Free Peer Pressure by Chris Watt

P.E. teacher that he had met on his first day. In the end, it wasn’t the largest of staff get-togethers, the party consisting of himself, Jon, Steve Penman from the Geography department and Amy Mackenzie, who was Head of Modern Studies.
    Steve was fifty, well dressed and prone to moments in which his hippy heritage would get the better of him. Every so often, he would throw a ‘Led Zeppelin’ or ‘Thin Lizzy’ reference into the conversation, not caring whether his companions knew who they were or not.
    Amy, meanwhile, was forty, smart and completely besotted with the new arrival, taking any opportunity to make jokes so that she could laugh and nudge Rob’s arm, trying to find any way to make physical contact, hoping that at some point she could work her way up to an arm on his shoulder, or possibly even a tap on the thigh.
    Rob, however, could see through this and took every opportunity to pretend to check his mobile phone, to get the next round in, to go to the toilet, anything to avoid being treated like a piece of meat by the recently divorced Ms. Mackenzie.
    They had met up in a local pub called ‘The Hog’s Head.’ The bar was busy, the late night shoppers having just finished and the remnants of dozens of bar meals lay strewn across many of the tables. Rob’s table was no different, a wasteland of empty pint glasses, ketchup stained plates and half-eaten onion rings.
    “I think that the key to finding the right man is mystery.” Amy was on her third large glass of Pinot Grigio by the time she started on the opposite sex, which, if you knew her personally, was probably something of a record.
    “The less you know about someone, the more curiosity gets the better of you.”
    Steve, who was slowly drinking his second pint of cider, indulged Amy’s rant, by throwing in a literary reference.
    “Sure, like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ . Look where curiosity got her.” He looked across to Rob, to see if he had appreciated his nod to Lewis Carroll. Rob, however, had his eyes fixed somewhere across the room.
    “Exactly,” Amy continued, “if the white rabbit had been a good looking man and Alice a blonde bimbo...,” but she’d lost her train of thought by this point, the alcohol and Rob’s lack of interest distracting her, and could only muster, “...well, we’d have a very different story.”
    Jon chipped in,
    “Not to mention a really fucked up cartoon. How much have you had to drink, Amy?”
    Amy wasn’t listening.
    “Take my husband,” she continued, “‘the helmet’ as I like to call him.”
    “Why do you call him ‘the helmet’?” asked Steve, curiously. Jon rolled his eyes and drank heavily from his pint, knowing what was coming.
    “Because he’s a knob-end.”
    “Nice,” Steve nodded, “continue.”
    “We knew each other for years before we got married. I knew everything about him and he knew everything about me. Then we married and...Nothing! Silence. We literally had nothing to talk about. No surprises. No mystery. I think it’s ninety five per cent of what makes a good relationship.
    “What about the other five per cent,” Jon dared to ask. Amy shrugged,
    “A decent sized penis doesn’t hurt.”
    Jon tried to stifle a laugh, while Steve couldn’t resist adding,
    “Or so you’ve heard.”
    Amy didn’t take him on, instead turning to Rob placing her hand tentatively on his shoulder and going for broke.
    “What about you, Rob?”
    Rob, however, didn’t notice the hand, his eyes still fixed across the room. He didn’t even look at her as he replied,
    “What about me?”
    Jon, noticing Rob’s dis-interest, followed his gaze landing on two women who sat at the end of the bar. Jon could see from their clothes that they were smart, professional women, both good looking, but one more than the other. He looked back to Rob and smirked to himself, while Amy continued.
    “What do you look for? I mean, in a relationship.”
    There was a pause. Rob’s gaze, it would seem, had not