Not proud. Also not sorry. I keep saying that like it makes me sound evolved. It does not. It just means I did the thing everyone pretends they would never do, then I sat on the edge of my own bed in yesterday’s makeup and kept scrolling.
His name, for the purposes of this, is Tom. It was not Tom. Close enough that if he reads this he will know, and if he does not then he was never paying attention anyway.
How we even got here
We met on a Thursday that had no business turning into a Friday. Mia had dragged me to some pop-up in Shoreditch that was pretending to be a bar and a gallery at the same time. He was there with a boy who knew a boy who used to intern with Sophie. That is how London works. Six people, two postcodes, one coincidence that feels like fate if you have had three drinks.
He was fit in that annoying way. Tall enough. Good coat. Talked like he had a job that required him to say “bandwidth” without laughing. I should have left it there. I did not.
We went back to his because mine had Sophie in it, and Sophie has a face she does when I bring someone home on a school night. His place was a one-bed in a new-build that still smelled of paint. Nice enough. Not nice enough to write home about. Nice enough to stay.
The sex was fine. Better than fine, if I am being honest, which I am trying to be. He was enthusiastic in that slightly surprised way men get when you actually tell them what you want. I came. He came. We lay there like people who had just remembered they were strangers.
I did not plan to sleep. I never plan to sleep. Then I did.
The morning, which is where I go wrong
I woke up first. That is always the mistake. First light through cheap blinds. His arm across my waist like we had agreed on something. Phone face down on the bedside table, charging, bright little Apple on the back.
I needed the time. I needed to see if my Uber was still a reasonable price. I needed to text Mia that I was alive. His lock screen was just a black wallpaper. No passcode delay. He had Face ID set up and his face was right there, asleep, mouth open a bit.
I am not going to dress this up. I picked it up. I held it over his face. It unlocked.
There is a version of me that puts it down at that point. That version does not write this blog.
His mum, first
The first thread was his mum. Of course it was. Men who still live like this always have their mum near the top.
She had sent him a photo of a roast. Then a question about whether he was coming Sunday. Then, from last night, at 11.42pm, while he was taking my dress off in his hallway:
Hope you’re having a nice evening darling. Don’t stay out too late. Love Mum x
He had not replied. He had liked the roast photo at 9.03pm and then gone radio silent. I do not know why that made me feel something. It did. Not jealousy. Something smaller. Like I had walked into a kitchen I had not been invited into.
I put the phone down. Picked it up again. This is how it goes.
Then the ex
Her name was in his recents. I am not using it. She had a photo of a dog as her contact picture, which I hated immediately because it made her seem like a person.
The last message from her was Wednesday.
Can we talk properly or are you just going to keep doing this
He had replied, Thursday afternoon, before he even met me:
I’ve been busy. I’ll call you this weekend.
This weekend. As in the weekend that now included me, naked, in his bed, holding his phone like a journalist with no ethics and a decent blow-dry.
I scrolled up. I should not have. I did.
They had been doing this for months. On, off, the usual rot. She missed him. He missed “the idea of it”. He said he was not ready. She said he was ready when it suited him. He sent a heart once in July and nothing after that until she started again.
None of this made him a villain. It made him a man with a phone and a habit. Which is most of them.
I screenshot the “I’ll call you this weekend” one. Then I deleted the screenshot from his recents so it would not sit there looking at him. Then I sent it to myself on WhatsApp from his phone and deleted that too. Then I realised I had just used his WhatsApp, which is worse, and I sat there for a full ten seconds feeling like a criminal who still wanted coffee.
Dishoom
That was the one that actually did it.
Buried under Deliveroo and a group chat called “work lot 💀” there was a booking confirmation. Dishoom. Saturday. Table for two. 7.30pm. Name on the booking was his plus one word I assume was hers, or someone else’s, or a colleague he wanted to impress. I do not know. I do not care in the way I keep telling myself I do not care.
Saturday. Two days away. While I was still in his sheets.
I screenshot that one as well. Cropped out the name. Left the time, the date, the little “your table is confirmed” banner. It looked like evidence. It was evidence of nothing except the fact that he had a life that did not include me, which I already knew, which I had counted on, which still landed weird in my chest.
I put the phone back exactly how I found it. Face down. Cable in. Angle matching the grain of the wood. I am good at this part. Too good.
He woke up like nothing had happened
Because nothing had, for him.
