger, so we’d settled on a sparkly gel polish instead.

Sipping my drink, I wondered what it would be like to be in a relationship with a spy. He’d be away for long periods, presumably, off doing mysterious things in dangerous places. When our friends asked about his work, he’d say something vague about it being admin, and if he ever got transferred to Moscow or Washington or wherever we’d have to pretend it was because he was exceptionally good at negotiating photocopier contracts.

Maybe his boss – who I imagined being like Judi Dench in the Bond films – would take a shine to me. Initially, she’d say, ‘Of course Zoë is wonderful, so supportive and discreet,’ but then she’d spot my potential and I’d train as a secret agent too, and have actual stiletto blades concealed in my stiletto heels and a tiny camera hidden in my lipstick. I’d have to flirt with men high up in foreign governments and charm information out of them, but it would never go further than that, because I was so madly in love with Brett.

Steady on, Zoë, I told myself, taking another gulp of wine. You haven’t even met the guy yet. And what would happen to Frazzle if you were off in Moscow gathering intelligence?

This was true, of course. I was just waiting for a Tinder date. I was just an ordinary twenty-seven-year-old, chronically single, with a job and a cat and an appearance that was, given I was smallish and slimmish with lots of curly red hair, like a woman in a pre-Raphaelite painting on a good day and one of those troll dolls on a bad one.

I’d been dating, on and off, for the past six months, and Mr Right hadn’t turned up. There was no reason to believe that Brett would be him, but I’d realised by now that I began every date with the same heady sense of expectation, the same wild imaginings of how my life might change if this one turned out to be The One.

And, if I was brutally honest with myself, this date had a certain feeling of being the last roll of the dice. It wasn’t like I hadn’t tried. I’d tweaked my online profile over and over again. I’d composed witty message after witty message. I’d put different filters on my pictures. I’d sat in bars like this one, expectant and hopeful, only to be disappointed or let down or ghosted.

And speaking of which, where exactly was Brett?

I looked at my phone, shifting uncomfortably on the bar stool, which had a rail near the bottom that my legs weren’t quite long enough to reach. The two women at the table next to mine glanced at me, glanced away again, and whispered to each other.

Yes, I am waiting for a date, I wanted to snap at them. No, he hasn’t turned up yet. Anything else you’d like to know? But I didn’t say anything, because there was a text from Brett on my phone saying he was running ten minutes late – actually, what it said was, Runign 01 mins l8 soz, but my translation skills were just about adequate for that. Maybe spies weren’t allowed to use predictive text, or he was used to sending WhatsApps in code.

We’d been due to meet at five, and it was eleven minutes past. Right on cue, I saw him through the window, hurrying down the street. There was the chiselled jaw, the smudge of designer stubble, the muscular shoulders under his grey T-shirt. I felt a little fizz of excitement.

He wasn’t older than he’d said, or shorter, which I knew by online dating standards meant I’d pretty much hit the jackpot already. But there was something strange about the way he approached the bar. He didn’t walk in a straight line. He did a kind of wide parabola from one side of the pavement to the other, and back again. Maybe it’s a spy thing, I thought, confused. Maybe it’s how you check you’re not being followed.

He reached the door, put his hand on the handle and pulled, even though the sign said push. Then he peered at it, confused, pulled again and finally pushed, so hard that he almost fell into the room. The women at the next table giggled. Clutching the door handle to steady himself, Brett looked around the bar. I raised a hand in a half-wave.

‘Zoë!’ his voice rang out above the hum of conversation, not the James Bond-ish voice I’d been expecting, but a normal London accent, or maybe Essex. ‘There she is!’

He let go of the door and hurried towards my table, knocking into a couple of others on the way and sending a bar stool flying and a small dog darting for cover under its owner’s legs.

I watched, confused at first and then horrified. Oh no, my mind screamed. Oh nononono. But I was here, he was just a couple of feet away, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to escape. I was going to have to get through a date with a man who was clearly completely steaming.

‘Zoë!’ He pulled me into a hug so strong and unexpected it snatched me off my stool, and my legs flailed helplessly in mid-air for a second before I slipped through his arms to the floor. His T-shirt was wet with sweat that, judging by the smell, was ninety per cent tequila. His breath smelled of fags and I could see a half-smoked one tucked behind his ear. Blurry blueish-grey tattoos covered both his arms.

‘Hi,’ I said, my voice coming out in a kind of squeak, because he’d squeezed all the breath out of my lungs.

‘Whatcha drinking?’

I wanted to say, ‘Just a glass of water,’ in the hope that he might follow suit. But my half-finished glass of wine was right there on the table in front of him.

