The Last Romeo

by Justin Myers

Genres: LGBT Gay; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

James is 34 and fed up. His six-year relationship with Adam has imploded, he hates his job making up celebrity gossip, and his best friend Bella has just announced she's moving to Russia.

Adrift and single in loved-up London, James needs to break out of his lonely, drunken comfort zone. Encouraged by Bella, he throws himself headlong into online dating, blogging each encounter anonymously as the mysterious Romeo.

After meeting a succession of hot/weird/gross men, James has fans and the validation he's always craved. But when his wild night with a closeted Olympian goes viral and sends his Twitter-fame through the roof, James realises maybe, in the search for happy-ever-after, some things are better left un-shared. Seriously, wherefore art thou Romeo....

From Justin Myers, author of sensational blog The Guyliner, this razor-sharp and cringingly candid account of one man's quest for 'The One' is as sad, fearless and funny as dating itself.

Release date: February 1, 2018

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 304

Sample

Hello! Well.

As my last ever headteacher told me, while they held out their hand in anticipation of my spitting chewing gum into it, ‘rules are rules’. They’re important. Call it your set of commandments, a motto, a mission statement, a manifesto, what*ever* – it’s important to know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and where the hell you’re going.

So welcome to One More Romeo, my blog. And I am your Romeo. The name seemed like a good idea at the time and that time is now. It’s called that because I’m looking for another Romeo – I am gay, you see, so I’m afraid there’s no room for Juliet in this tragedy – and I’m hoping there’ll always be one more around the corner until… well, until I need to stop looking altogether. But I’ll come to that.

This is how it works: I’m on a dating site, packed with fantastic single men and also *other* single men. I arrange dates with these men – my Romeos, are you still with me? – and if there’s anything worth saying, I blog about the evening we spend together. Anonymously.

I can feel you clenching now. Not another one. There’s a lot of them about, I know. Dating blogs. I’ve seen them. They’re all great in their own way, of course, but I think there’s room for something a little bit different. Dare I say, something with heart? Someone. Maybe it’s shallow to score men out of 10 for their behaviour on one night out with a stranger but **newsflash** we’re judged and graded every second we walk the earth for much more superficial reasons.

Dating is weird and awkward and uncomfortable and the way we behave when we’re swirling a mangy old slice of lime around a badly made gin and tonic in a (horrible) pub *they* chose tells us a lot about ourselves and the world. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s excruciating, sometimes it’s outrageous and, often, it’s a little dull.

 

So, the rules: 

1.  

I only ever write about a Romeo I’m absolutely sure I’ll never see again. If I started blogging about a guy I liked and was hoping to get into something with, that would be pretty awkward. So, if he gets blogged, I’m afraid that means – for whatever reason – it didn’t work out. I know, I’m sad for me too.

2.  

To spare a few blushes, I always change a few details so the Romeo can’t be identified. Although if he can’t recognise *himself* then, wow, some self-awareness for table 5, please – but the hope is he won’t because that wouldn’t be nice. And I don’t make the dates up. I don’t need to: people really *are* that fucking strange. I’m an unreliable narrator but I’m all you’ve got. I’ll be as truthful as I dare.

3.  

I’m never horrible about a Romeo for no reason. I’ll be nice about them unless they start being dicks to me and, guess what, quite a lot of guys need no provocation whatsoever to start behaving like a huge asshole, so buckle in for that one.

4.  

I spent the last six years with a guy who broke my heart every day and either never noticed or didn’t care, so I will not break someone’s heart, spirit, or trust for the sake of a blog post. Never. It’s not in my nature. But I’m not going to be a doormat, either.

5.  

If a date goes badly and it’s my fault, I’ll never lie to make myself sound good and the Romeo sound bad. I’m not here to make myself sound amazing. If I wanted you to fall in love with me, I’d just show you my face and cook you breakfast because my eyes and my eggs are to die for, babycakes. Yes.

6.  

No shaming. If someone’s not for me, they’re not for me. I won’t ever criticise anybody’s looks unless they go in for me first. And well they might, because I look like the dish that ran away with the spoon. See? I told you I was an unreliable narrator.

7.  