He smiled. He said morning. He asked if I wanted tea. I said yes because saying no would have meant I had to leave immediately and I still had mascara under my eyes and a story half-formed.
We drank tea in silence that he thought was comfortable. I thought about his mum’s roast. I thought about the ex waiting for a call that might not come. I thought about two people sitting in Dishoom on Saturday saying cheers with black daal while I would probably be in the flat doing my makeup and telling Mia I was “fine, actually”.
He kissed me at the door. Proper kiss. Not a get-out kiss. I let him. I even kissed back. Then I got in the Uber and opened the screenshots like they were a private viewing.
Sophie already knew the second I walked in
She was in the kitchen in that robe she thinks is chic. Mia was on the counter eating yoghurt with a fork because we had no clean spoons. I dropped my bag. Sophie looked at my face and said, “What did you do.”
Not what happened. What did you do. She knows me.
I showed them the Dishoom one first. Mia said “peak”. Sophie said “Chelsea”. Just my name, like a warning and a diagnosis.
I told them about the mum text and the ex and the Face ID and the way his phone felt warm because it had been charging against his ribcage all night. Mia wanted details. Sophie wanted me to admit I felt bad. I did not give either of them exactly what they wanted.
I felt something. I will give them that. It was not guilt exactly. More like the feeling you get when you open a cupboard in someone else’s house and there is a whole system in there. Tupperware with names on. A life that was running before you arrived and will keep running after you leave.
Sophie said I should delete the screenshots. I said I would. I have not.
What I am meant to feel versus what I actually feel
People love to tell you that reading someone’s phone is a boundary thing, a trust thing, a you-need-therapy thing. Fine. All of that can be true and I can still have done it.
I was not looking for a relationship. I was looking at a man who had just been inside me and I wanted to know who else he was while he was doing that. That is nosy. That is ugly. That is also, if I am staying honest, extremely human.
Would I want him going through mine? God no. Mine has drafts of this blog and a thread with Mia that would get me cancelled in three group chats. Double standard. I contain them. Most women I know contain them. We just do not write it down.
He texted later. Had a good time last night x
I left it for an hour. Then I sent same x
I did not ask about Saturday. I did not mention Dishoom. I did not say I know your mum worries when you stay out late. I am not that girl in the story. Or I am, and I am choosing the edit.
The part I keep coming back to
It is not even the ex. Exes are furniture. Everyone has them. It is the booking. The little administrative proof that while I was deciding whether to stay the night, he already had Saturday inked in like a dentist appointment.
I keep imagining the table. The waiters. Him taking off that same coat. Her, or whoever, sitting down and asking how his week was. Him saying busy. Him not saying Thursday.
Do I want to be the Thursday? Sometimes. Thursday is easy. Thursday does not require a reservation and a story about how you met. Thursday gets to leave before the full English and still take the shirt smell with her.
Other times I look at the screenshot and think I would have liked to be asked to Dishoom. Not because I am in love with him. I am not. Because being chosen for the good table is a feeling, and I am greedy for feelings I can use.
What I did with the screenshots
They are in a folder on my phone called “receipts”, which I started as a joke and now treat like a filing cabinet. Next to a blurry photo of a boy from June and a screenshot of a Hinge prompt that said “looking for my person” from a man who lasted forty minutes.
I am not going to send them to the ex. I am not a good person, but I am not that person. She already knows who he is. She has been asking him to talk properly since Wednesday. She does not need me arriving like a well-dressed informant.
I might use the Dishoom one in a caption one day, cropped within an inch of its life, no names, just the time and the word confirmed. That is the job. That is the ugly little engine under all of this. Something happens, I keep it, I wait until it looks like a sentence.
Mia asked if I would see him again. I said maybe. Sophie said I should not. I said I know.
He has not called the ex yet, as far as I can tell, because he texted me again last night asking what I was doing Friday. I have not answered. I am busy pretending I have morals between coats of lip gloss.
If you came here for a lesson
There is not one. Do not go through his phone. Also, you will. If the lock is that easy and your curiosity is that loud, you will. Then you will sit with the information like leftover takeaway and decide whether it makes you leave or stay or write 2,000 words about it on a Wednesday afternoon.
I still have his mum’s roast in my head. I still have “I’ll call you this weekend” sitting in a folder. I still have a table for two at 7.30 that I was never invited to.
He thinks Thursday was just Thursday.
I think Thursday is content.
Not proud. Also not sorry. I keep saying it. It is starting to sound like a brand.