The Plus One: escape with the hottest, laugh-out-loud debut of summer 2018!

I’d nodded shyly at him and he’d grinned back.

‘They’re awful, aren’t they? I’m Bill by the way.’ He’d stuck out a hand for me to shake, so I shook it. And then we’d started talking over the music about our GCSEs. It was only when Lex surfaced for air an hour or so later, gasping for breath, mouth rubbed as red as a strawberry, that I realized I’d made a friend who was a boy. Not a boyfriend. I didn’t want to snog Bill. His glasses really were shocking. But he became a friend who was a boy all the same. And we’d been friends ever since.

‘Come in, come in,’ Bill said when I arrived. He opened the front door with one hand and held a pair of jeans in the other. ‘Sorry, I haven’t changed yet.’ He grinned. ‘You’re the first.’

‘Go change,’ I said. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘No. Leave those bottles on the side and open whatever you want. I’ll be two minutes,’ he said, walking towards his bedroom.

I opened the fridge. It was rammed. Sausages, packets of bacon, some steaks. Something that might once have been a tomato and would now be of considerable interest to a research scientist. No other discernible vegetables. I reached for a bottle of white wine and fished in a drawer for a corkscrew.

Bill appeared back in the kitchen in his jeans and a t-shirt that said ‘I am a computer whisperer’ on it. In the years since I’d met him, he’d discovered contact lenses but developed a questionable line of t-shirts. ‘I’ll have one of those please. Actually, no I won’t. I’ll have a beer first. So, how’s tricks?’ he asked, opening a bottle. ‘How was Christmas? How was your birthday and so on? I’ve got you a card actually.’ He picked up an envelope from his kitchen table and gave it to me. ‘Here you go.’

‘Being single at 30 isn’t as bad as it used to be,’ the front of the card read. I smiled, ‘Thanks, dude. Really helpful.’ I put the card down on the side and had a sip of wine. ‘And Christmas was lovely, thanks. Quiet, but kind of perfect. I ate, I slept. You know, the usual.’ I’d been worrying about Mum and her scan all week, but I didn’t want to mention it to anyone else yet. If I didn’t talk about it, I could keep a lid on the panic I felt when I woke in the middle of the night and lay in bed thinking about the appointment. I had decided to wait for the results of the scan and then we could go from there. ‘Anyway, how was yours?’

‘Terrible,’ Bill replied. ‘I was working for most of it, trying to sort out some investors.’ He took a swig of beer and leant on the kitchen counter. ‘So, I haven’t left the office before midnight this week and I’m doing no exercise apart from walking from my desk to have a pee four times a day. But that’s how start-up life is,’ he sighed and had another slug of his beer.

‘Love life?’ I asked.

‘I’m still seeing that girl, Willow. I told you about her before Christmas, right?’

I nodded. ‘The Tinder one? Who works in… ?’ I couldn’t actually remember much about her. I was always, selfishly, slightly peeved when Bill was dating someone because it meant he was less available for cinema trips and pizza.

‘Interior design, yeah. She’s cool. But everything’s so busy at the moment that I keep having to cancel on any plans we make in favour of a “chicken chow mein for one” at my desk.’

‘Have you invited her tonight?’

‘Yeah. But she couldn’t make it.’

‘OK. So, who’s coming?’

Normally, Lex would be here too, and she and I would spend the night drinking wine while discussing our New Year’s resolutions. But Lex had gone away to Italy with her boyfriend, Hamish, this year. So, I was slightly nervous about who Bill had invited. Or not nervous exactly. Just apprehensive about having to talk to strangers all night.

‘Er, there’s Robin and Sal, who you know. Then a couple I don’t think you’ve met who are friends from home who’ve just got engaged – Jonny and Olivia. Two friends from business school you haven’t met either. Lou, who’s in town for a bit from America, who you’ll love, she’s amazing. And a guy called Callum I haven’t seen for years but who knows Lou, too.’ He looked at his phone as it buzzed. ‘Oh, that’s her now,’ he said.

