One evening, once

It's about time we had a fun one.

This is an old story, and is… mostly true.

You were tired but you forced yourself out of the house anyway, knowing that an evening or even just an hour or two spent chatting with a bunch of people who do the same job as you – just in different companies or as freelancers – would be uniquely restorative. You always come away from these meet-ups wishing you could spend more time with these people.

And sure enough, when you got to the pub, you were welcomed immediately as part of the core group, a regular. But you stayed quiet on the fringes for a short while, as the first beer dissolved gently into your blood. You found yourself talking to a couple of your fellow regulars, circling the usual conversational haunts: demanding clients, useless feedback, the nightmare scenario of being forced to rewrite copy live as you share your screen on an all-team meeting (if you’ve ever made a copywriter do this, please know your face is never coming off their mental dartboard).

Then a latecomer arrived: conspicuous because of his height and because he looked like he belonged in one of those terrible post-grunge bands that proliferated during the early 2000s. He looked like every boy you had a crush on between the ages of 12 and 16, in other words. Your teenage self rose, a giggling ghost at your shoulder, while you had to stifle a laugh for real as you looked straight into the eyes of this long-haired, patchy-bearded new arrival.

Later he would whisper ‘you looked right at me’.

But you weren’t going over there, absolutely not. Recently bruised by someone else’s cowardice, you weren’t exactly in a hurry to line your heart up for another kicking. So you stayed with your friends, the conversation moving away from your day jobs and towards the unfinished novels and screenplays you all hammered away at in bursts and felt guilty for never completing.

And then some people started gathering coats and scarves and talking about last trains, while you and your fellow locals stayed put. You saw Tall Guy linger and decided to risk another drink. Unintentionally, you ended up side-by-side at the bar, waiting to be served.

‘Are you a musician? You look like a musician.’ You’d said it before you’d thought about it – but look, that’s a line with a solid success rate in Brighton.

He had to think for a split second. ‘No.’

‘Do you play any instrument at all?’ By this point, you’d had three drinks and no dinner.

‘A bit of guitar actually, yeah’.

Not that it mattered; at this particular moment, you did not care a jot what this man did in his spare time. You both ended up part of the last group standing, and soon, whatever had passed between you when he first appeared – that accidental glance, that lightning-strike of nothing very much at all – took shape.

But it took until you decided to leave. You carried on chatting with the others, silently willing them to leave and silently matching the Tall Guy drink for drink while a thread of invisible energy hummed between you. Then it was just the two of you left, and still he did not make a move. Alright, fine. Maybe I’ve misread this completely.

You were half-disappointed as you made the decision to go home but also half-high on how powerful it would feel to walk away and leave him wondering. So you put on your coat, leaned in to hug him goodbye, and kissed his cheek in a way that was the opposite of polite.

And that was it, that’s what it took. His hands were in your hair and you were kissing in the middle of a bar like students.

‘You looked right at me,’ he whispered.

Eventually, you observed you might get chucked out if you carried on kissing in the middle of the bar like students.

‘I’ll walk you out,’ he said.

More kissing, in the cold street. You finally turned to leave, to actually leave this time – and he pulled you back by your wrist.

Oh, you thought about that wrist-grab for days. It haunted you like a fever dream, made you gloriously, luxuriantly deranged. Outwardly, you carried on as normal: went to work, bought groceries, walked the dog. But you were in the clutches of an alien madness and you felt skinned. Song lyrics cut you to the quick and you saw moments of fleeting beauty everywhere. Even the lashing wind from a winter that had long outstayed its welcome felt exhilarating rather than painful as it whipped across your face.

And the scenes that played on a loop in your head were obscene. You were secretly mad, sickened with feral desire. Blood roiling with it, every fibre of every muscle flexing and twitching and frenetically, dangerously alive.

You tried to burn off this surplus energy by writing pages and pages of filth in your diary. You had never been so prolific. You had never been so amused by your own melodrama nor so mortified by your own sentence fragments, many of them abandoned, interrupted by the next thought and left unfinished. You tried – in vain, it must be said – to believe that in a situation like this, the fantasy was likely to be the best bit. This was the purest thrill, a cold-water-shock of a reminder that you were still a living, breathing, wanting animal.

And you realised something important: the crush that results from an encounter like this is fundamentally a conversation with yourself. The ‘he’ of your fantasies is almost entirely your own construction. You get to cast yourself in the role of the desired, and what you’re in love with at this moment is therefore yourself; you are imagining what he saw when he looked at you and what he’s remembered of you since then. If indeed he has remembered anything at all.

We can never truly see ourselves as others do, but this is perhaps the way we get closest to it: feeling someone’s desiring gaze upon us and unfurling in the glow of it. And oh, the hunger that gaze incites. How it rages. How it roars in your veins and aches in your bones, how it animates each idle thought and stalks your dreams and falls again upon you each morning with the dawn.

Eventually, of course, a fire will burn itself out. Life came back into focus.

But two weeks after that evening, you got a text.

‘I would like to see you again.’

There was life in that madness yet.