‘Large merlot for the lady,’ he bellowed, making his way unsteadily towards the bar. ‘And mine’s a double tequila shot, salt and lemon, and a Budweiser chaser.’

Except the last bit came out like ‘bugwishershasher’. I watched the bartender hesitate, wondering whether to refuse to serve him, then shrug and pour the drinks. The women at the next-door table glanced at me again, concerned this time rather than amused, and whispered to each other once more.

The floor of the bar was shiny reclaimed parquet, solid as could be, which was a shame because right then I’d have given absolutely anything for it to collapse and swallow me without trace, forever.

But the floor was clearly not going to oblige. I was stuck there for the duration of this date with this man who, I was beginning to suspect, was as far as possible from being a spy. Unless he made a habit of going on stakeouts absolutely shitfaced, with the smell of tequila betraying his whereabouts for miles around.

Brett returned from the bar, his two shots clutched in one hand, his bottle of beer tucked under his arm, and my glass of wine held unsteadily in the other hand. He put it down on the table and the glass rocked, red wine slopping over its rim, then fortunately settled.

‘Cheers.’ Brett downed a shot, chomped a lemon slice, then poured the second shot down his neck. ‘Bit pissed. It’s been a long time.’

I smiled politely and took a sip of wine. ‘What’s been a long time?’

‘Since I had a drink. Or went out with a bird. Been away, see, like I said.’

Maybe I was being unfair, I thought. Maybe it was understandable that a man who’d been abroad, doing a high-pressure job, would want to let his hair down a bit when he got back? Maybe the lairy Essex-boy act was put on to throw people off the scent? But the scent of booze and fags was for real, there was no doubt about that.

‘Well, uh, cheers,’ I said, taking another gulp of wine. There was no way I was going to be able to drink this date successful, but at least once I’d finished this glass I could go. ‘Was it far, where you were based?’

‘Not so far. Was a good long stretch though. Two years I’ve been away.’

He picked up his beer and took a long swallow. Shit. He was almost halfway down it. I was going to have to speed up my wine drinking so he didn’t get the chance to get another round in. Or, worse still, so politeness wouldn’t require me to offer him another drink.

But I needn’t have worried.

‘Gotta go see a man about a dog,’ he said. ‘’Scuse me.’

He got up and made his way circuitously to the ladies’ loo, then fortunately realised his mistake, turned around and stared blearily for a second before spotting the sign for the men’s and heading off in more or less the right direction.

I watched him, wondering if I should just cut my losses and do a runner. But before I could get up, one of the women at the next-door table piped up.

‘Excuse me?’

I looked round and managed what I hoped was a bright smile. ‘Yes?’

‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but it doesn’t look like your… friend… is in a very good way.’

I felt a massive blush creeping up my neck and flooding my face. Not only was I on a date with a guy who was so bladdered he could barely string a sentence together, but people had noticed. Well, duh, obviously they had. Half the pub was looking in my direction with varying degrees of amusement, worry and disgust.

‘He’s not, is he?’ I muttered. ‘Oh my God, it’s a Tinder date and it’s just awful, isn’t it?’

‘You could ask for Angela,’ her friend suggested helpfully.

‘I could what?’

‘It’s a thing. If you go to the bar and ask to see Angela, they’ll make sure you get out of here safely.’

‘Really?’ I got to my feet and was about to approach the bar, when Brett reappeared from the loo, the front of his T-shirt wet with what I hoped was water now, as well as sweat.

‘That’s better,’ he slurred. ‘Now, another round.’

He turned and strode purposefully in the direction I’d been about to go myself, but something went wrong. His brain had said, ‘Go to the bar,’ but his feet hadn’t got the memo. One of them went one way and one went the other and his ankles got twisted around each other in a kind of French plait. For a few seconds he teetered, just like my glass of red wine had, but he didn’t manage to right himself. Arms flailing, he faceplanted spectacularly, right next to the table with the little dog, which recoiled in horror.

‘Just a suggestion,’ said the woman next to me, who I was starting to regard as my new best friend, ‘but now might be a good time to leg it.’

‘If you’re sure you’re okay to get home,’ added her friend.

‘I am,’ I assured her. ‘I’m grand. Never been better.’

I gathered up my bag and what was left of my dignity, gave them a quick wave and headed for the door. But as I was passing Brett’s prone form, I noticed something. Right there on his right ankle, between the bottom of his jeans and his grubby white sock, was a chunky plastic bit of kit on a webbing strap. I’d never seen one before, but I knew straight away what it was.

