Supper With Sarah...

Sarah chattered away while we waited for the soup to heat up. She was crouched awkwardly on a stool next to a single gas ring which served as her cooker, watching the small saucepan and talking about her work.

She’d just come back from a conference abroad and was fizzing with new ideas, her face lovelier than ever, alive with enthusiasm. I hoped I looked interested but my mind was tending to wander...  I’d never been inside her bedsit before and really hoped this was the start of something much more than friendship. I re-filled her wine glass while she was talking hoping she’d not notice that mine was still quite full. Stay sober at all costs, Doug. Pace yourself.

She leant over to stir the broth, her light cotton blouse open at the neck, now showing just a little more of the curve of her breast.

We’d been colleagues for the best part of a year, our friendship developing into more than that of mere workmates. We went out together several lunchtimes a week to the café around the corner from our office, tucked away down an alley off Fleet Street. Recently we had started doing things together in the evenings, too, having discovered that we both liked foreign films and the less mainstream theatre. There’d been a visit to her parents in the suburbs, too. We seemed to have a common outlook on the world; hers revealing a certain vulnerability that only served to make her even more attractive to me.

I desperately wanted to move things along further, a lot further, romantically further. But was it the vibes from Sarah or my fear of rejection which told me not to move too quickly?

Now, out of the blue she’d invited me for supper. I had arrived wearing a brand new shirt, the lightest splash of aftershave and clutching a bottle of a decent wine and six red roses.

Her bedsit was intimate and tiny: an irregular-shaped room on the second floor of an old building. Immediately in front of the only window and dominating the room was a large, high, double bed with a colourful hand-made patchwork quilt bedspread. On the wall above it was a large framed print of a seated nude by a modern artist - Modigliani I guessed. I hoped it was a good omen.

I was sitting adjacent to the end of the bed in what was the only upholstered chair, old and threadbare in places. A utility chair with a rush seat was next to me on one side of the small round wooden table we’d soon be dining off. It was just big enough for two soup bowls. It was carefully laid with two soup spoons (not matching), a small basket with a few pieces of rustic bread torn from a loaf, a now a pub glass serving as a vase for the roses.

She spooned some soup into our bowls and brought her stool up to the table so we sat facing each other, her dark eyes flashing with interest. “Watch out - it is very hot,” she said, her long dark hair framing her almost symmetrical face. I tried to fill her glass again but she moved a slender hand over the top. “Better not, I don’t want to get squiffy”. Squiffy was precisely where I wanted her and I said so and I grinned wickedly. She ignored my comment, not blushing at all, and carried on talking about the conference.

I moved the roses slightly to one side so that our eyes could meet and she chatted on as we ate, me still trying to flirt and tease, she failing to respond in kind.

When she reached over to take my empty bowl, I was ready with my killer chat-up line, the one I’d been practising in the mirror back home for several days now. But she got in first. “Doug, I want your advice - that’s really why I asked you over for supper”.

What was I hearing?

“It’s complicated. You see, I’ve met this man…”