Lockdown on London Lane [PUBLISHED w/ WATTPAD BOOKS]

PART 2: The Honeymooners - Chapter 4

When I met Danny, it was instant sparks.

We met, of course, on Hinge. (Because, where else but dating apps do you find single guys now, without having to awkwardly tell a work mate that their best friend may be single, and may be a great person, but is that bowl cut some kind of ironic throwback, or...?)

Danny asked me on a date within an hour of us matching. Usually, I wouldn't have met up with someone so quickly, but maybe that was why I'd agreed to it. All the other guys I'd met off dating apps had been after weeks of messaging, and had all fizzled out after a handful of dates. Maybe I'd just save myself a lot of time, meeting Danny for dinner that same weekend.

I was a little put off by the state of his house share – the line of empty beer bottles on a windowsill in the hallway, the mess of mop buckets and a Henry hoover and packets of toilet roll in the open space beneath the stairs, the cobweb in the corner by the doorway... But it all paled to insignificant in the glow of a perfect first date as he cooked me a three-course dinner.

We just... clicked.

Talking to some of my friends, we all waited with bated breath for things to go wrong. Such a perfect first date was so rare, something had to change.

Guys like that didn't just exist. Dates like that didn't just happen.

It'd all go south sooner or later; even my most optimistic friends said so.

But we went out for drinks and tapas. He talked in conversational Spanish to the waiter, who gave us a free jug of sangria because of it. We went bowling, and even though he was pretty atrocious and I'm competitive almost to a fault, he was such a good sport about it that I hardly stopped smiling all night. The first time we spent the night together, after our fourth date, he didn't hog the duvet or snore in his sleep and even got up to make me breakfast the next morning.

"You're obsessed with him," a couple of my friends told me, after that.

They were probably right, but could you blame me?

He was perfect.

And every time I saw him, I got butterflies. I'd hear my phone buzz with a message and lunge for it, hoping it was him. He'd kiss me, and I'd go weak at the knees. I'd go more than two days without seeing him, and I'd be going stir crazy.

"Do you think he's lost interest? Do you think it's because I didn't get that joke he told, about Han Solo? Do you think he's annoyed at me because I told him I couldn't make it out for drinks because I was too tired from tennis? Look! He put a red heart emoji at the end of this text when he said goodnight! Do you think that means something? It's got to mean something. It means something, right? I know he said he was having a boys' night but we've only been dating for like two weeks, we never said we were exclusive, what if that's code for something and he's actually out with another girl on a date? Ohmigod look at this meme Danny tagged me in, it is so us! Isn't that amazing that we've only been together a little while and we already have an 'us'? I just love that, don't you think it's the cutest thing?"