An electronic monitoring device. An ankle tag. Brett hadn’t been working abroad at all – he’d been in prison.

My dating life hadn’t exactly been a resounding success up until that point, but now I knew I’d hit rock bottom.

Today marks a turning point for you, Aquarius. Facing the future and finding the happiness you desire and deserve means letting go of the past, however painful that may appear.

I was pretty much used to waking up with a feeling of leaden sadness in my heart, and a feeling of hot, itchy softness on my head. The first was my longing for my ex-boyfriend Joe, the sense of loss and regret that had stubbornly refused to shift even though we’d split up years ago, after an intense three-month relationship at university. After many years apart, Joe had come back into my life – or I’d come back into his – and all those feelings had been painfully reignited, even though I’d realised there was no chance of him splitting up with his girlfriend, Alice.

The second was Frazzle, my fluffy ginger cat, who liked to sleep on my pillow so he could keep an eye on the birds in the tree outside.

It was Frazzle who woke me, one Monday morning in late March. There were blackbirds building a nest outside, and every cheep from the birds was met by an answering chirrup of longing from my cat.

‘What are you on about, you big daftie?’ I mumbled, half asleep, trying to turn over so I could maybe slip back into sleep for a precious half-hour.

But turning over was impossible, because Frazzle was lying on my hair.

‘Ouch!’ Fully awake now, I pushed the cat gently aside and sat up. Immediately, the birds forgotten, he jumped to the floor and stared at me, meowing plaintively for his breakfast.

‘Okay, okay. Give me a second to at least wake up. Jeez, it’s like having a furry dictator ruling my life.’

I slid my feet into my slippers and stood up. It was a gorgeous day – already, although it wasn’t yet seven, the sunlight streaming through the window felt warm on my bare skin. The winter, which had felt like it would never end, seemed to be loosening its grip at last, being pushed reluctantly away by the promise of spring.

And something else was different too. Something inside me.

A couple of years back, I’d gone through a phase of doing yoga classes. I think I imagined that it would somehow transform me into this serene, spiritual person who cherished the gifts of the universe and spread good energy around the place and also, crucially, could touch her toes without gasping and grunting like my grandad after he’d been digging his allotment. I didn’t stick with it for very long – the incense the teacher burned before classes made me sneeze uncontrollably and I was always worried I’d fart when I was doing a shoulder stand – but one thing had made an impression on me. At the beginning of every class, the teacher would ask us to do a kind of audit of our bodies: assessing ourselves from our feet up to our ankles, knees, hips and so on, identifying where we were tense or sore, learning to recognise what was going on in every bit of ourselves.

I did that now, trying to figure out what it was about me, this morning, that felt different from the morning before.

The bruises I had on my shins from my workout in the gym two days ago were still there. So was the scab on my knee where I’d cut myself shaving, and the blue plaster on my thumb where I’d missed the target while chopping onions. A tingling feeling on my top lip told me the cold sore that had been threatening to erupt was still hanging around, waiting for its moment to pounce and leave me with a gross blemish that would last for days.

All normal, all just the same as yesterday.

But what was missing was deeper inside me than any of those things. The sense of loss – grief, almost – that had haunted me since I’d split up with Joe had faded. Just like that. It was like when you have a horrible hangover and eat a huge fried breakfast, drink loads of tea and take two paracetamol, then go back to bed and wake up feeling amazing. Or when you’ve had a miserable cold – the kind that makes your eyes look red and piggy and your nose stream for days – and you wake up one morning and realise you’re better.

Not completely better though. If it was a hangover I was recovering from, I’d be at the ‘Okay, I’m never drinking again but at least I’m not dead’ stage. If it was a cold, the skin round my nose would still be red and raw and I’d have an annoying, lingering cough. But I felt different from how I had when I’d woken up the day before, and the day before that, and… you get the idea.

All of me was still the same, except I didn’t have a broken heart any more.

I sprang to my feet and almost went flying as Frazzle wound himself around my ankles. While I cleaned my teeth and washed my face, he stayed constantly half a step in front of me, trying his very best to trip me up.

‘If I fall and break my neck, then who’s going to give you breakfast?’ I scolded him. ‘You haven’t thought this through, have you?’

Frazzle looked at me, his amber eyes quite clearly saying that he didn’t give a shit what I thought.

Once he was fed and I was dressed, I sat back down on my bed, trying to make sense of this new feeling of lightness, freedom, optimism. What was going on? What had happened to me? Was it the advent of spring, which was meant to bring new hope but had never done anything of the kind for me before? Had my heart finally caught up with what my head had been telling me for months: that Joe and Alice were right for each other in a way that Joe and I had never truly been? And, more importantly, without my unrequited love for Joe, what was I going to think about?

