I had that number for weeks and I treated it like a locked drawer. Not deleted. Not used. Just sitting there in the phone, quietly accusing me every time I opened the messages by mistake. I would scroll past it and pretend I was a woman with standards and a calendar and a brain that clocks in on time. Then Friday happened, and wine happened, and the version of me that supervises a team and balances figures went off shift. Want clocked in. Wisdom did not even put its shoes on.
I am thirty one. I know how this reads. It reads like I have no self control, which is not entirely unfair, and also not the whole story. I had been on and off with the idea since I got the number. I like a man who is good in bed. Most of us do, if we stop doing the cute shrug. The trouble was the stories. Two women I actually trust, not the loud ones, not the ones who perform a conquest for the table. They both went quiet first. Then they both got that same look. They said he ruins you. In the best way. Best you will ever get. That is a heavy sentence to carry around on the Central line. It is intimidating when you already know you like it high energy. It is worse when you have spent years telling yourself no man is as good as the rumour.
So I sat on it. I am good at sitting on things. I sit on opinions at work. I sit on the soft part of myself until I am home in a hoodie. I sat on this number like it might bite. Some nights I wrote a message and deleted it. Some nights I opened the chat and just stared at the empty field like an idiot. There is a particular kind of cowardice that looks like patience. I called it judgement. It felt grown. It felt like the girl who goes home for roast and does not make a mess of her week for a stranger.
Then I had a drink. Then I had another. I was in the flat, not even out, which is how you know it was serious. Out in a wine bar you can blame the room. At home it is just you and the bottle and the part of your brain that has been humming since Tuesday. I put some rubbish on the telly so I would not have to hear myself think. Commentary usually saves me. It did not save me that night. I picked up the phone the way you pick up a bad idea you have already made friends with.
I did not do a clever opener. I did not pretend I only wanted a chat. I told him straight. That is a very me thing and also a slightly insane thing, given what I was asking for. Charm when I am nervous. Honesty when the wine has loosened the bolt. I could hear my own accent in the words, thicker than it is in emails. I sent it and then I sat there with my heart doing something unprofessional in my chest.
He replied quicker than I expected. First surprise. Men with a reputation like that are supposed to play it cooler, or maybe I have watched too much telly. He thought I sounded younger. That stopped me. I laughed out loud in an empty room, which is a pathetic sound if you catch yourself doing it. I had to send a picture of my ID to prove I was thirty one. Coolest compliment I have had in a long time, if I am being honest. Made me feel giddy and slightly seen, even while I was cringing at how forward I had been. Looking that young is not something I work at. It is just sleep and genetics and the fact I do not cake my face for the office. Still. Being mistaken for a kid when you are a bank supervisor with a team and a rent payment is a strange little gift. I took it.
He cannot do anything until next week. Work, or life, or the ordinary machinery that keeps even rumoured men in ordinary time. So now I have days. Days are dangerous. Days are where wisdom tries to make a comeback and want just sits in the body like weather.
I woke up the next morning and the message was still there. No magic undo. No fog so thick I could pretend a stranger had used my thumbs. I made tea. I stared at the mug like it might offer policy. Part of me wanted to write something breezy, joke it off, take the power back. The other part was already replaying the few lines we had exchanged and smiling at the screen like a teenager. I am not a teenager. I am a woman who knows better and did it anyway.
People talk about drunk texts as if they are accidents. Some are. This was not an accident so much as a jailbreak. The judgement had been on duty for weeks. It had done its job. It had kept me from disappointment, which is the thing I hate most with this subject. I find being promised a revelation and then handed the same old half hearted effort almost offensive. Curiosity is a pest, though. It followed me to the station. It sat in the lift. It turned up in a meeting I should have been listening to. By the time the wine arrived, the pest had friends.
I keep a small circle. Those two women are in it, which is why their stories landed. If a loud girl in a bar told me a man destroyed her I would smile and file it under performance. These two went quiet. Quiet is expensive. Quiet means they were not selling me a legend. They were remembering. I have been turning that over ever since. What does it mean when two separate people use the same kind of hush. What does it mean when the man himself, if you asked him, would probably shrug and say he does not know what you are talking about. That is how rumours stay alive. The girls talk. He confirms nothing. You are left with your own nerve.
At work I put the face back on. Harsh, stern, the whole bit. Nobody on my team needs to know their supervisor spent Sunday with her stomach in knots because a stranger on a phone thought she looked young. I crossed my legs at my desk at one point and had to breathe through a memory that had no business in a bank. That is the split I live with. Spreadsheets by day. This humming by night. I walked to the station telling myself I was being ridiculous. I looked him up anyway, weeks ago, which is how I knew he was only alright in pictures. Not catalogue handsome. Ordinary in a way that made the lore more interesting, not less. The dangerous ones rarely look like a poster. They look like someone you might pass and not clock, until you do.
