Friday, one glass, no audience. That is the whole setup, and it still feels like I am getting away with something. I finish at the bank, I drop the supervisor face somewhere between the office doors and the pavement, and I go and sit at a small table with a glass of red I do not strictly need. No friend running late. No date I have had to perform for in the group chat. Just me, a dress that knows what it is doing, and the low noise of other people’s evenings.
I used to think going out alone was sad. That is the inheritance talking. Essex rooms where a girl by herself gets a look, not always unkind, just curious in that way that means someone will ask who you are waiting for. As if waiting were the respectable shape of wanting. I am thirty one now and I have decided I am not waiting. I am sitting. There is a difference. Waiting is a story you tell so nobody thinks you are hungry. Sitting is what you do when you have your own money, your own Friday, and a private dare that does not need a witness.
The dare is small and I still feel it in my stomach every time. It is not danger exactly, not the stupid kind. It is the feeling of being seen without a buffer. A friend is a buffer. A planned date is a buffer. Even your phone is a buffer if you hide in it hard enough. I try not to hide. I take the table in the corner of a Shoreditch wine bar, I put the phone face down, and I let the room happen. That sounds like a column about mindfulness. It is not. It is about sex and loneliness and vanity and freedom all sat in the same chair.
Work me would never admit how much I like this. Work me is harsh with a team of under twenty fives and allergic to sloppiness. Work me does not get a little wet from the simple fact of a man in a good suit noticing the empty chair. That sentence would not survive a meeting. This page is not a meeting.
I pick places with decent wine and enough light that I can clock a face. I am not hunting with a net. I am leaving the door on the latch. There is a difference there too, and I can feel women inventing a cleaner motive while they read. Fine. Invent it. I like a drink. I like being dressed. I like the possibility. Possibility is underrated. People want plot. I want the ten minutes before plot, when your body has already voted and your mouth is still making small talk about nothing.
How a suit sits down is a whole language. I am serious. You can tell a lot from whether he asks or assumes, whether he looks at your glass first, whether his eyes do that quick inventory and then come back to your face like he has remembered you are a person. The money ones are easy to spot in East London on a Friday. Watch, shoes, the way the shirt sits open at the throat after a day of pretending the city belongs to them. Some of that is attractive. Some of it is just costume. I have learned the hard way that a costume can kiss badly.
My body decides first. That is the part I used to be embarrassed about, as if wanting were a leak I should have patched. I will be mid sentence about work in the vaguest possible terms, because I am not giving a stranger my employer, and under the table my knee will already know. Heat. Attention. That low pull that has nothing to do with whether he votes the way I do or whether he would survive Sunday roast with my family. The body is rude. The body does not care about my ideal man list. Tall, dark, handsome, kettle, foot rubs, stay the night and still like me in the morning. The body cares about a voice, a mouth, the weight of a look held a second too long.
I have left with men who were not the list. I have also finished my glass, paid, and gone home to the onesie and a show so stupid it rinses the week out of me. Both versions are mine. The internet likes a woman to pick a brand. Either you are out here being sexually free or you are a soft romantic waiting for a decent man. I am both, and Friday night is where they argue.
Going out alone still feels like a small dare because of the story I tell myself about what I look like. Not ugly. Not catalogue pretty either. Blonde hair tied back more often than not, makeup minimal, athletic rather than carved. In the office I am practical. In the bar I put on the dress and feel the shift. Men look. Some look like they are bored and hunting. Some look like they have been given a pleasant surprise. I like the second look more than I should. It is vain. It is also information. I have spent years being the stern one. Being clocked as a woman with an evening is a different kind of power, quieter, a bit dangerous to my own peace.
There is always a moment after he sits when I have to decide whether I am going to be charming. I throw charm when I am nervous. It is a tell I cannot fully kill. I will make a dry joke. I will let the Essex out a little, not the full roast table version, just enough that he understands I am not a glossy blank. The accent thickens if I drink or if I like him. I used to flatten it. I do not flatten it anymore. If a man in a suit is put off because I sound like where I am from, he can go and find a girl who thinks Basildon is a punchline.
