Like I said, I could get addicted to anything.
7
In the staff room, Carey-Jane was microwaving her revolting minestrone soup. The smell would stay on my clothes for the next seventy years. Hell is other people’s food. Trying to numb myself to the different stenches doing battle – Priya’s tuna bap, Yasmine’s beetroot salad – I ate my own （civic-minded, stench-free） hummus and crackers and zoned out for a while, thinking about Luke.
I’d see him tomorrow. Which was almost unimaginable. A wash of gratitude for Quin hit me.
Granted, my feelings for him weren’t what I’d felt for Luke. But how could they be? Quin wasn’t Luke. And I wasn’t the starry-eyed hopeful who’d fallen in love with Luke, but someone older and wiser.
Sometimes, when I considered that things with Quin might not have happened, I went cold.
The relief I’d felt during the LovingKindness exercise at the meditation weekend had been real – but in the twenty-four hours afterwards, I’d wondered if, actually, it had had anything to do with Quin? Perhaps it had just finally been time for me to forgive myself and Quin had appeared as a catalyst? ‘When the pupil is ready, the master will appear.’ （That’s the kind of thing we say in ‘personal-growth’ circles. Nola says it, Anna says it, even Brianna says it occasionally and she believes in nothing unless it can be signed for or filed.）
Less than two days after we’d met, Quin texted, then rang. ‘So. We should meet. Properly.’
His self-assurance was impressive. Entertaining, almost. But to say I was out of the habit with men was a giant understatement. In the previous year I’d gone on a couple of dates, once with a cousin of Brianna’s and another time with a colleague of Claire’s – but only because Brianna and Claire made me. It was no surprise that nothing further had ensued.
‘Let’s do an escape room,’ Quin said. ‘If things go south and we’ve nothing to say to each other, at least we’ll have fun trying to unlock the puzzle.’
‘Hold on there, mister, what if we can’t? Unlock it, I mean? Are we stuck there forever?’
‘Haha, no, they let us out after an hour. You’ve never done one? Okay, wear comfortable clothes, like, no high heels or tight dresses.’
Tight dresses? I thought. You’d be lucky!
‘Is it maths and stuff?’ I asked. ‘Because I’m terrible at that. I don’t want to be responsible for us losing.’
‘Not maths. Basic cop on, mostly. And I’m really competitive; we’ll definitely win.’
Well? I asked the voice in my head. Should I go?
But that day, she remained frustratingly silent.
So I ran the whole thing by my sisters.
‘What age is he?’ Claire asked.
‘Same as me? Maybe a bit younger?’
‘Kids? Ex-wife? Job?’ Margaret asked.
‘I don’t know. But by the law of averages, he’s likely to tick some of the boxes.’
‘And you’re okay if there are kids and an ex-wife?’ Claire asked. ‘Like, you’d better be. At your age, everyone has baggage.’
‘Is he a Feathery Stroker?’ Helen asked. ‘Has to be if he was trying meditation.’
The term ‘Feathery Stroker’ originated years ago in New York after Anna’s friend Jacqui slept with a kind, respectful man who’d spent most of the night stroking her body with featherlight pressure. Unbearable, she’d said. Being flung across a bed and ravaged was much more her thing.
To be fair, many people would adore a session of feathery stroking but the phrase caught on and spread to condemn all straight men who were a bit, I suppose, earnest. Perhaps slightly humourless and pompously right-on: men who pontificated about their homemade tamarind marinade with its secret ingredient （which was always tabasco）; who defended public breastfeeding even when there had been no objections; who sought your opinion about putting their cat on Valium or who pronounced ‘artisanal’ in a nonexistent French-meets-Dutch accent （‘oar-tijj-in-owwl’）。
I, personally, wouldn’t have been keen on actual feathery stroking but more and more blameless men came to be written off as the circles of definition expanded: those who habitually used the word ‘groceries’; had opinions on fabric softener; spent more than thirty seconds going down on you; or had no reservations about eating a mango in the street.
If any of those misfortunates fancied one of my sisters or their friends, they were laughed out of it. And if you liked a man, the very last thing you wanted was for him to be categorized as a Feathery Stroker.