‘Can’t say what?’
‘That stuff about being a feminazi social justice warrior.’
‘Why not? I’m allowed to want to date someone who cares about the same stuff I do, right? And don’t say feminazi – it’s highly offensive on all sorts of levels.’
‘Sorry. But seriously, you’ll scare ninety-nine per cent of blokes off before you’ve even started. And given you’re already ruling out the ninety-one per cent of them who are the wrong star sign, you can’t afford to do that, can you?’
‘But it’s only temporary. I’m going to work my way through the whole zodiac until I find the right person.’
‘Even so. Come on, I know what I’m doing here. Trust me.’
‘Okay… Do your thing.’
Five minutes later, Zoë, 27, London’s profile was live. It described her as a fiery redhead with abs of steel and killer knife skills, and quite frankly she sounded absolutely terrifying. Robbie and I had been through my photos and selected three: one of me cuddling Frazzle (in which he, too, looked kind of terrifying, even I had to admit, making Robbie tell me darkly not to say he hadn’t warned me); one of me in the gym (in which some trick of the light did actually manage to make me look like my abs were half decent); and one of me taken when I was working in Paris, with the Eiffel Tower in the background. (I’d objected to that on the grounds that my hair was all frizzy and I had a spot right next to my nose, but Robbie insisted it made me look well travelled and sophisticated, and I had to relent because he’d let me have the abs one.)
‘Good to go,’ he said. ‘Look, someone’s swiped right on you already. Strong work.’
‘Oh my God, my first match! Give me my phone, let me look.’
‘Hold on. Tom, 28, loves Star Wars and pepperoni pizza. Sounds promising. I’m liking him back.’
He held my phone up high over his head so I couldn’t reach it, and I cursed being only five foot three inches tall, for about the millionth time in my life.
‘Robbie! Give me my phone!’
We had a brief tussle, which I eventually won, mostly because the oven beeped and Robbie whipped round to take out the muffins before they burned. Before I could check out Tom’s profile in more detail, though, a red dot flashed up next to the messages tab at the top of my screen.
‘Shit. He’s messaged me. What do I do?’
Robbie laughed. ‘You read it, obviously. Come on, it’s not brain surgery.’
My finger was literally trembling as I hovered over the tab, then tapped it.
There were no words in the message, just a picture. It was kind of blurry and the lighting wasn’t the best, but I could still more or less make out what it was.
It looked like a penis, only smaller.
Five
Others will be drawn to you today, Aquarius. Make the most of your attractions while you can.
That might have been my first dick pic – the breaking of my dick-pic virginity, so to speak – but it wasn’t the last. Over the next few days, wang after wang popped up in my inbox. If I’d been concerned that my period of celibacy had gone on for so long I’d forgotten what a cock looked like, Tinder would have put me right in no time at all. At the rate this was going, it wouldn’t be long before the number of penises that had landed in my inbox would exceed the number that had landed in me, which was a somewhat depressing thought.
‘What’s wrong with these people?’ I complained to Robbie. ‘Seriously, what do they actually think they’ll achieve by doing this? Do they do it to blokes, too?’
‘Hardly ever,’ Robbie said wistfully. ‘And I wouldn’t mind too much if they did. I like having a good look at a nice hard-on. But it’s just rude, isn’t it? Block the fuckers.’
‘It’s about control, right?’ Dani said later in the gym, once we’d recovered our breath enough after our workout to talk at all. ‘It’s like, I want to show you my junk and I don’t care about what you want.’
I rolled over on the mat, leaving the sweaty imprint of my body behind. ‘What do they think is going to happen? Like, does any woman ever receive a dick pic and immediately be like, “Oh yes, bring that right here and let me see if it’s that good in the flesh”?’
‘Maybe they do,’ Dani mused. ‘I mean, maybe if you were on Tinder for booty calls, it would work. Like a try-before-you-buy kind of thing.’
‘Maybe they think you’ll be flattered. Maybe they’re trying to show you that reading about how you love Quentin Tarantino movies and halloumi fries has given them the raging horn.’
‘God, the idea of halloumi fries is giving me the raging horn right now,’ Dani said. ‘I’m always starving after a workout. I could totally inhale an entire portion of those bad boys to myself and move on to potato wedges and it wouldn’t touch the sides.’
‘Oh my God, potato wedges.’ I levered myself to my feet, waited a second to make sure my legs would actually hold me up, and took a gulp from my water bottle. ‘We’ve got them on the menu in the pub tonight – it’s burger night. The punters will be lucky if there are any left once I get my hands on them.’
‘It’s protein you need after a heavy workout, you know, ladies,’ said a voice behind us. I turned around and Dani sat up. ‘You’ve heard about the thermic effect, right? The calories burned in protein metabolism are twenty to thirty per cent higher than when metabolising carbs and fats. Plus proteins trigger the release of satiety-inducing hormones in the brain’s hypothalamus, while inhibiting the release of ghrelin, the hunger hormone.’
Normally, I’d have rolled my eyes at the tedious inevitability of having fitness mansplained to me by some random dude in the gym. But I couldn’t roll my eyes now, mostly because they were in danger of popping out of my head. Not because the man who’d spoken was hot – although objectively he was: six foot two of pure, rippling muscle, with an elaborate sleeve tattoo wrapping around one bulging bicep, tousled dark brown hair and Hollywood-perfect teeth – but because of who he was.
Fabian Flatley. The same Fabian Flatley who’d made a bid to purchase the Ginger Cat last year, wanting to close it down and turn it into luxury apartments. In the end there’d been a massive scandal over his tech start-up squirrelling away funds in the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes, as well as dodgy quality and extortionate service charges in the apartment blocks he’d already built (never mind his habit of talking loudly on his mobile in the gym, which as far as I was concerned should have carried a custodial sentence), and he’d disappeared to San Francisco, where I’d assumed he still was.
But he wasn’t. He was here, and he was bad news.
‘That’s really interesting,’ Dani was saying. ‘So if you eat, like, an egg, that’s got the same number of calories as a piece of toast, you basically get fewer calories from the egg?’
‘Correct,’ Fabian said, squatting down next to her and taking out his phone. ‘There was a great article about it recently in Fitness magazine. Why don’t you give me your number and I’ll WhatsApp you a link?’