I’m not going to date anyone just so I can fill space in my blog. Anyone I date I want to feel a *connection* with. I’m not sure I believe in ‘the one’ anymore, because of that guy I was telling you about who took a sledgehammer to my heart, but I do believe in the ‘next one’ and that will have to do for now.

8.  

Yes, the picture at the top of the blog and in my Twitter avatar really is a close-up of my lips. A friend told me I had great lips and I was, like, OK, and I couldn’t think of another pic to use that wouldn’t get me sued by a photographer. Other options included abstract snapshots of my arse, my hair and my right eye but none of them had the pulling power my lips do. And I’m going to be using those a LOT, if things go well.

9.  

Whether it takes five weeks, five months, or five years I will NOT stop until I meet someone who I think is worth giving it all up for. I’m thirty-four and the thought of still doing this when I’m nearly forty does kind of make me want to take a really long drink of something poisonous tbh but I have *integrity* and if this train stops, it has to stop for a reason. And when I meet him, you’ll know – because I’ll call him the Last Romeo. Weird thing is, I’m in no hurry whatsoever, yet I can’t wait to meet him.

10.  

Don’t ask who I am, don’t ask what I do, or why. Just two months ago I was someone else. None of it matters other than the fact this is who I am now. And this is where we are.

 

I’m tired of calling up to the balcony in vain. Let’s do this.

I felt disoriented, and a bit peaky. How was it possible I was here, right now, like this? That weird feeling when you arrive somewhere on holiday after a long flight, and are unpacking and you suddenly realise only this morning you were standing in your dingy kitchen in west London worrying about the taxi being late and now, here you are, thousands of miles away in a hotel room, realising your phone charger is… back in that dingy kitchen. Unsettled, displaced, exposed – yet superhuman, because however you got there, you made it happen yourself. In an unfamiliar lounge of an unfamiliar flat, surrounded by boxes and bags containing the life of the stranger I was ten minutes ago, listening to the sound of the supposed love of my life plodding down the six flights of stairs that would take him outside and away from me, for ever, my life began.

Breaking up with Adam would’ve been easier if it had been over something headline-grabbing and dramatic. But he’d never played away from home, wasn’t embezzling my savings account and never laid a finger on me. Adam’s crimes were stealthy, his talent was wrong-footing me, or trying to fix me up to be less of an inconvenience. His love for me felt like a series of favours, with the repayment on each one becoming harder and harder to meet every time.

I had it all worked out, the day I finally made up my mind. Many a time, after an argument about money or his insistence I order something different from him in a restaurant, I’d fantasised about what I’d say if I ever decided to leave. Great long speeches, full of adjectives I never got to use in everyday life, to explain why I couldn’t do it anymore. Tears, perhaps, or crockery shattering against a wall. I considered a trip to Ikea to make sure we had plenty to spare. He would beg my forgiveness, I decided, cling to my ankles as I strode majestically out of the flat. He would implore me to reconsider, tell me he’d change, and I’d half-smile, put my index finger to his lips, bid him hush, and say, evenly, ‘Go fuck yourself, Adam.’ The reality was different.

 

It was Tuesday. He clattered in, late, from his gym class and kicked off his shoes, slumping into a chair. Usually Adam didn’t talk after he’d been to the gym; he liked to eat whatever I cooked in silence, either with headphones in or glued to his laptop. The dead hour, I called it, when I’d sit and wait for him to come round and notice me again, like a coquettish maid trying to catch her master’s eye, and not a thirty-four-year-old man who’d been in this relationship for six long years. Too long. Jupiter years. But tonight there’d be no dead hour. It would live. He would hear me.

I remember the words coming out of my mouth and being disappointed at how badly they scanned. It wasn’t poetic – I stammered like an adolescent giving a presentation in sex education, reddening and nervously scratching my chest, as I usually did whenever a video camera was pointing at me. Adam sat, his eyes bulging, not saying a word until I got to what I thought was my masterpiece.

‘It’s just… we’re not going anywhere. We go to the same places, do the same things.’ Would it be bad form to pour myself a glass of wine before I went on? Probably. ‘And I wanna go to other places. I wanna… you know, try different things, walk down streets I’ve never walked down before.’

I saw a vein throb in his head. ‘Streets?’

It sounded amazing in my head – brave and powerful – but now it seemed crass and melodramatic.

