Free Dan Taylor Is Giving Up on Women by Neal Doran

message hanging in the air. I checked my outbox to be sure that it actually went. It did, six minutes ago.
    Oh, God, I thought, she’s been looking for words of consolation from a friend when she’s genuinely upset about the conduct of a man she might actually love, and I’ve been acting like a leering chimp. While Sam was taking a phone call, Cliff had approached the two young students and was making a clumsy play, trying to look cool in his postie uniform with the trousers slightly too short for him. All he got for his troubles was a derisory laugh from the girls and a clip around the head from barmaid Carla. It was no less than us half-witted buffoons deserved.
    Then my phone beeped.
    Oi! Cheeky!! :-p. He’s just come in to collect his shoes, he’s spending the whole day watching football at the pub with his stupid mates :-(
    I thought I’d got away with it.
    Choosing to leave you to go out to watch 22 sweaty men spit and scratch themselves in high definition? Madness!
    Sam cruised back to the girls, who finished their drinks and they all left the bar together. As I waited to hear what Delphine had to say next, I pondered what my own next message should be — in text chess you’ve got to be thinking several moves ahead. I was thinking that now I’d highlighted some of Alex’s faults as a putative boyfriend, I should probably lay off him to not look bitter. I did think about mentioning the fact he was wearing the same stinky socks two days in a row, and was probably using her toothbrush, but that looked a bit petty.
    No, I decided my next move should be to raise the prospect that she could be doing something more fun with her Sunday afternoons than hanging around at home while the bloke she’d been expecting to see got pissed.
    Then, next week in the office I could casually mention the cinema listings in the
Metro
during a coffee break, and get an idea if there was something she’d like to see. That day I could go by myself to see the latest nihilistic psychodrama with subtitles the French seemed to watch for fun, and maybe send a text on my way home saying whether it was any good or not.
    After that, I’d just need to keep a track of the film listings in
Time Out
to monitor whenever there was a Gallic Despair season on at the Everyman. Then, the next time she was looking for textual sympathy because she’d been let down by a spotty oik, I’d be able to leap in and suggest we forget about him and cheer ourselves up with Canal Plus’s latest romantic comedy about the suicidal paraplegic and the bi-polar single mother.
    From there it was just a matter of casually suggesting we grab a bite at a hot new tapas bar afterwards and getting sufficiently drunk on San Miguel to suggest we do it again some time on a proper date. Our superficial office-based friendship would then be out there in the real world.
    Checkmate in a few simple moves.
    I jumped as my mobile beeped at me again:
    Would you like to go to the pub to get pissed this afternoon?
    Or that might be a quicker way to do things.
    I stared at the message, my heart rate up to the levels it’d reached on the treadmill earlier. I started to think about how I could say yes in a way that sounded keen, but not too eager. I jumped again as the phone started ringing in my hand. Shit! She was calling. I’d have to do these arrangements in real time. I’d have to be decisive aboutvenues without having Googled for the best pubs in her vicinity. Or maybe it was him, Alex, calling to tell me to back off or he’d pound me to a pulp in a greasy headlock.
    I looked at the caller display – false alarm: it was just Rob and Hannah.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘Hiya, Dan, it’s just me. What are you up to?’
    I was taken aback a bit by it being Hannah rather than Rob on the phone. I could have told him I was in the midst of a text-flirting situation and he would have hung up immediately, knowing it took all my powers to keep up my levels of insouciant charm. But some innate sense