The Plus One: escape with the hottest, laugh-out-loud debut of summer 2018!

‘Oh excuse me,’ said Lex loudly, sitting forward in her seat.

‘What?’

‘Leaving it until now to drop the news that you got lucky. What’s he like? What does he look like? Did you touch his penis?’

‘Lex,’ I hissed, trying to quieten her.

‘Oh my God!’ she shrieked, ignoring me. ‘You might have a plus one for my wedding!’

The man on the table next to us shifted in his seat again, as if flinching.

‘Shhhhh! Lex, I don’t think we’re hearing wedding bells with this one. And “getting lucky” would be a generous description.’

‘Who is he?’

‘Just a friend of Bill’s. From business school. Called Callum.’

‘Aaaaand? Come on.’

‘And nothing. He came home with me and there was a bit of a disaster. That’s all.’

‘What do you mean, disaster?’

‘Not much.’ I glanced at the man next to us and lowered my voice again. ‘I gave him a blow job and then he went home.’

‘What do you mean home? Straight home? Straight after he came in your mouth?’

‘Shhhhh. Seriously. People can hear. And yes.’

‘You didn’t actually shag?’

‘No,’ I hissed.

‘Well,’ said Lex, leaning back in her seat again. ‘He has incredibly bad manners. Now, shall we order some eggs?’

‘Do you think I can start following him on Instagram?’ I asked. I was still wondering if I could, but also worrying this seemed a bit desperate. A bit keen. And I didn’t even know if I liked him. I was just feeling a bit low on excitement and the thing was, even though Callum had left after the blow job, I’d still come within touching distance of a penis. And that was rare. For me.

‘Do you want to see him again? Do you actually like him?’ she said.

I pulled a face. ‘Dunno. Am I just being desperate?’

‘Because something’s happened with him?’

‘Well, kind of. I guess because he’s the first heterosexual man to be in my flat for several decades.’

‘But he left immediately afterwards. Like, straight afterwards? No quick cuddle? No “we should do this again”?’

‘Nope.’

She winced. ‘Up to you, love, but I’d probably leave it.’

I’d always been bad at playing it cool. When I was eleven I went to my first disco in a hessian dress that Mum gave me for Christmas. She plaited my hair for the occasion after I showed her a picture from Just 17 magazine. The result was more Little House on the Prairie, but I didn’t let that stop me, chubby, 11-year-old me, asking handsome Jack – the boy every girl in Year 7 worshipped – for a dance. It was a particularly bold move on my part because handsome Jack was already on the dance floor with his girlfriend (the school bitch, Jenny) when I chose to walk up to him.

‘Yeah, maybe I should leave it,’ I said.

I looked down at my menu and tried to concentrate on what kind of eggs I wanted, but what I was actually thinking was that my best friend was getting married, and I didn’t even have a boyfriend. Which meant I still had to find someone, go out with them long enough for them to fall in love with me – and this could be many years – before he’d even propose. And as I’d just turned thirty, I did a quick calculation in my head, this meant I might not be married for at least five or six more years. And I definitely read something the other day about getting pregnant before you turned thirty-five, otherwise you had, like, a 3 per cent chance of even having children.

‘What eggs are you having?’ asked Lex.

But I wasn’t listening. Because now I was getting really hysterical. Maybe I’d never get married? Maybe I’d just go to all my friends’ weddings alone. Maybe all the wedding invitations I’d ever get would have a solitary ‘Polly’ written at the top of them and I’d go along and people would say ‘How’s the love life?’ and I’d say ‘Haven’t found one yet!’ in a falsely cheery manner and they’d look at me sadly, as if I’d just told them I’d got a terminal disease. And then they’d be dancing in couples after dinner and I’d be dancing on my own and all my friends would have children and I’d just become the weird, asexual old woman – Auntie Polly – who’d come over for lunch every now and then smelling of dust and Rich Tea biscuits. ‘Poor old Polly,’ friends would say to one another. ‘Such a pity, she just never met anyone.’ And I’d die alone in my flat and it would be months before anyone found me. Although it probably wouldn’t even be my flat since I couldn’t afford to buy one and I didn’t even know what a pension was either and…

‘POLLY?’ said Lex.

