The Plus One. Sophia Money-Coutts

on about weddings. ‘We’re having a photo booth but not a cheese table because I don’t think it ever gets eaten. What do you think?’ I heard Sal say.

      As if she’d been asked her opinion on Palestine, Olivia solemnly replied, ‘It’s so hard, isn’t it? We’re not having a photo booth but we are going to have a videographer there all day, so…’

      I yawned again. I’d been at uni with Sal. She once stripped naked and ran across a football pitch to protest against tuition fees. But here, discussing cheese tables and photo booths, she seemed a different person. An alien from Planet Wedding.

      ‘So, you’re a fellow cyclist?’ said Bill’s friend from business school, sitting down beside me on the sofa.

      ‘Yup. Most of the time. Just not when I’ve drunk ten bottles of wine.’

      ‘Very sensible. Sorry, I’m Callum by the way.’ He stuck his hand out for me to shake.

      Stuck, as I had been, between two wedding fetishists, I hadn’t noticed Callum much. He had a shaved head and was wearing a light grey t-shirt, which showed off a pair of muscly upper arms, and excellent trainers. Navy blue Nike Airs. I always looked at men’s shoes. Pointy black lace-ups: bad. The correct pair of trainers: aphrodisiac. Lex always criticized me for being too picky about men’s shoes. But what if you started dating someone who wore pointy black lace-ups, or, worse, shiny brown shoes with square ends, and then fell in love with them? You’d be looking at spending the rest of your life with someone who wore bad shoes.

      ‘I’m Polly,’ I replied, looking up from Callum’s trainers.

      ‘So you’re an old mate of Bill’s?’

      ‘Yep, for years. Since we were teenagers.’

      He nodded.

      ‘And you met him at business school?’

      He nodded again. ‘Yeah, at LBS.’

      ‘So what do you do now?’ I asked.

      ‘Deeply boring. I work in insurance, although I’m trying to move into K&R.’

      ‘What’s that?’

      ‘Kidnap and ransom. So more the security world really.’ He leant back against the sofa and propped one of his muscly arms on it.

      ‘How very James Bond.’

      He laughed. ‘We’ll see.’

      ‘Do you travel a lot?’

      ‘A bit. I’d like to do more. To see more. What about you?’

      ‘I work for a magazine. It’s called Posh!’ I said, as if it was a question, wondering if he’d heard of it.

      He laughed again and nodded. ‘I know. Sort of… society stuff?’

      ‘Exactly. Castles. Labradors. That sort of thing.’

      He grinned at me. ‘I like Labradors. Fun?’

      ‘Yup. Mad, but fun.’

      ‘Do you get to travel much?’

      ‘Sometimes. To cold, draughty piles in Scotland if I’m very lucky.’

      ‘How glamorous,’ he said, grinning again.

      Was this flirting? I wasn’t sure. I was never sure. At school, we’d learned about flirting by reading Cosmopolitan, which said that it meant brushing the other person with your hand lightly. Also, that girls should bite their lips in front of boys, or was it lick their lips? They should do something to attract attention to their mouths, anyway. My flirting skills hadn’t progressed much since and, sometimes, when trying to cack-handedly flirt with someone, I’d simultaneously touch a man’s arm or knee and lick my lips and end up looking like I was having some kind of stroke.

      ‘Hang on, hold your glass for a moment,’ he said, leaning across me.

      My stomach flipped. Was he lunging? Here? Already? In Bill’s flat? Blimey. Maybe I didn’t give myself enough credit. Maybe I was better at flirting than I realized.

      He wasn’t lunging. He was reaching for a book. Underneath my glass, on the coffee table, was a huge, heavy coffee table book. Callum picked it up and laid it across both our laps.

      He leant back and started flicking through the pages. They were exquisite travel photos – reindeer in the snow around a Swedish lake, an old man washing himself on some steps in Delhi, a volcano in Indonesia belching out great clouds of orange smoke.

      ‘I want to go here,’ he said, pointing at a photo of a chalky landscape, a salt flat in Ethiopia.

      ‘Go on then. And then… let’s go here,’ I replied, turning the page. It was Venice.

      ‘Venice? Have you ever been?’ He turned to look at me.

      ‘No.’ Was now a good moment to touch his arm? I quite wanted to touch his arm.

      ‘Then I will take you.’

      ‘Ha!’ I laughed nervously and clapped my hand on his forearm.

      We carried on turning the pages and laughing for a while, discussing where we wanted to go until the photos were becoming quite blurry. I wasn’t really concentrating anyway, because Callum had moved his leg underneath the book so it was touching mine. I glanced across at him. How tall was he? Hard to tell sitting down.

      ‘Right, team,’ said Bill, sometime later from across the room, draining his coffee cup. ‘I think it might be home time. Sorry to end the party but I’ve got to go into the office tomorrow.’

      Callum closed the book and moved his leg, stretching out on the sofa and yawning. ‘Fun sponge.’

      ‘I know, mate, but some of us can’t just drink for a living. We’ve got real jobs.’

      ‘Talk to me when I’m in Peshawar.’ He stood up and clapped Bill on the back in a man hug. ‘Good to see you after so long, mate. Thanks for dinner.’ He was the same height as Bill, I noted. Sort of six foot-ish. A good height. The size I always wanted a man to be so I didn’t feel like a giraffe in bed next to him. That thing about everybody being the same size lying down is rubbish.

      Around us, everyone else was saying goodbye to one another. ‘Thanks, love,’ I said, hugging Bill. ‘Don’t work too hard tomorrow.’

      ‘Welcome,’ he said back, into my shoulder. ‘And I won’t. I should be around on Sunday if you are? Cinema or something? Is Lex back?’

      ‘Yup, she gets back tomorrow so said I’d see her for lunch on Sunday. Wanna join?’

      ‘Maybe, speak tomorrow?’

      I nodded and Bill turned to say goodbye to Lou behind us.

      ‘Where you heading back to?’ Callum asked as we stood by the open front door. I was squinting at my phone, trying to find Uber.

      ‘Shepherd’s Bush.’

      ‘Perfect. As you’re not cycling I will escort you home.’

      ‘Why, where are you?’

      ‘Nearby,’ he replied. ‘What’s your postcode?’

      This never happened. Sightings of the Loch Ness Monster were more common than me going home with anyone. I frowned as I tried to remember what state my bikini line was in. I probably shouldn’t sleep with him; I had an awful feeling it looked like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

      ‘What’s wrong?’ he said, looking at my face.

      ‘Nothing, all good,’ I replied quickly. Also, I knew I hadn’t shaved my legs for weeks. Or months, maybe. So, a few minutes later, in the back of the Uber, I reached down and tried to surreptitiously stick two fingers underneath the ankle of my jeans to check how bristly my legs were. They felt like a scouring brush.

      ‘What you doing?’ asked