Our Stop. Laura Jane Williams

and Emma found that out only after she’d dumped him for … refusing to wear a condom. For some reason all three of them had dated more than a handful of men called James, who ended up being referred to by number: James One, James Six, James Nine. The most memorable bloke was Period Pete, a friend of a friend who liked performing oral sex on menstruating women, and who the three collectively decided must have an undiagnosed iron deficiency.

      Nadia, Gaby and Emma had talked about them all, trying to understand the puzzle of men-kind. Well, except for the one who said he’d be too busy to have a girlfriend ‘for the next five years, at least’, who Nadia had simply never texted back again. He was a riddle not worth trying to solve. She didn’t want a man she had to teach kindness to.

      Nadia wondered if it would change if any of them ever got married – if they’d stop telling each other everything about their sex and love lives. She hoped not. She hoped that even in marriage or after fifty years with her hypothetical guy that there would still be romance and mystery and tension that she’d want to gossip over with her girlfriends. She’d heard on an Esther Perel podcast that that was important. For a woman who historically hadn’t been very good at it, Nadia spent a lot of time researching love.

      The image Emma had photographed cleared into vision and Nadia saw that it said:

       To the devastatingly cute blonde girl on the Northern line with the black designer handbag and coffee stains on her dress – you get on at Angel, on the 7.30, always at the end nearest the escalator, and always in a hurry. I’m the guy who’s standing near the doors of your carriage, hoping today’s a day you haven’t overslept. Drink some time?

      Nadia stopped walking, causing a woman behind her to side-step and mutter, ‘Oh, for god’s sake.’

      She reread the note.

      The devastatingly cute blonde girl on the Northern line with the black designer handbag and coffee stains on her dress. She spun around to look back at the train she’d just disembarked. It had already left. She dropped her hand to run a finger over the brown mark on her dress. She looked at her handbag. She WhatsApped Emma back.

      !!!!!!!!! she typed with one hand.

      And then, Um … I mean, lol but maybe?!

      After a beat she thought better of it: I mean, the chances are slim, right?

      She mulled it over some more. She and Emma weren’t even sure that Missed Connections was real. It made her initial reaction seem increasingly off the mark. Nadia and Emma didn’t care one way or the other – if it was real or made up by the weekly intern at the paper as a creative writing exercise – it was the fantasy of a stranger searching for somebody they felt a fleeting connection to that was fun. It was like Savage Garden knowing they loved you before they met you.

      It was romantic, in a you’re-a-blank-canvas-I-can-project-my-hopes-and-dreams-on sort of way.

      In a fantasies-don’t-have-problems-so-this-is-better-than- real-life way.

      An our-love-will-be-different way.

      Missed Connections felt full of more romance than messing around on Bumble did. Although, any time either of them doubted that sort of love existed, the other would bring up Tim, Emma’s brother. He’d gone out to Chicago for a couple of weeks for work and used a dating app to meet a local who could show him around, maybe even partake in a fling. Through that app Tim had met Deena, and legend had it that when Deena went to the loo Tim pulled out his phone, deleted the app, and within three months had transferred out there to live with her. They’d got married that spring. Miracles do happen, Tim had said in his speech. I searched the whole world for you, and there you were, waiting for me in downtown Chicago, in a restaurant window seat.

      Emma texted: Question: are you sporting a coffee stain this morning, and did you get the 7.30? It’s Monday, so I presume yes.

      Nadia replied with a snap of her outfit from above – the splodge of butter-laden coffee clearly visible – very obviously on her way to work.

      But, Nadia thought … surely there were a million women on the Northern line spilling coffee and carrying fancy bags that family members had sourced at discounted designer outlets. And nobody ever did things on time – not in London. Loads of cute blondes – devastatingly cute blondes – probably missed their intended train all the time. And yeah, she’d never really thought about how she instinctively always turned left at the bottom of Angel’s escalator and walked towards the end of the track there, but that was something she did. Who else did? Hundreds, surely. Thousands? It was the longest tube escalator in London, after all. It could hold a lot of people.

      Right then, Emma sent back, love heart emojis before and after her text, I think we’ve got some investigating to do, don’t you?

      I’m dying, Nadia wrote back. It’s totally not me. I’m grateful to all the other women out there who can’t take a coffee cup on a train without spilling it, though. Makes me feel better about myself, lol.

      Could be you, though … Emma said.

      Nadia considered it. I mean, there’s like a 2 per cent chance, she typed. And then: If that.

      Then it hit her: the man by the train doors, reading the paper. There’d been a man there! Was that him? Men must stand by the door and read the paper all the time, what with being male and commuting and picking up a newspaper on the way being statistically quite high. Nadia looked around the station, to see if she recognized anyone as the man she’d been near. She couldn’t even remember what he’d looked like. Blonde? No. Brunette? Definitely handsome. Oh god.

      A weird feeling of hope that it was her came over Nadia, whilst she simultaneously realized that hoping for that was kind of non-feminist too. She didn’t have to wait to be chosen by a mystery man to date and be happy. Did she?

      But – also – in The New Routine to Change Her Life, Nadia was supposed to believe that luck was on her side. And if luck really was on her side, maybe this was for her, and maybe this guy wouldn’t be an insecure loser. Awful Ben, her last boyfriend, had had a weird fragile masculinity – he was emotionally manipulative and made her think she was in the wrong until he’d undone her confidence. And he did do that – he did undo her confidence. It had really bruised her, because for the six months they dated she almost came to believe there was something wrong with her. She still didn’t understand why somebody would do that: say they’d fallen in love with you and then decide to hate everything that made them say that in first place. She was only just starting to feel like herself again.

      Nadia shuddered at the bad memories. She thought about Awful Ben every day still, but when she did she always thanked the heavens that she was now out of that dire situation. She couldn’t believe what she’d let herself put up with. Occasionally she set her web browser to private and typed in his Instagram handle to check he was still as much of a difficult, pretentious arse as ever. He always was.

      But now, months after their break-up, Nadia was equal parts bruised and in need of an emotional palette cleanser. A romantic sorbet. Somebody new to think about. A man to be a bit nice to her would do, as if that didn’t place the bar too low. Perhaps her own newspaper ad would read, Wanted, man: must actually seem to like me.

      Oh, who was she kidding? Her advert would say: Wanted: man with strong sense of self, capable of having a laugh, healthy relationship with mother. Must love romance, reality television, and be ready to champion and cheerlead as a partner through life, in exchange for exactly the same. Also must understand the importance of cunnilingus and pizza – though not at same time. I cum first, pizza comes second.

      Was she expecting too much? She thought of Tim and Deena. Surely she could have that too.

      2 per cent is higher than 0 per cent, typed back Emma. So, game on.

      Nadia laughed as she finally made her way to the escalator, emerging in the early-morning summer sun at the top. Whatever you say, she typed back. And to herself