At First Sight by Hannah Sunderland (latest novels to read TXT) 📕

He stiffened a little and moved his hand around to his back pocket, pulling out his phone and frowning at the same unknown number.

‘You avoiding someone?’ I asked, that sense of dread creeping back to me like it did so often around him. Was the persistent person on the other end something to do with the things he’d told me about? Or was it a whole other can of worms that we hadn’t even found the right tin opener for yet?

He scrunched up his nose and shook his head. ‘It’s not important.’ He pushed the phone back into his pocket and turned to me with a forced smile. ‘You sloppily eating spaghetti is all I want to be thinking about right now. I’m imagining something like the Ood from Doctor Who, with the mouth tentacles.’

‘I know who the Ood are; you can’t hold the monopoly on being a nerd you know. And be careful what you wish for, because I’ve been told that I make an uncanny resemblance.’

‘Oh good,’ he said with mock excitement. ‘Because I always found the Ood the sexiest of all the Doctor Who creatures.’

As we settled into the window booth of Giorgio’s Italian, with a smiling waiter pouring iced water into our glasses, I began to think that this was a bit of a heavy place for me to have chosen. The ceiling hung with obviously fake, but aesthetically pleasing vines that trailed down around large columns and mock frescos sat on faux-aged walls. I clutched my menu with nervous fingers as Charlie pulled off his hat and ruffled a hand through his unruly hair.

Violin music played through the speakers and the subdued lighting made it the perfect brightness for all of the couples. The waiter withdrew a lighter from his pocket, clicked it on and lit a candle between us, smiling manically, as if years of hearing this same violin music over and over again had driven him into the realms of insanity. Charlie seemed unfazed by the enforced levels of romance as he checked his phone again and pushed it underneath his hat, which lay on the table next to an unnecessarily large pepper grinder.

Who knew, maybe this was exactly the sort of setting he’d been after when he’d asked me to choose a place to eat, or maybe he was just being too polite to show his discomfort at the couple at the table closest to us who were hand feeding each other chocolate-dipped strawberries. The woman lifted a fondue fork, stabbed a square of waffle and dipped it into the bubbling cauldron of chocolate, before lifting it to her partner’s mouth. He didn’t get to it in time, the chocolate dribbling down his chin and onto the napkin waiting on his lap. They giggled and he wiped it from his chin with a playful finger, offering it up to her. I watched on in horror as she raised his finger to her mouth, placed it inside and licked the chocolate from his skin.

I looked back at Charlie but he hadn’t seen a thing.

I wondered if Charlie and I would ever get to those sickening levels of cliché where you don’t even care that you’re a cliché anymore, because the endorphins are making you feel all ridiculous and fuzzy inside?

I looked back at Charlie who was frowning at the menu like it’d just insulted him. He was wearing a red lumberjack shirt, open over that same Night of the Living Dead T-shirt he’d been wearing when I’d first met him and I found myself smiling at his charming boyishness and the memory of us two lone zombies, sat side by side in a cinema of regular-looking people. He had an air of nervous energy tonight, his aura pulsing with anxiety.

‘You okay?’ I asked.

He glanced up from his menu, not maintaining eye contact for long and then looking back down. ‘Grand. Yerself?’

‘Uh-huh,’ I replied, unconvinced. ‘So, what is this in aid of?’

He looked up and sat back in his chair. ‘Well, I thought, seeing as, so far, I’ve caused yer to violate rules at work, been a bastard, ghosted yer and dropped the bombshell that is my mental health, I’d give yer somethin’ nice for a change.’ He sipped his water and crunched through an ice cube with careless, clearly unsensitive teeth. ‘Yer deserve things like this after what you do for everyone else all day.’

I grinned as the waiter arrived and took our order.

I ordered a glass of red wine, which Charlie upgraded to a bottle. We got olives to start and eventually, he decided on a pepperoni pizza. I decided to go for ravioli, because it seemed the most graceful to eat of the foods on offer. I did glance down at my pale blue shirt when I read the words ‘rich tomato sauce’ and uttered a silent apology to my later self, the one with a nail brush and a tub of Oxi Action. I added on the garlic bread that I’d been craving and the waiter congratulated us hyperbolically.

He sashayed away, humming as he went, and returned almost immediately with a pot of olives on a saucer, toothpicks in little paper sleeves sitting around it in a circle.

‘I’ll pay for my half,’ I said, unprompted. I was always uncomfortable when other people paid for stuff for me. This was probably due to Joel never paying for anything. In seven and a half years I could count on one hand the number of times he’d taken me out for a meal and paid. I could, however, count on several thousand hands the number of times he’d ‘forgotten’ his wallet or his card had been ‘surprisingly’ declined and I’d ended up having to foot the bill.

‘If yer want to pay then that’s fine, don’t want to offend, but I did ask yer here and so I’m more than happy to pay. Think of it as a thank you for puttin’ in the overtime with me.’

He reached over