Happy Hour (A Romantic Comedy)

Chapter 7

I take a well deserved day off on Wednesday. No travelling, no Instagram, just complete relaxation. I laze in bed reading until lunchtime, before I stuff myself full of mac and cheese and think about taking myself for a walk. 

My phone lights up as I stomp outside, my big sister Sarah's name flashing on the screen. I'm not a phone person at all; I'm that person who stares at a ringing phone in terror and then waits until it stops to text the caller back. But the one person I will always make an exception for is Sarah.

"I'm in town!" She shouts without preamble as I answer.  "Come meet me for lunch."

"I've literally just eaten, sorry," I grimace. 

"Liquid lunch then?" She suggests brightly, adding enticingly. "My treat."

She had me at "liquid lunch" to be fair.

"You're out of sorts," she accuses within five minutes of seeing me. She pushes a big glass of wine in my direction. "What's wrong?"

I sigh. "Does your past ever appear out of nowhere and kick you on your arse?" 

"You've lost me," Sarah shrugs.

"Have you ever ran into a guy you fancied when you were younger?" I ask. 

She thinks for a minute then laughs. She says: "The last time that happened I was in for a right disappointment. He'd aged about thirty years and he should only have aged 10 by my calculations." She shakes her head. "I don't know if it's a good or bad thing to see what a former crush looks like now."

I take a fortifying gulp of wine. "What if he still looked the way you remembered?" 

She looks up in realisation. "Not . . . Chris?" She gasps. I nod. Sarah was, apart from Kirsty, the only one who'd known about my massive crush back then. I couldn't really talk to Kirsty about it after all; he was her brother and it was weird. I needed to let out my feelings somewhere. Sarah knew it all - including the out-of-nowhere kiss . . . And the devastation I'd felt almost immediately afterwards as I started to come to terms with the fact I was actually unlikely to ever see him again. 

I tell her about the Glasgow Green scene on Sunday afternoon and she can't help but laugh. "Only you!" She said. She frowned. "I wonder if it's his kid."

"Who knows?" I'm trying not to dwell on that part. A kid implies a possibility that he has an other half and, while it's not like I expect to see him again or have a chance with him, I'm not quite ready to accept that part yet. 

"So then this happened." I bring up the anonymous Instagram account on my phone and push it over to her. She looks at it blankly.

Says "Nope, no idea what you're showing me."

"I have this overwhelming feeling that this account belongs to him. I don't know why."

She examines it curiously. "Purely because the username looks a bit like his initials followed by a random selection of numbers?" She wrinkles her nose.

"It's more than that," I struggle to explain. "The name caught my attention because of that but I just get this feeling. It's like . . . My spider senses are tingling."

"You were always so weird when it came to Chris." She shakes her head. "Okay… so how would he have found you?"

I've thought about this a lot. "So Paige posted the Glasgow Green photo on Monday morning on Instagram. She tags me as photographer whenever I take her picture. She also location-tagged Glasgow Green. So maybe he did a search on Instagram, found her and by extension found me?" The more I put my theory out there, the more ridiculous it sounds. I laugh at myself. "Sorry, now I'm thinking why the heck would Chris even go to that level of effort to find me? It's probably not him and I'm just projecting cos he's in my head again."

"Well, there's only one way to find out," Sarah has an evil grin on her face all of a sudden. Instantly I knew what she'd done. 

"You've bloody requested to follow him haven't you?" I put my head in my hands. "On my fucking phone. Oh my god, I'm actually going to kill you"

"Sorry." She's clearly not sorry as she passes my phone back. "Look, if it is him - and I'm not saying it definitely is but you never know - then he followed you first so you don't need to feel embarrassed. If it turns out not to be him, then just unfollow him." She reached over and tapped the page to bring it to life again. "It says there's 20 posts hiding behind that account. If you have access, surely there will be at least one photo that will prove whether or not it's him."

That's a very good point. I'll kill her later.

"So now what?" I ask.  She tops up my wine glass.

"Now we wait."