I looked up. ‘Yes?’

‘What eggs are you going to have?’

‘Oh. Dunno. I was just thinking about pensions.’

‘You’re so weird,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I’m having scrambled with a side of avocado. And another cup of tea.’

I looked down at the menu again. Eggs, I thought. Ha! It was all very well for Lex to bang on about eggs. Her eggs were probably fine. It was mine I was worried about.

On Monday morning, I went through my usual routine: arrive at work, drop bag on desk, go to Pret for an Americano, come back to desk, check all forms of social media on phone and computer despite the fact I had been checking them constantly on the bus on the way in. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, repeat.

My finger hovered over the ‘Follow’ button again on Callum’s Instagram profile. I was still obsessing over it. Good idea? Bad idea? Should I? Shouldn’t I? In the unlikely event that I was ever the President of the United States, I would have to be more decisive than this with any nuclear buttons. I tapped on ‘Follow’ and quickly put my phone back on my desk again.

‘Polly, can you come into my office in ten minutes,’ shouted Peregrine from his office. ‘We need to be all over this story about Jasper Milton. Lala, too. Where is Lala?’

‘Not sure,’ I said slowly, frowning at the desk next to me where Lala should have been sitting. ‘I’ll text her.’

Technically, Lala’s job meant that she looked after the party pages in Posh!, the pages where terrifically fat, red-faced men danced with terrifically thin, plastic-surgeried women. In reality, it meant Lala emailed her friends every now and then asking if she could photograph their wedding. She was twenty-eight and ravishingly beautiful. Even on a bad day, Lala still looked like a messy Brigitte Bardot, blonde hair piled on top of her head, black eyeliner still on from the night before. The daughter of the fifteenth Earl of Oswestry, she could tell you the difference between a soup spoon and a dessert spoon. On the other hand, she couldn’t tell you who the prime minister was, or what one plus three amounted to, or much about anything else. Her love life was similarly chaotic. Men worshipped her for the first few dates, but the last three men she’d dated had all gone silent after she slept with them. ‘I think I’m maybe doing it wrong,’ Lala had said sadly at her desk a few months ago, before ordering The Joy of Sex from Amazon.

Morning, La, he’s on the rampage. When you getting in? X

I put my phone back on my desk. Next job: find out what Jasper Milton, the Marquess of Milton and notorious society heart-throb, had been up to now. Lala had once snogged him while at a shooting weekend in Gloucestershire, and they’d gone on a few dates afterwards. Lala’s mother was thrilled at the prospect of her daughter dating the country’s most eligible bachelor. But he’d ended things with Lala a couple of weeks later by failing to turn up to dinner with her, having spent the day in a Knightsbridge casino gambling on the Cheltenham Races.

‘I don’t want to go out with someone who prefers horses to me,’ Lala said tearfully in the office the next day. I hadn’t wanted to tell her that this counted out almost the entire British aristocracy.

Jasper, I knew from working at Posh!, was always photographed at parties, drink in one hand, fag in the other, women standing adoringly around him. But I hadn’t read any of the papers that weekend so I quickly googled him, to find out what Peregrine was banging on about. Ah, here we go. I clicked on the headline for the Mail on Sunday:

EXCLUSIVE: PLAYBOY SINGLE AGAIN!

A picture below showed a handsome blond figure falling through a nightclub door, shirt undone, feet bare. ‘Some say it was only a matter of time,’ started the story, ‘but the Mail on Sunday can confirm that Jasper, the Marquess of Milton, has ended his relationship with Lady Caroline Aspidistra after just three months.

‘Sources close to the Marquess, pictured here in Kensington on Friday evening, say the couple had an argument over his partying habits and his late-night return from The Potted Shrimp nightclub in Chelsea earlier last week proved the final straw for Lady Caroline.

‘It’s the latest in a steady stream of break-ups for the 32-year-old playboy, who last year alone was linked to Princess Clara of Denmark, Lady Gwendolyn Sponge and the actress, Ophelia Jenkins. Friends are said to be worrying that he still shows no inclination to settle down.’