‘Lou, hi,’ he said, answering it. ‘No, no, don’t worry, just a bottle of something would be great… number fifty-three, yep? Blue door, just ring the bell. See you in a tick.’

By 11 p.m., everyone was still sitting around Bill’s kitchen table, their wine glasses smeary from sticky fingers. I’d drunk a lot of red wine and was sitting at one end of the table, holed up like a hostage, while Sal and Olivia, sitting either side of me, discussed their weddings. How was it physically possible for two fully grown women to care so much about what font their wedding invitations should be written in? I thought about the countless weddings I’d been to in the past couple of years. Lace dress after lace dress (since these days everyone wanted to look as demure as Kate Middleton on her wedding day), fistfuls of confetti outside the church, a race back to the reception for ninety-four glasses of champagne and three canapés. Dinner was usually a bit of a blur if I was honest. Some sort of dry chicken, probably. Then thirty-eight cocktails after dinner, which I typically spilled all over myself and the dance floor. Bed shortly after midnight with a blistered foot from the inappropriate heels I’d worn. I couldn’t recall what font any of the invitations were written in.

‘Polly,’ they said simply at the top. Just ‘Polly’ on its own. Never ‘Polly and so-and-so’ since I never had a boyfriend. Sometimes an invitation said ‘Polly and plus one’. But that was similarly hopeless since I never had one of those either. I reached for the wine bottle, telling myself to stop being so morose.

‘Who’s for coffee?’ asked Bill, standing up.

‘I’m OK on red.’

‘You’re not on your bike tonight?’ asked Bill.

‘Nope, I’ll Uber. But touched by your concern.’

‘Just checking. Right, everyone next door. I’m going to put the kettle on.’

There were murmurs of approval and everyone stood and started to gather up plates and paper napkins from the floor. ‘Don’t do any of that,’ said Bill. ‘I’ll do it later.’

I picked up the wine bottle and my glass and walked through the doors into the sitting room, collapsing onto a sofa and yawning. Definitely a bit pissed.

Sal and Olivia followed after me and sat on the opposite sofa, still quacking 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 Callum, looking at me quizzically.

‘Just an itch.’ I sat back in the taxi.

‘You’re not coming in,’ I said, in my sternest voice, when the car pulled up outside my flat.

‘’Course I am. I need to make sure you get in safely,’ he replied, opening his door and getting out.

So, as alarmed as I was about my ape-like levels of hairiness, I let him in, whereupon he immediately started looking through my kitchen cupboards. I kicked off my shoes and sat at the kitchen table, watching him, still hiccupping.

‘Shhhhhh, my flatmate’s asleep,’ I said to his back, as he inspected the labels of five or six half-empty bottles he’d discovered in one cupboard.

‘This’ll do.’ It was a bottle of cheap vodka, the sort that turns you blind. ‘Where are your glasses?’

I pointed at a cupboard above his head.

‘I can’t drink all that,’ I said, as he handed me a glass.

‘Yes you can, just knock it back.’ He swallowed his in one and looked at me expectantly.

I lifted my glass, nearly gagged at the vapours, then opened my mouth and took three slugs.

‘Good work.’ He took the glass back as I shivered and put it down on the table. ‘I mean, why do the Russians like this so much? It’s disgusting, swallowing it makes me—’

He interrupted me by cupping my face with his hands and kissing me. His tongue tasted of vodka.

‘Which one’s your room?’

I pointed at a door, and he took my hand, pulled me off the kitchen table and into my room, where I froze. There were two embarrassing things I needed to hide: my slightly shrivelled, browning earplugs on the bedside table, and my ancient bunny rabbit, a childhood comforter, which was lying between the pillows, his glass eyes glaring at me with an accusatory air.

I reached for both, opened my knicker drawer and stuffed them in there. I felt briefly guilty about my rabbit and then thought, You are about to have sex for the first time in five hundred months, Polly, now is not the time to be sentimental about your stuffed toy.