Give your head a wobble, Zoë, I told myself. You can’t go around being broken-hearted because your heart isn’t broken any more. That would be off-the-scale ridiculous.

On the bedside table, my phone buzzed furiously with an incoming notification. I glanced at it, the wild hope I would have felt in the past that it might, somehow, impossibly, be a message from Joe strangely absent. It wasn’t, of course. It never had been and now I found myself able to accept quite calmly that it never would be. It was just the astrology app I’d installed ages ago, which sent me a daily message. Some of them were inspirational, some all but meaningless, and some of them downright brutal.

If the app were a friend, I sometimes thought, I’d have unfriended it long ago. Not that I exactly had loads of friends to choose from, since I’d spent most of my twenties travelling – great for life experience, not so good for forging enduring bonds with other people.

You know that emptiness you feel inside? You going to fill it with something, or let it suck you in?

‘Yeah, thanks for that,’ I told my phone, thinking that, right in that moment, the emptiness I felt was the same kind that had made Frazzle clamour for his breakfast. But then I couldn’t help thinking, Hold on, maybe it has a point. Maybe the Joe-shaped hole in my heart could be filled by someone else.

Maybe it was time for me to stop hankering after someone I couldn’t have and find someone I could.

When I got to work, Robbie was already there. I couldn’t even use an arduous journey as an excuse, because my daily commute consisted of stepping out of my tiny flat, locking the door behind me, walking down a flight of slightly rickety wooden stairs, pushing open a door, and voila, there I was in the Ginger Cat, the pub where I worked as a chef. But Robbie had beat me to it, as he usually did, and was already sliding two loaf tins into the oven.

It was his enthusiasm that had led me to hire him, two months before – that, and the fact that he was cheap, cheerful and touchingly grateful to be offered his first proper job in a professional kitchen. Not that the tiny cubbyhole where the two of us worked practically elbow to elbow was the most professional of workplaces. But I loved it, and so did Robbie, who worked all the hours I’d let him, with boundless energy and the ability to function on about two hours’ sleep a night.

‘Morning.’ I flicked the switch on the coffee machine and heard it roar encouragingly to life. ‘What have you got there?’

‘Date and banana bread. It’s gluten free, dairy free and refined-sugar free. The punters are going to love it. And so am I – was out until four and I’m hanging so badly, Zoë. Any chance of a coffee?’

‘Sure. Double espresso with three sugars?’

‘You’re a lifesaver.’

‘So what were you up to last night?’

Robbie leaned a snake-like hip against the stainless-steel worktop and ran his hand through his hair. It was dyed bright blue at the front and shaved into a careful fade at the sides, showing off his multiple piercings and ear tunnel.

‘Ah, nothing much.’ He ducked his head.

‘Go on! You know I need to live vicariously through you, since I have no social life of my own.’

‘I finished my shift here, and then I went home.’

I gave him my best hard stare. ‘And then…? Don’t tell me you were up watching box sets until four in the morning and getting shitfaced on your own.’

‘Oh, okay. So I had a new Grindr date over.’

‘What, someone you met on a dating app, over to your place? Just like that?’

‘Sure. My flatmates were asleep, they didn’t notice. And if they had, they’d have given zero fucks.’

‘So who was he? Someone you’ve met before?’

‘Never. And never will again. He was useless in the sack.’

Robbie peered into the oven. The kitchen was beginning to fill with the mouthwatering smell of cinnamon. Over the weeks I’d known him, I should have got used to Robbie’s casual attitude to relationships, but it still had the power to surprise me. The idea of inviting some stranger from the internet over to your home, having sex with them, and then hustling them out of the door while they were still putting their socks on shocked and impressed me in equal measure.

Also, although there were only about five or so years between us, Robbie had the ability to make me feel about a hundred years old.

‘I thought you Generation Z-ers were meant to be going through a sex recession,’ I said.

‘Yeah, well.’ Robbie flicked his hair out of his eyes. ‘You know the Keynesian theory of fiscal stimulus, right?’

‘Course I don’t. How do you know that stuff anyway?’

‘Did a GCSE in economics, didn’t I? I’m not just a pretty face.’

‘Okay, so hit me with it.’

‘Basically, I’m spending my way out of the sex recession. The way I see it, the more I shag, the more other people are shagging too. So in theory there should be more to go round. Supply and demand, right?’

‘Maybe. But none of it’s coming my way, that’s for sure.’

. . .