The One Before the One by Katy Regan

sentimental and morose and drinking alone in my wedding dress. But really, I wasn’t upset about Nathan or Mark or Garf, I was just upset that, at thirty-two, I was no closer to finding The One, and asking myself whether I’d made a huge mistake letting Martin go. After all, I still loved him, even if he was a bit middle-aged, had over-bearing parents and could spend three hours making the perfect pesto. I just don’t know whether I was ever
in
love with him, that’s all, not after the first few years anyway. But the older I get and the more complicated life becomes, I am beginning to wonder whether I could settle for ‘love’ rather than ‘in love’, which everybody knows is the solid, reliable concrete that remains beneath your feet, when the sparkling snow has melted away.
    Still, I reasoned, it could be worse. At least I had the book club …

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
    Toby leans coolly against my bedroom window frame, takes a slow, deep drag on his cigarette, his eyebrows smouldering as he does. I swear he’s putting that on now.
    ‘God, you really look like James Dean doing that.’
    ‘Do I?’ he says.
    ‘Yes, except for maybe the socks.’ I squint at his feet. ‘Are they actually South Park socks?’
    It’s a rare man that can pull off nudity
avec
South Park socks with all the style and nonchalance of a Hollywood sex god, but Toby Delaney manages to.
    I sit up in bed and pull the sheet up so my nipples don’t escape. It’s 8.08 p.m., still broad daylight outside, the hum of traffic from Battersea Park Road just audible, and Toby is smoking a post-coital cigarette out of my bedroom window. It’s something he’s done every other Wednesday for the past five months, a ritual of the ‘book club’. Except, it isn’t a book club at all. It’s more, well, it’s more of a fuck club. With just the two members: Toby and me.
    Rachel, Toby’s wife thinks it’s a book club. She thinks that every second Wednesday, Toby comes to my house in Battersea to discuss the naked prose of M. J. Hyland, when really, he’s just there to get naked with me.
    I sink further down into the duvet and take a moment to savour his physical form. I never know when it might be my last chance, after all. When all this might implode. When he, or I, decide we can’t do this any more. His long, slim legs, which drive me crazy, his bum, possibly less firm than it could be but that’s because he spends so much time sitting on it. Lazy bugger. His … Yep, he’s got a very nice one. Surely it spells trouble if you’re starting to find their flaccid penis attractive?
    My eyes move up his body to that flat, boyish belly of his, which he’s always stuffing but which never increases. It incites a sort of erotic envy in me. His chest, lean yet broad, that perfect smattering of darkish hair and then that bizarre, mutant third nipple, tiny like a baby’s, which apparently is very common and which I find thrilling because when he’s at work I know it’s there, under his shirt. Our little secret. And, finally, his face. The bit I crave the most when he’s not here: that gorgeous line from his Adam’s apple to his chin to his jaw, emphasized by a two-day shadow, which I know he’s kept for me because I’ve got a thing for facial hair. (A throwback from a crippling crush on Tom Selleck in
Three Men and a Baby).
The fine, distinguished nose and the sexy quiff of a fringe. Then the famous Delaney eyebrows, which I love and despise all at the same time because they give away all of his feelings. They frequently disappoint me.
    Toby sucks hard on his Lucky Strike.
    ‘So what did you tell your sister again?’ he asks.
    ‘That I was hosting a book club. That it would be full of geeks reading
War and Peace
and that she’d hate it.’
    Toby laughs.
    ‘Steele, you’re a genius. And did she buy it?’ He exhales the last of his cigarette and gets back into bed, slipping his cool, hard body next to mine.
    ‘Oh yeah, totally. She was like,