Callum sat down at the end of the bed and started unlacing his shoes.

‘Hang on, I’m just going to do something.’ I picked up a box of matches on the bedside table and lit a candle next to it.

And here is a list of the things that happened next, which illustrates why I should never, ever be allowed to even think about having sex with anyone.

Having lit the candle, I sat next to Callum and he started unbuttoning my shirt. But then I panicked about him doing this while I was sitting because of the fat rolls on my stomach, so I lay down instead, pulling him back onto the bed. He then undid the rest of my shirt buttons and there were a few undignified moments where I flailed around like a beached seal trying to get my arms out of it.

The tussle of the bra strap. Callum reached for it, clearly wanting to be one of those nimble-fingered men who just have to blink at a bra strap – any bra strap – for it to ping free. ‘I’ve nearly got it,’ he said, after several seconds of fiddling while I arched my back.

Getting my knickers off. This required me to waggle my legs in the air like an upturned beetle.

Callum then moved his way down my stomach until he was kneeling on the floor, his head between my legs. I wondered whether to make a joke about needing some sort of Black & Decker machinery to get through the hair and then decided it would kill the vibe. So, I started worrying about my breathing instead. It’s awkward to just lie there in silence, so I decided to start panting a bit as he used his tongue on me. But it’s quite hard to pant when, after a promising beginning, Callum – perhaps encouraged by my erratic breathing – started working harder with his tongue, like a dog at a water bowl. So, then it started hurting, as opposed to feeling remotely pleasurable, and I decided I’d lost sensation in my entire vagina and instead lay there wondering when to suggest that he came back up again. And how do you do that, anyway, without causing offence?

The worst bit of all. I tapped him on the head and he looked up. ‘Come up,’ I said, in what I hoped was a seductive, come-hither way.

He looked up from between my legs and frowned. ‘Why? Aren’t you enjoying it?’

Oh, GOD, why is sex this embarrassing? Does it always have to be this embarrassing?

‘No, no, I just want to, erm, return the favour.’

CRINGE. I thought I might die. I might actually die from cringing.

So Callum crawled back up and rolled over, lying on his back, still with his boxers on. I then climbed on top of him, trying not to slouch again so that my stomach didn’t crease into rolls of fat. Then I noticed that I hadn’t plucked my nipple hairs recently either. Too late. I wriggled backwards so that I was kneeling between his legs and started pulling his boxers off. Another difficult move because I had to stand up to pull them out from underneath him.

Callum’s penis wasn’t quite hard, so I opened my mouth and gently started sucking the head of it. He groaned. I ran my mouth slowly down it, trying to ignore the musty smell. After a few minutes, my thigh muscles started to burn. For God’s sake. How much longer was this going to go on for? I wriggled my knees in a bit closer, then opened one eye and squinted at his penis. Why do they look like giant earthworms? Then his moaning started getting louder and I felt one of his hands on my head, pressing my mouth down. I’d read magazine articles before that said you should suck their balls as well, but I’d never been sure I could fit everything in my mouth at once. It would be like tackling a foot-long Subway. Or were you supposed to suck just one ball at a time?

I gagged as his penis hit the back of my throat, then he gave a sudden shout and my mouth filled with warm semen. Slightly salty, slightly sweet. I swallowed as quickly as possible. The thought of that swimming around in my stomach with the vodka was ungodly.

‘Just going to get a glass of water,’ I said through a sticky mouth, climbing over him and picking up an empty glass from the bedside table. In the bathroom, I wiped my mouth with some tissue and looked in the mirror. Well, that bit’s done so that’s something. And it’s always quite gratifying to get there, isn’t it? Mostly because then your thighs get a break, but also because it means that you’ve done something right and your teeth didn’t get in the way. And anyway, I decided, filling up the glass from the tap again in case he wanted a drink, it’s my turn. That’s the rule. He should possibly have tried harder to sort me out first. But never mind. He could make up for it now.