We talk about nothing important. That is correct. I do not want his portfolio. I do not want to give him my team’s sins. I want to know if he listens. Listening is rarer than height. He can be a high flyer and still be thick about a woman’s face. The good ones ask a question and then stay for the answer. The bad ones use your sentence as a trampoline for their own. I have sat through enough trampolines. I finish drinks faster when that happens. I am allowed to want company without renting my ears out.
People ask, in nicer words, whether this is safe. I am not reckless. I tell someone I am going. I stay in public. I do not follow a man into the kind of night that only works in films. I have a bank brain even when I am being the other girl. Risk assessment does not switch off because the lighting is nice. That said, there is no version of a woman alone that some stranger will not have an opinion about. I decided I would rather have my own opinion. My opinion is that I have as much right to a Friday table as a man with a loosened tie and a wandering eye.
When it works, it works in stages I can feel in order. First the look across the room. Then the empty chair question. Then the knee that does not move away when it brushes mine. Then the decision in the body, yes, this, before the head has finished its due diligence. I have tried to reverse that order. I have tried to be sensible first. Sensible first is how you end up in a long conversation with a man whose mouth you do not want, out of manners. Manners have a poor Friday record.
I left with one of them. You may have read around the edges of that night already. Executive. Sharp suit. The kind of money that does not need to say the word money. In the cab his hand sat on my thigh like it had been invited, which it had, by everything I had done since I let him sit down. I remember the streets sliding past and thinking, this is the dare paying out. Not destiny. Not the tall dark kettle man. A night. I wanted a night. I am allowed a night. I keep repeating that because part of me still hears an aunt in Basildon asking who I was with, as if the answer had to be a name you could bring to roast.
The city makes those nights easy and the morning after oddly loud. You wake up in your own bed or you do not. You have the shower. You have the replay. You have the version you will tell your friends after two drinks and the version you will keep because some details are not for the group chat. I am loyal to my small circle and I am also a woman who talks. Those two facts fight on Saturday. Usually the talk wins, softened. I do not hand out identifying features. I hand out weather. How it felt. Whether he could kiss. Whether I felt like a person or a scene he was shooting in his head.
Kissing is how I know. In a wine bar you can fake conversation. You cannot fake a kiss in the stairwell once the door of the evening has closed. A good kisser slows the dare down and makes it better. A bad kisser makes you want your coat. I have walked away from nights at the threshold because the mouth was sloppy and entitled. People think that is harsh. I think it is efficient. My time is not an unlimited resource. I already gave the bank most of it.
The nights I go home alone are not failures. I need that on the page in case I forget it. I have sat through a second glass, decided nobody in the room had it, paid, and felt oddly proud on the pavement. The dare is not completed only when someone comes home with you. The dare is completed when you leave the flat. Everything after that is extra. Extra can be delicious. Extra can also be a man who talks about himself in quarters and halves until you want to put your head in the ice bucket.
I watch couples in these bars and do that private inventory women do. Who is performing. Who is bored. Who has a hand on a neck like a claim and who has a hand on a neck like a question. I want the question. I have never liked being collected. I like being chosen in the moment, which is different. Chosen tonight. Not added to a roster. The high flyers can be the worst for rosters. They have the polish and the calendar and the sense that women are a category of treat. I can fancy the polish and still clock the category. When I clock it I go home. My hunger is not so desperate that I will be a treat on a plate with good lighting.
There is a feminist sentence in here if you want one, and I will not preach it. I earn my money. I buy my wine. I go home when I want. That should be ordinary. It still feels faintly rebellious, which tells you about the world, not about my wine order. I am not interested in a lecture about whether casual nights empower anyone. I am interested in whether I liked myself in the morning. Some Fridays I do. Some Fridays I feel a bit hollow and I put a film on and I let that be true too. Honesty is not a brand. It is just what is left when you stop tidying.
Why alone, though, really. Friends are easy. I have a tight circle and they would come. They would make it louder and safer and funnier. They would also make it a different night. I would perform a bit. I perform for people I love without meaning to, the commentary, the bit where I am entertaining. Alone, I do not have to be entertaining. I can be quiet. I can be the girl who watches. I can let a man come over and do the work of crossing the room, which I like more than I will say at work. I like being approached when I have already chosen the ground. My ground. My table. My glass.
