Lockdown on London Lane

“Nate. Nate. Nate-Nathan-Nate. Honeypot. Wake up.”

For a cute guy, he wakes up in the most unattractive way. He smacks his lips together, head rolling and eyes blinking, letting out a quiet little fart, and mumbling, “Whassamatter?” before he seems to remember some random girl is living in his apartment for the week, and now she’s waking him up in the middle of the night. He sits up, rubbing his eyes and asking instead, “Immy? What’s up?”

“You drool in your sleep, you know.”

Automatically, his hand comes up to the line of dribble on his chin, and he scrubs it away. I wriggle my way into the gap he’s made between himself and the arm of the sofa; the duvet’s bigger than I thought, though, and he has to shuffle out of my way.

“You woke me up to tell me I drool in my sleep?”

“Yes.”

He lets out a short, disbelieving laugh, before frowning curiously at me and saying, “Did you call me Honeypot?”

“Yes. And it suits you, so shut up.”

“Okay.”

“Do you really think I’m chaotic?”

His frown deepens, the amusement disappearing from his face now. “Oh. Still hung up on that, huh?”

“Just a little.”

“What time is it?”

“One forty-three.”

He sighs. God, how many times have I heard that sigh this week?

So many that I know this isn’t his annoyed sigh, or even the mildly irritated one, but an uncomfortable one.

“Okay, yeah. Fine. I think you’re a chaotic kind of person. Not bad, not good, just straight-up chaotic. What I’m trying to say, is . . .

You seem to have a lot going on. Which, you know, I didn’t really mind when we matched on the app, because I was just looking for something casual, like I said. It just seemed like every day, there was a new batshit crazy thing you were stuck in the middle of. And I’m not being funny, but you did pretty much invite yourself over to my apartment in the middle of a global pandemic when you didn’t even remember my name.”

“When you put it like that . . . ” I chew on my lower lip for a minute, then ask him, “Didn’t you think they were funny, though?”

“Think what was funny?”

“My stories. Whatever batshit crazy thing I had going that day.”

Nate shrugs one shoulder. It knocks against me. “Sure. I mean, yeah, you told a funny story, but mostly I just read the messages thinking, how the fuck does this much stuff happen to someone? I mean, you had an email threatening you and your housemates with bailiffs, then the next day you went to three different shops because you realized you had no toilet paper and you came back with a crate of wine instead. There was the neighborhood cat you left food out for, and then it got into the house and you couldn’t get it to leave again . . . It just seemed like a lot of really wild stuff going on. I don’t think I’d have believed it was all happening in real time if you hadn’t sent pictures.”

I blink at him. “You say that like that sort of thing’s not normal.”

“Do all your other friends do stuff like that?”

“Well, not . . . Like, not exactly, I guess. And for the record, I did buy toilet paper. Not just the wine.”

“Good to know.”

We both fall quiet, until Nate claps his hands softly to his thighs and says, “Vodka or tea?”

I don’t remember the last time I turned down the offer of some vodka, but I give him a small smile. “Tea would be great. Thanks.”

This time, when Nate gets back with two steaming mugs of tea, I’m hunched in the corner of the sofa, sticking my hands out of my self-made blanket burrito to take the mug off him; Nate doesn’t even so much as look like he wants to admonish me for risking spilling tea on his lovely clean duvet.

He must be feeling sorry for me.

I’m used to people rolling their eyes at me, or being a little pissed off with me, and Lucy has definitely been disappointed in me more than once, but I don’t remember the last time somebody felt sorry for me.

“You know,” I mumble, “I think you managed to do in one day what my therapist has been trying to do for a year.”

“Nobody ever called you chaotic before?”

“Not the way you did.”

“Changing your whole perspective on yourself for a guy? And you called yourself a feminist in your bio.”

He’s teasing, though, so I cut him a mock glare.

“Should charge you for it,” he muses, rubbing his chin melodramatically. “What do therapists charge these days?”

“One night of hot sex and the return of your Ramones T-shirt.”

Nate laughs so hard he snorts, which makes me giggle, too, just a bit.

“So you, um, you see a therapist?”

“I thought loads of people did these days. I thought it was hashtag-stylish.” I roll my eyes. “Of course I see a therapist. Like, half my friends do.”

“Yeah, no, loads of mine do as well. Or did, at some point.” Nate nods, slowly, thoughtfully, and I wait to see what he’s going to ask me next. Probably wants to know why I see a therapist. Or what I think is so screwed up about me that makes my life so chaotic.

But what he says is, “It’s not like it’s easy, you know. This whole . . .

this.” He offers up a grand, and appropriately vague, sweeping gesture around the room. “I’m not saying some of my mates are even half as wild as you, but some of them seem to be . . . stuck too. And then some of them are off getting married and having babies and buying houses with south-facing gardens and it’s like, way to show up the rest of us—but then they feel like they’re the ones getting left behind when someone starts posting about their year traveling in Asia and volunteering to build schools in Africa.”

“What?”

“What I mean is, everyone’s just moving at different speeds. We all think we’re on the same track and that we just missed the train, but the fact is, nobody’s on the same track, and not everyone’s even on a train.”

I stare at him for a long moment, processing that, trying to get my head around it.

Maybe . . . Maybe he’s got a point.

Lucy would be your average train, for sure. Maybe a nice one, with a fancy first-class carriage, and trolley service and nice comfy seats.

And Nate, he’d be one of those boring seven-seater cars like all the dads used to drive when I was at school.

Which would make me, what? A hang glider? One of those duck buses that turn into a boat? A penny farthing?

Nate mistakes my silence for confusion. His face scrunches up and he grimaces, scratching his head.

“It sounded better coming from the vlogger I got it from. It sounded smart when he said it. But that’s kind of my point, right? Or, his point, I guess, that I stole. What I’m trying to say is, just because you’re not in the same place as other people, doesn’t mean you have to make up for it by putting on this whole persona. When I said you were chaotic—”

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