‘D’you want some water?’ I whispered, walking back into the bedroom and holding out the glass. Callum was standing up with his jeans back on and his phone in his hand.

‘No, I’m good, thanks. I’m actually going to get an Uber. Got golf in the morning so I need to get home.’

‘Oh. OK. Cool. No problem,’ I stuttered.

WHAT?

‘Thanks though, that was great.’ He reached down for his t-shirt, pulled it over his head, patted his jean pockets, then – while I was still standing there, naked, cold, holding the glass of water – leant in and kissed me on the cheek.

‘Good to meet you.’

‘Er, yeah. You too. Hang on, I’ll let you out.’

‘Nah, don’t worry. I can let myself out. See you soon.’

‘Oh… Sure. OK… Bye,’ I said, still holding the glass of water, as he walked out.

I heard the front door close, put the glass down and stood naked in my bedroom thinking. Was that now a thing? Can men just Uber at – I looked at my phone – 2.54 a.m. after a blow job, having not returned the favour, and think that’s acceptable?

2

WHEN I EMERGED FROM my bedroom in the morning, Joe was in the kitchen making toast. He was wearing threadbare boxers and an old rugby shirt, both of which were too small for his sixteen-stone frame.

‘Morning, my little chou fleur, want some breakfast?’

I’d met Joe via a Gumtree advert three years earlier, when I moved out of my mum’s place. I was too old to have my knickers ironed for me, I’d decided back then. And Joe had since become a sort of surrogate boyfriend-slash-brother figure, a proper friend to both me and my mates. Our flat was above a corner shop run by a large Jamaican lady called Barbara who was obsessed with horoscopes. I’d go in there to buy bacon on a Saturday morning and come out half an hour later, having been told how my weekend would pan out. It was always bad news. Barbara would suck in her cheeks and say that Mars was doing something weird with Jupiter and that Saturn was all over the shop, and so I should be very careful about any mysterious men that crossed my path.

‘No. I’m feeling a bit delicate this morning. Can you put the kettle on?’

‘How was last night?’

‘Oh, you know. Dinner at Bill’s. Brought someone back here to have sex for the first time in nine hundred years, nearly choked to death giving him a blow job before he Ubered straight out of here.’

‘Polly, my darling, how dramatic. Why didn’t he stay?’

‘Beats me.’ I collapsed on the sofa and caught sight of the vodka bottle on the kitchen counter. ‘I don’t know how I manage it.’

‘Who was he?’

‘A mate of Bill’s. Kind of handsome. Lives around here somewhere.’

‘So, is this grand romance going to continue?’ Joe sat down in the armchair opposite me with his plate of toast.

‘I doubt it. And anyway he plays golf.’

Joe shuddered. ‘Revolting.’

I sighed. ‘Why can’t I be a normal person and have any kind of normal, functioning relationship? Or not even a relationship, just normal, straightforward sex? The only thing I’ve had in my vagina recently is a speculum.’

‘More poisson in the mer, my darling. Beating ourselves up won’t help. What plans for the weekend?’

‘Well, first I’d quite like you to close that gaping hole in your boxers,’ I said, my gaze accidentally dropping to his crotch. ‘Then I might kill myself. And not much else really. Going over to Lex’s tomorrow. And seeing Bill maybe. What about you?’

‘The usual, just a bit of light pillaging. Got a date this afternoon.’

‘Who with?’

‘Lovely chap called Marcus, he plays the French horn.’

‘Does he indeed. Where did we find him?’

‘Teaches at the academy. He’s got an arse like Tom Daley’s. It might be love.’

It was ‘love’ quite often with Joe. In the past few months, various of these loves had passed through the front door. There had been Lee, a waiter from a pub in Kilburn; Josh, who Joe had picked up in the Apple Store buying a new iPhone; Paddington, a footman from Buckingham Palace, and Tomas, an Argentine polo player who insisted he was straight, but liked Joe to do unmentionable things to him with various leather props that he kept under his bed in a box. I tried never to go into Joe’s room in case this box was lying open.