‘By “streets you haven’t walked down before”, do you mean…’ He bristled. ‘Are you seeing someone else?’

‘No!’

It was the last cruel trick of our relationship that I couldn’t tell him why I really wanted it to end. He wouldn’t understand; it would sound even more foolish. How do you tell someone that despite paying the rent, turning up to weddings beside you, tilting their head just-so in your couples selfies and being to all intents and purposes a great boyfriend, that they actually weren’t? His knack for filling me with self-doubt at every turn with just one look or a carefully chosen word, his dismissiveness of my career, disdain for anything I liked to do, gearing our social life toward his own interests, the ceaseless commentary on what I assumed were my little quirks or harmless faults but were, to Adam, behavioural abnormalities that must be curbed. Nothing went unchecked, ever. How do you explain to someone that you feel owned, insignificant, without making them feel terrible? I knew, then, as I watched Adam slowly pour himself a glass of wine – none for me, eternally the Gretchen Wieners – that the easiest way to do this would be to make him think the fault was all mine. Because I didn’t actually want Adam to have an epiphany, or beg me for forgiveness, or clutch my ankles. I wanted him to let me go. For all his outward calm, I could tell he was shocked, because he downed the wine immediately – ‘James, you’re supposed to sip it, not throw it back like you’re on an all-inclusive to Magaluf’ was always a favourite line of his – and poured another. His eyes were moist but he didn’t look sad. I realised these were tears of anger.

‘Well,’ he said, finally, after another glass of wine was down the hatch and I was done stumbling through my apologies. ‘You’d better move into the spare room.’

I wasn’t expecting him to suggest we flat-shared, so I asked him what he meant.

‘You’ve got a month, Jim. More than kind under the circumstances.’ He unbuttoned his shirt and started to walk out of the room. ‘From now on, you’re a lodger. Four weeks today, I want you gone. If it’s over, it’s over.’ I heard the bathroom door slam and the shower jerk into life.

Lodger. Wow. This was cold, even for him. How could he be so calculated, so transactional already? And then it dawned on me. Adam obviously thought he’d be the one to end it. He was the catch, he had the cash. He was tall, loaded, handsome and popular, with a huge circle of friends who adored him – his friends had become mine, while I had few of my own – and a great future ahead of him. Everybody brushed his faults aside because the idea of him was so attractive. But I rejected it. And I was probably the first person ever to do so.

 

My phone rang, echoing against the bare white walls of my new flat. Someone calling?! My phone was strictly for messaging, tweeting and occasionally writing out panicked articles or correcting mistakes in ones I’d just published, before the boss saw – everyone knew that. It was my best friend, Bella; I wouldn’t answer for many, but for her I did.

‘Well?’ She sounded breathless, nervous.

‘He’s just left, actually.’

‘You in the new flat?’

‘Yes.’

We were silent for a few seconds.

‘It’s fine.’ I sniffed loudly as my eyes began to water.

‘Oh, Jim.’ Bella’s voice faltered. ‘Was he a dick about it? Do you want me to come and stroke your hair and tell you everything’s going to be all right?’

‘No, I don’t,’ I whimpered. ‘But I’ve got a duty-free bottle of Patrón crying out to be poured down my throat by a willing volunteer, while Céline Dion plays very loudly in the background.’

Bella laughed. ‘Queen Céline, count me in. I’ve had a shit day and work can go fuck itself tomorrow.’

‘You’re an icon.’

‘I know. Do you want me to bring pyjamas and stay over, or are you being a special brave boy who can totally do this on your own?’

I looked around. I listened to the din of the traffic outside. It was starting to get dark.

‘I can do it alone,’ I said. ‘But, well, bring pyjamas. Just in case.’

 

I dug into a box that looked like it might have shot glasses and tumblers in it to prepare for Bella’s arrival, unearthing all kinds of treasures and artefacts that I’d hurriedly packed. I remembered when I had decided I couldn’t go on, just twenty-nine days earlier. Monday morning. Singing in the shower, the most ridiculous of things. I was just croaking my way through the chorus of ‘Into the Groove’ – the only song I ever sing in the shower – and soaping what I will call an intimate area, when the door flew open and Adam appeared at the frosted screen, his face angry and contorted like a gargoyle.