The body decides first, and then the head tries to catch up with a list. Is he kind in the eyes. Does he smell like effort without drowning in it. Does he assume I am younger and can I live with that little flutter of vanity when he does. I have had to prove my age once, which was ridiculous and also the best accidental compliment I had been paid in months. Thirty one and still being asked to produce evidence. I laughed. I liked laughing. I also liked that I could. A night that cannot take a laugh is too brittle to go home with.
I think about my future man in these rooms even when I am not looking for him. That is the romantic infection I cannot quite cure. A suit sits down and some small stupid part of me wonders, is it you. It almost never is. It is a Friday. It is chemistry. It is a mouth I might want for a few hours. I let the small stupid part exist and I do not give it the keys. Hope can sit in the corner if it behaves. Hope is allowed to watch. Hope is not allowed to turn a high flyer into a husband over one glass of red.
When I write this I can hear a certain kind of reader wanting me to repent. I will not. I can hear another kind wanting me to turn it into a manifesto about women owning their desire. I will not do that either. I am not a campaign. I am a person who gets lonely in a specific city way and solves it sometimes with a dress and a table. I solve it sometimes with roast potatoes and my mum’s kitchen. I solve it sometimes with nothing but sleep. The wine bar is just one tool. It is a pretty tool. It works on Fridays.
I walk in and I feel the dare. I sit down and I feel it thin out into something calmer. I drink. I watch. I decide. If nobody sits, I have still done the thing I came to do, which was to be a woman in a room without an escort. If somebody sits, my body gets a vote before my manners do. If I take him home, I do it with my eyes open. If I do not, I get the night air and the walk and the quiet flat and I am still the person who left the office and chose herself as company.
That last bit is the part I like most when I am honest. Not the suit. Not even the kiss, and I am greedy about kissing. The bit where I look at the empty chair opposite me and do not panic. I used to panic. I used to feel the absence like a verdict. Now I feel it like space. Space can be filled. Space can stay empty and still be mine. A man can sit in it if he asks properly and my knee says yes. He cannot sit in it because I am afraid of what alone looks like.
Friday, one glass, no audience. I will do it again. I will wear the dress again. I will put the phone down again. I will let a stranger’s voice try its luck and I will be kind or blunt depending on the quality of the luck. I will go home with someone or I will go home with my keys in my hand and a little heat still left in my throat from the possibility.
The city is full of people performing evenings. I am trying to have one. That is all this is. A table, a glass, a dare small enough to repeat, and a body that knows before I do whether the night is going to stay respectable. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it does not. I pay my bill either way. I am good at bills. I am learning, slowly, to be good at wanting without making wanting look like a problem I need a man to solve.
If you see a blonde woman in the corner with her phone face down and her accent ready to thicken if she likes you, it might not be me. It might be. Do not make it weird. Ask about the chair like a human. Look at my face when I talk. Do not tell me your bonus. Do not assume the empty seat is a sad story.
It is not a sad story. It is a Friday. I bought the glass myself. I can afford the night I am in. The rest is weather. A suit sits down, or he does not. My body decides, or it stays with the wine and the low music and the private pleasure of having come out anyway. That private pleasure is the part I keep when I take the make up off and put the hoodie on and become the girl who will be stern again on Monday.
I like her. I like the one in the bar as well. They share a bank account and a stubborn streak and a hope they do not advertise. On Fridays they take turns. I pour the second thought back in the bottle and I leave the glass where it is. One glass, most nights. Enough to soften the week. Not enough to blur the vote.
Going out alone will probably always feel like a small dare. Good. A dare means I am still awake in my life. A dare means I have not disappeared into work and roast dinners and other people’s plans. I can love roast dinners and still want a room where nobody knows I am the supervisor. I can want a husband kind of ending and still like the way a stranger says is this seat taken.
Yes. Sometimes it is taken by the night itself. Sometimes it is taken by a man who can kiss. Sometimes I take it back, finish, and go.
That is the essay. Not a moral. Not a warning. A table in East London and a woman who refuses to wait to look like she is waiting. I sit. I drink. I decide. Then I walk home through streets that do not care, which is their own kind of kindness, and I let the dare expire until next Friday, when I may well do it again.