I threw charm at the first message because that is my cover. I told him I had heard good things and that I wanted to try. I said I could give him a proper run for my money. In daylight that line makes me cover my face. Who talks like that to a man she has been too chicken to text for a month. Me, apparently. The girl who likes to think she is sweet and a bit timid until the switch flips. I have a drive I usually hide. I stay single so I can have fun without turning someone good into collateral. I also keep this daft, stubborn hope that the right one will turn up and keep me in check. Tall. Dark haired. Handsome enough. Affectionate after. Foot rubs. Kettle. The whole fairytale with a filthy streak. I have not found him. This number was never supposed to be him. This number was supposed to be research. A night. A test of the rumour. Wine turned research into a sent message.
Waiting is its own sport. He said next week and my body took that as a starting gun. I have been restless. Showering when I do not need to, as if hot water might rinse the thought out. It does not. It just gives the thought a steamy room to stretch in. I catch myself grinning for no reason and then I remember I have to wait and the grin turns into a sigh. It is doing my head in, but in the nicest way. I put telly on and give it the usual commentary and still check the phone every two minutes like the plot is in there.
Judgement has opinions about all of this. Judgement says you do not text a reputation on a Friday because two friends got that look. Judgement says you are thirty one, you have a good job, you go home to Basildon for gravy, you are not a girl who needs to chase a legend. Judgement is not wrong. Judgement is also not the one who has to live in a body that lights up when someone is described as the best you will ever get. I can hold both. I do it every week. The bank gets the woman who will not let sloppy work leave the floor. The flat gets the woman who knows she likes being thrown about and kissed properly and taken apart without a performance. The phone sits in the middle like a traitor.
I keep thinking about the ID. Not because I need compliments. Because of what it did to the tone. He was careful. He did not just swallow the first message and start talking filth like a bot. He checked I was grown. That should be basic and somehow it felt like manners. Manners from a man with that kind of whisper around him is a confusing combination. I liked it. I liked it enough that the nerves doubled. If he had been crude straight away I could have filed him under predictable and gone to bed. Instead I have this stretch of days where I am allowed to imagine, and imagination is a menace when you already run hot.
I told myself I would not write about it until after. Then I sat down with tea gone cold and realised the story had already started. The story is not the night. Not yet. The story is the weeks of almost, the deleted drafts, the way a rumour can live in your thigh muscles before anyone has touched you. The story is wine pulling a chair up to judgement and talking over it. I can be funny about that. I am good at the dry line. Underneath it I am properly nervous. Excited in that scary way. Stomach doing somersaults. Certain, stupidly certain, that it is going to be a good time. I do not know how I know. I just do. That certainty is what got me wet thinking about a week that has not even arrived. I am not precious about saying that. I am also not going to pretend it makes me shameless in the office kitchen. Context, girls. Context.
There is a version of this where I am wiser. I put the glass down. I leave the number alone. I go to Essex on Sunday and talk about potatoes and let the city stay outside the door. That version is lovely. She exists. She is the one who shows up with a chick flick when a friend is wrecked. She is loyal and non judgemental and good in a crisis. She is also the one who hid this appetite until the wine found the key. I do not think those two women cancel each other. I think they take turns at the wheel. Friday night the hungry one drove. Saturday morning the other one made tea and did not smash the phone, which I am counting as growth.
I keep almost texting again. Little check ins. Little jokes. Anything to bleed the pressure off. Then I remember he has a week of his own life and I am not going to sit on his lock screen like a dripping tap. Want wants contact. Wisdom says let the man work. For once I am trying to let wisdom have a shift, now that the damage is done. The message is out. The ID has been seen. The date, or the almost date, is parked in next week like a train I can hear from down the track.
What I will not do is rewrite the night as a moral. Drunk texts are not a personality. They are a tool the body uses when the mind has been too proud. Sometimes they are a catastrophe. Sometimes they are just the truth arriving late and slurring slightly. Mine was the second kind, I think. I did want to try. I had wanted it for weeks. The wine did not invent the wish. It only posted it.
If next week is ordinary, if the rumour was just two friends having a good night and dressing it in myth, I will live. I will be disappointed in that cold way I hate, and I will come home, put the onesie on, and tell myself that judgement had a point. If next week is what they said it is, I will have a different problem, which is how to sit on the Tube on Monday with my work face on and my legs still remembering. Either way I sent the thing. I cannot get the shy back. I am not sure I want it.
I have been single long enough to know the pattern. Heat. Story. Aftermath. The hope that this one might also know how to be kind when the lights are up. I am not asking this number to be the tall dark fairytale. I am asking it to be honest. Show up. Do what the hush promised, or fail in a human way. I can survive a human fail. I struggle with the performance of greatness that turns out to be seven rushed minutes and a man pleased with himself.
Until then I am just a woman who sat on a number, drank, and let want speak. I will go to work. I will be blunt about deadlines. I will vape by the window and watch Hackney do its evening. I will check the phone less, in theory. I will think about the ID photo and the laugh I did in an empty room. I will think about two trusted girls going quiet, then grinning. I will think about next week like it is a weather warning.
Want and wisdom do not clock in at the same time. I have proof now, in sent form. Wisdom can have the rest of the days. Want already clocked its overtime. I am still glad I pressed send. That is the part I did not expect to survive the morning. The shame was smaller than the buzz. The buzz is still here, low and steady, like a train still coming. Next week can arrive when it is ready. I will be here, tea in hand, trying to look like a woman with better judgement, and failing in a way that feels, God help me, quite a lot like being alive.
