Zoe May - How (Not) to Date a Prince

He meets my gaze.

‘Sure!’ I gulp.

‘Okay.’

We talk numbers and Phil suggests a reasonably good pay increase that will definitely help me get one step closer to buying my dream home.

‘So, are you happy now?’ he asks.

‘Yes, thanks Phil.’

‘Good,’ he replies. ‘I’ll get a new contract drawn up. And, in the meantime, I want that slushy wedding feature. And I want you to make it extra romantic after all of this.’

‘No problem,’ I trill. ‘An extra slushy feature coming right up.’

Phil smiles. ‘Finally.’

Chapter Two

‘So, let me get this straight,’ my best friend and housemate Collette says, clearing her throat. ‘You’ve been assigned to cover the most adorable love story of the century and you’re complaining.’

‘Yeah, kind of.’ I shrug as I stir the mugs of tea I’m making.

‘Why?’

‘Because I write hard news, Collette,’ I remind her.

‘Yeah, but this is Holly and Isaac, they are hashtag goals!’ Collette enthuses.

‘You’re ridiculous.’ I laugh as I carry the steaming mugs over to the kitchen table.

‘So, what’s first? Do you get to meet them? I want to hear everything!’ Collette places her drawing pad down on the table and takes the mug I hand her. I glance at her drawing pad as I sit down. As well as studying for a PhD in biology, specialising in amoebas, Collette is also an illustrator and makes quirky greetings cards that she sells online. With their jaunty drawings and cheeky off-beat slogans, they sell so well that she barely needs a student loan. It’s actually really impressive and she makes it look so effortless. She has an idea and, with a few flicks of her pen, it’s down on paper, whereas whenever I’ve had a go, my attempts have looked like something a toddler brought home from nursery.

I glance at her drawing pad. For the past couple of weeks, Collette’s been working on her upcoming Valentine’s Day collection and her latest design features a sketch of a fried egg with the slogan, ‘You’re a good egg, maybe I’ll keep you.’ I smile. It’s certainly less of a shocker than last night’s, which showed a drawing of a rhino, with the slogan ‘You make me horny.’ But Collette always insists that it’s the cheekiest cards that sell the best. She has a habit of leaving them around the flat for me with notes to pick up some milk or that it’s my turn to do the hoovering. If I recall correctly, the last one was a picture of a naughty Santa with the slogan ‘Jingle my bells’ left over from her Christmas collection, on which she’d scrawled, ‘Wanna get takeaway tonight?’ It’s far less effective than just texting, but her cards do make me smile. They add colour to the flat, just like all the patterned cushions, patchwork throws, scented candles, artsy prints and fairy lights she decorates the place with. Even though we’ve been best friends since school, Collette and I had never lived together before and, at first, she’d tease me about my ‘bachelor pad’ aesthetic, because of how minimalistic I was. But I’ve warmed to her style now. I like flicking through the magazines she leaves on the coffee table and snuggling up under her throws. Now, if our hallway doesn’t smell like molten scented wax when I get home from work, I have to light a candle straight away.

‘So, will you get to go to the wedding?’ Collette asks, wide-eyed.

‘Yeah, of course!’

‘Oh my God!’ she gasps, clutching her heart. ‘This is too much! You’re going to go to the wedding of the year. Actually, scratch that, the century!’

‘It’s just a wedding!’ I remind her. ‘Chill out!’

‘Just a wedding?’ Collette scoffs. ‘Just a wedding!’

Despite spending her days in a lab carrying out sophisticated analysis on cells, Collette can become a giddy schoolgirl over a slushy wedding. Like me, she’s single, except, unlike me, she wishes she wasn’t. She’s a die-hard romantic. Collette adores romantic movies, she always has a pile of romance novels stacked on her bedside table and she’s hooked on celebrity love affairs. She even has a Pinterest board entitled ‘My Dream Wedding’. She left it open once on her computer and went bright red when I spotted it, claiming it was research for some bridal cards she wanted to design. But despite being obsessed with love, Collette somehow struggles to apply the romance of books and movies to her own life. There’s a physics researcher at her university who she’s been into for ages. His name’s Michael and apparently, he looks like ‘a cross between Ryan Gosling and Johnny Depp’, which I can never quite picture. But despite Collette having a serious crush on the guy, who’s apparently single and quite flirty, they’ve been working in the same lab for more than two years now and neither of them has made a move. Collette’s hardly dated either apart from a regrettable fling she had with this creepy guy called Leonard a few months ago.

‘Yes! It really is just a wedding!’ I remind her. ‘You know, those things that have a fifty per cent divorce rate?! Those things we idolised in the Victorian era when women had nothing better to do than to sit around waiting for a man to pluck them out of obscurity and make them his wife? This is the twenty-first century, Collette! It’s literally just a wedding. Yes, it’ll be silly and pretty and fun! But it’s just a fricking wedding.’

‘Wow!’ Collette scoffs, eyeing me with an expression bordering on derision. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone quite so unromantic.’

‘I’m not unromantic,’ I insist. ‘I’m just practical. I just don’t get why women ought to focus on marriage, like it’s the be-all and end-all. Singleness isn’t a problem to be solved! You can have a happy, fulfilled, enjoyable life without a man by your side and a ring on your finger, I mean, come on!’

‘Urgh!’ Collette rolls her eyes. ‘Do you know what you remind me of?’

‘What?’ I mumble.

‘An amoeba,’ she announces proudly.

‘An amoeba?’

‘Yeah. An amoeba. They don’t need to find mates. They can reproduce alone through mitotic division. That’s what you are. An amoeba!’

‘Fine!’ I shrug. ‘I’ll take it! Amoeba and proud! I’ll get it on a T-shirt. Or you can make a card. An alternative Valentine’s Day card, for people who don’t need anyone, with a big fat amoeba on the front and the caption, “I love myself!”’

Collette laughs, rolling her eyes. ‘Somehow I doubt that would be a bestseller.’

I grin, picturing myself buying a Valentine’s Day card for myself. ‘No, possibly not.’

We lapse into silence for a moment, sipping our tea.

‘You haven’t always been an amoeba, though,’ Collette muses, looking at me over her steaming mug.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, remember when we were kids and you always wanted to sit around at lunch break on the grass playing that game with daisies when you pull out the petals and say, “He loves me, he loves me not”?’

I wince, shrinking into my seat. I’d totally forgotten how obsessed with that game I used to be, but it’s true. While other kids were swinging on the monkey bars or running around playing tag, I’d be sitting under a tree, plucking daisies from the grass and playing 'he loves me, he loves me not' while thinking about boys at school (most of whom I didn’t even interact with) or inventing imaginary heroes.

‘You used to drag me with you and make me sit there, just plucking the petals out of the daisies,’ Collette sniggers. Damn her and her annoyingly good memory.

‘Whatever,’ I grumble.

‘He loves me, he loves me not,’ Collette trills teasingly.

‘That was years ago,’ I remind her. ‘It was literally decades ago.’