Pretending: The brilliant new adult novel from Holly Bourne. Why be yourself when you can be perfect?(6)

He reaches over the barrel table to take my fingers again. ‘I was just asking about your job. You’re always quite quiet about it.’

‘Well, yes, that’s because I’m an advisor for a sex and relationships charity. I can’t really talk about it on dates. It’s all very uncouth.’

He squeezes my hand harder. ‘We’re on our sixth date, April, I think things can get a bit uncouth.’

Then he does that thing men do with their eyes, when they’re making it super clear they really want to have sex with you. Oh God, here it comes. It will be OK, it will be OK. If he’s The One, it will be OK.

‘So, your job?’ he prompts, leaning back and returning his eyes to normal. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Well, do you like it there?’

‘I love it there.’ I brandish my wine glass with excitable abandon and let the joy of my job cancel out my unfurling anxiety. ‘I mean we’re constantly running out of money; we couldn’t even afford a Christmas party last year. But the work is rewarding and my colleagues are great. My job is split,’ I explain. ‘I spend half my time on organisational stuff – sorting out our volunteers, our safeguarding policies etc. Basically I’m in charge of recruiting volunteers, training them, keeping them, and ensuring they know what the hell they’re supposed to be doing. Then I spend the other half of my time doing shifts on our front-line services.’

‘And they are?’ He looks only half interested now, but maybe I’ve just imagined him glancing at his phone?

‘Well, I work on our online service. People send in their questions about sex and relationships and we write back.’

‘Sex questions? You must get some fruity stuff.’

I laugh and finish my glass, feeling the warmth of it dribble through me. It is date six and I’m starting to feel comfortable with Simon. Nothing to do with all the wine, I’m sure. ‘Nothing shocks me any more,’ I tell Simon, my potential future husband.

‘Is that so?’

‘Oh yeah. You can’t be a prude with this job. I mean, on my first day there, I had to chair a meeting about our anal sex policy.’

He almost spits out his wine. ‘And what is your anal sex policy?’

‘Do you mean mine, or my place of work’s?’

He swallows hard, and I’m pleased with myself for that line. I laugh again and enjoy his squirming. ‘Told you I’m unshockable. In my defence, you started this conversation. Though my colleague, Matt, told me not to bring up work for a while longer.’

His head tilts. A smirk tugs across his face. ‘Oh, so you’ve been talking to your colleagues about me?’ He puts his glass down so he can reach over and take my hand again.

I nod shyly, unable to even describe how amazing his skin feels against my skin. ‘Why? Have you told your colleagues about me?’

It’s his turn to nod. ‘I may’ve mentioned I’ve been on a few dates.’

This is it. I told you this was it! If he’s telling people about me, that must mean he’s falling too. My muscles untwist themselves, heaving sighs as they relax into giddy abandon. I try to drink in the moment around me and commit it to memory, so I can recap it accurately for our grandchildren. The sweaty sun in the sky, the smell of the nearby Thames in my nostrils, my exact outfit, his exact outfit, the precise location of our barrel table, the noises of the groups around us. It’s all so wonderful that I make a fatal mistake.

I believe.

And therefore I start to relax.

‘I always wonder what it must be like to just have regular relationships with work colleagues rather than really intense ones,’ I ponder, brushing the rim of my wine glass against my bottom lip. ‘When you work for a charity like We Are Here, in order to be professional, you have to immediately have highly-personal and unprofessional conversations.’

‘What do you mean?’ Simon asks, tipping his head back a bit too far to get to the wine in his glass. It’s not the most attractive look but it doesn’t matter because he’s potentially my future husband and therefore everything he does is adorable.

‘Well, if you work with upset people telling you upsetting things, like we do, it’s unhealthy to have an I’m-at-work bravado, you know? We’ve got to feel healthy in ourselves to handle the users appropriately. You can’t take on a shift on a helpline if you’re in a bad way. That’s irresponsible. You may accidentally let it seep into your responses. So, my colleagues and I are, like, super close. We always have a buddy to debrief to after each shift, and we have to talk about our emotions all the time. I know basically every terrible thing that’s ever happened to them, and vice-versa. That way we can all know our triggers, and look out for one another during shifts.’

Simon’s face screws up. ‘Triggers?’ he asks.

I nod. I really do love talking about my job. Our little charity. It’s been such a source of good in my life since Ryan. ‘Yes, subjects that upset you – usually because of something that’s happened in your past. At work, if you’re triggered by a particular topic, you may be too upset and therefore need to let a colleague take over.’ I smile fondly, thinking of Matt and Katy and all the others in our little microcosm of support. ‘So, we are all very close. Like, I know my buddy cannot handle anything to do with alcoholism because his dad was an alcoholic. And, my manager isn’t so good on the STI type questions, because she’s phobic of germs, and one of our volunteers, bless her, isn’t so good on anything to do with drugs.’ I look up at Simon, still grinning, expecting him to be grinning too. So, it’s a shock when his face isn’t the face I imagine. Instead, he’s leaning back, looking slightly bored. I see him punch his thumb onto his phone to check for notifications and my stomach twists.