Free Bella Summer Takes a Chance by Michele Gorman

would be my first real chance to sleep with another man since Mattias. What if everything had changed in the last decade? Not that I planned to sleep with The Musician on the first date. Definitely not. Almost certainly not. Even so, my nerves didn’t calm.
    He saw me right away. His dark blue jeans were faded in just the right places, his jumper well-fitted and casually elegant. He was under-shaven, probably through careful grooming rather than a lack of it. He looked cool. I felt flushed. ‘Ah, just in time for me to buy you a drink,’ he said, kissing me on both cheeks as I shrugged out of my heavy coat. ‘What would you like?’
    Ten years of elasticity back, please. My heart raced as we stood at the bar. I noticed he had great hands. Big hands. All the better to play his instrument. Hmm. ‘Glass of red please, er, Rioja. Is this a favourite haunt?’ It was a nice old pub with silly-sounding ales on tap like Bishops Finger.
    ‘Yeah, it’s got a nice atmosphere and it’s never too crowded. That’s not easy to say around here. Where do you like to go out?’
    My mind blanked on bars, alighting only on restaurants. I was unlikely to impress him with a recitation of London’s TopTable suggestions. ‘Zuma.’
    ‘That’s a bit expensive to be your local, isn’t it?’
    Probably so, but I wasn’t usually the one paying. Saying that, though, would open the Mattias can of worms. Was that appropriate on a first date? If I didn’t tell him and had to confront it later, it was a rather big piece of information to pretend to have forgotten. On the other hand, it was a rather big piece of information to digest before he’d finished his beer. ‘Er, I also like The Boisdale. But I work there sometimes so I don’t usually go when I’m not singing.’
    ‘Is that where you sing? Cool.’
    It was kind of cool, even though I fell into it randomly through a friend of a friend of a friend. And it wasn’t exactly a steady career. I only filled in when the regular singer was feeling off, or hung over, or had her sister visiting from Manchester. It was my admittedly rather lukewarm claim to fame in London. ‘I just help out the band sometimes. It’s not a regular gig.’
    ‘Oh.’ Said with judgment.
    ‘But I’m there in a few weeks. I’m thinking of doing more with my music, actually.’
    ‘What’s stopped you so far?’
    Ah, the million quid question. Nothing technically stopped me. And yet I was stalled as surely as if I’d run out of petrol. How did it happen? I was so ambitious in my twenties. I truly believed that I was destined to be a singer. And I was willing to put in the effort to get there. ‘There’s nothing stopping me. I don’t have a manager here, and there were a few years where work got quite hectic.’ That wasn’t why. If I’d really wanted to pursue my singing, I would have. ‘But that’s not really a good excuse,’ I said truthfully. ‘I guess music just became less of a focus.’
    ‘What became more of a focus, then?’ His eyes were a pretty green, fringed with envy-worthy lashes. He had quite a public school accent. No matter how low he wore his jeans or how much he rolled his hips when he walked, that accent gave him away.
    ‘Living in London got in the way. My social life, my job. The usual things that sidetrack us from what we think we want. I’ve kept writing, though, on and off, even when I wasn’t performing. I’ve written quite a few new songs lately. I know some of it’s good enough to perform, and I do sometimes, but I wasn’t trained in music, not really. I had voice classes but my degree isn’t musical. What about you? Is your background in music?’
    He chuckled. ‘No. Molecular biology, actually. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Beauty and brains.’
    ‘A bass-playing scientist. That’s not your usual combination. So you cast aside your microscope and followed your heart?’
    ‘No way, I love my microscope. When I’m not gigging I work part-time for a lab