‘Are you ever going to get to the middle-eight?’ he spat. ‘I’m late for work.’

I looked down at my crotch. ‘I’m washing my dick, Boo.’ Our cutesy pet name for one another, derived of about a hundred previous bastardisations neither of us could remember. We often used it to disarm a potentially explosive situation but recently it seemed more flammable than ever. ‘I didn’t know my singing bothered you. You used to like it.’

I sensed he was about to say something noxious, but the sight of me naked and pathetic as water bounced off my shoulders stopped him. He took a breath. ‘You sing the same bit over and over. It’s fucking annoying, especially when I need to be in here.’ When Adam wanted the bathroom, he ‘needed’ it – my own ablutions were nothing but inconvenient whimsy. If I got to the bathroom before him – even if I was doing an early shift – I’d emerge to find him pacing outside like a bad-tempered tiger, waiting to rip my head off.

It looked like my turn on the karaoke would have to wait. Without taking my eyes off him, I slowly turned the tap until the water stopped, and with a sponge covering my party zone, I climbed out of the tub, suds drifting to the floor and onto his pyjamas. I didn’t reach for my towel, just stalked out of the bathroom in a rush of steam, leaving only wet footprints behind me, my head throbbing with helplessness. And that’s when I absolutely knew. Adam had taken my voice away one time too often. I never complained, never explained. I just accepted, smiling beatifically by his side while the world gazed on adoringly. I’d let it happen over six years, and that was my own fault, but no more. I couldn’t love a man who wouldn’t let me sing.

 

‘How was it?’ Bella took off her coat and pulled an Edvard Munch face in anticipation of my reply. She’d always liked Adam but harboured suspicions. Whenever I hinted all was not well in the plush, perfect Brodie–Nardini household, paid for with Adam’s crazy salary, she would narrow her eyes and tell me, ‘The trouble with Adam is he’s too good-looking. Society tells hot people they never have to try, that we’re lucky to have them. And you’ – here she would prod me in the chest or, if it were after midnight, brandish a cocktail glass in my face – ‘you let him get away with it, because you believe it, too.’

I handed Bella a crisp packet. Empty. She looked at it like it was a used condom. ‘Is this symbolism?’ she asked. ‘We’re not back in English Lit with Mrs Ramsbottom, are we? Fucking hell, Jim. We don’t have time for that.’

I’d known Bella since we were teenagers. A mutual roll of the eyes across a boring French class soon made us firm friends. Through my coming-out, our boyfriends, moving houses and even escaping to different cities, one thing remained: our friendship. It never faltered, and despite terrible taste in men, we had excellent taste in each other. We shared various dives together for years until she met a man who made her ring-finger itchy. Dear Drew. We congratulated ourselves on how grown up we’d become, cooed over interiors magazines picking out expensive drinks cabinets we’d never buy, and met for boozy brunches, telling ourselves we were being ironic. Drew and Bella lived together for years until, one day, Bella took off her engagement ring to wash up and never put it back on, experiencing a revelation amid the bubbles. After being part of our lives, birthday gatherings and Facebook photos for so long, Drew was gone, almost overnight, and Bella spent two weeks in our spare room while I continually, dutifully, agreed she’d done the right thing. She’d been happily single and turning up to lunch in various states of hungover ever since. She understood. We were bonded by our secrets. She was the only person I wanted near me in the post-Adam fallout – which was lucky, as many of our ‘mutual’ friends were not returning my calls.

‘I cried over that sodding crisp packet earlier,’ I sighed. ‘It was Adam’s.’

Bella stared at it. ‘Monster Munch, really? Mr Eat Clean? Adam, we barely knew thee. Why the fuck were you crying over it?’

‘Because I feel like I’ve done something terrible. Ruined his life. His face when he left.’

Bella sat on the battered red sofa that had followed me from flat to flat and Adam had tried to get rid of at least a hundred times, and patted the seat next to her, elbowing papers and blankets out of the way. I sat.

‘Fuck his face. You haven’t ruined Adam’s life. You’ve saved your own.’

I laughed at the melodrama. ‘I swear you should be the journalist, not me. That is incredible.’

She didn’t laugh in return. ‘I’m serious, Jim. You weren’t happy. And you don’t realise it now because there are boxes everywhere and everything is scary and this flat smells fucking weird, but you will be absolutely fine. You can be yourself again.’

I swallowed hard. ‘Why did you say it was scary? It isn’t. I’m not scared.’

Bella peered at me. ‘Aren’t you? Oh. You should be. It’s terrifying out there.’

‘How was I not myself before? Why didn’t you say?’

Bella shifted in her seat. ‘It’s not the kind of thing you bring up. I didn’t want to upset you. You’d only deny it.’ She chewed her nails. ‘It was like a light was dimming.’ She looked away from me for a moment before immediately brightening. ‘Anyway, Adam is what we call histoire and the future is fucking blinding so let’s start it now.’

‘You sound like Geri Halliwell.’

‘Biggest compliment you’ve ever paid me. Get me the Patrón and rig up those speakers. It is time for Céline.’

 

Once my pity party was over and Bella had departed, lugging an entire week’s worth of empty pizza boxes down to the recycling, it was time to give reality a try. And nothing could be realer than going back to work.

You know those people who post on social media about how much they love their job and wouldn’t change it for the world? Do they mean it? Don’t they have days when they’d rather stay under the duvet getting intimate with a packet of biscuits and back-to-back episodes of Seinfeld? They must. No, mine wasn’t the worst job in the world and plenty of people would kill to park their arse in my swivel chair, but three years hadn’t done much to dull the sinking feeling I got as I stepped out of the lift and onto the seventh floor and the funsponge of entertainment news that was Snap!

If you’ve never heard of or read Snap! you’ll know someone who has – although they’ll also pretend they’ve either never heard of it or wouldn’t dare demean their precious brain cells with it. That was pretty much the thing to do whenever it came up in conversation. Snap! was a celebrity gossip magazine, owned by a newspaper with a decreasing appetite for morals yet a ravenous hunger for eyeballs on the page. While print sales were dwindling – good news for trees, bad news for staff with mouths to feed – the online version was thriving. Gossip was still huge, but nobody wanted a permanent relationship with it, and a magazine felt too much like commitment. What people really wanted was to see at least one huge picture with every scroll of their finger and reasonably amusing or informative words around it to explain what the hell was going on. My job was to guide readers into the abyss by crafting copy around these forgettable snaps to make it look like a real news story and not a desperate attempt to wring some scandal out of fairly tame pictures. And you know, while I was sick of hearing people who’d never picked up a paper in their lives call my job ‘lazy journalism’, I was bloody good at it. I think.

I walked across the vast open-plan floor and nodded hellos at people in other teams and departments. Every month or so, a face would disappear or there’d be some crafty desk rearrangement to disguise that a whole pod had disappeared. Times were tougher than we were allowed to know, but at least they were still paying me. I arrived at my own pod – now just eight desks – to find a half-eaten bacon roll on my keyboard. Hurley.

Sometimes you get those people who, for whatever reason, rub you up the wrong way inexplicably and immediately, and sometimes you are that person for somebody else – Hurley had been waiting his whole life for a nemesis. The battle lines were drawn when he discovered my habit of sneaking into his articles and changing words around. It was like an illness: I couldn’t let an errant semicolon or a poorly constructed sentence go unchecked. The trouble was, once I was in there, I couldn’t help myself, and when Hurley discovered I’d practically rewritten an entire piece about one of his favourite reality stars, the shit hit the fan.

‘I thought it could do with touching up, that’s all.’

Hurley’s face scrunched up. ‘Touch up your own shit. Don’t change my words. They’re in my style.’

He had a point. But seriously. ‘It’s about the reader, not our egos. It reads better now.’

Hurley was loud, and that voice of his carried. At least five teams’ worth of people – desks away from our tiny corner – turned to stare. ‘You’d be majorly pissed if I did this to your work.’

I saw my moment. ‘You wouldn’t need to do it to my work, Hurley.’ There was a ripple of laughter. Our relationship was dead on arrival.

 

‘Oh, Antiques Roadshow, you’re baaaaack,’ he drawled, slinking over to my desk like a marionette that had fallen face-first into a jumble sale, covered in superglue. All hair, chee. . .