My Type Is Trouble With Nice Eyes
I can spot a bad idea in a nice coat. I still say yes.
That is the whole confession, really. I am not confused. I am not unlucky. I have a type and it keeps turning up looking like proof.
Nice eyes. A mouth that already knows it is getting away with something. The kind of laugh that makes a pub feel smaller. Chemistry hits and my brain files it under fate when it is usually just familiar old trouble wearing better shoes.
I clock it. Then I lean in anyway.
I know the coat is a warning
There is a look. Not even a specific haircut. More of a temperature. He walks in like he has somewhere else to be and might stay if you are interesting enough. That should be my cue to finish my drink and go home to the flat like a woman with a rota in the morning.
Instead I sit up straighter. Check my mouth in the back of a spoon if I have to. Start talking like I have never been disappointed in my life.
People think attraction is mysterious. Mine is not. Mine has a pattern so obvious I could draw it on a napkin. Unavailable. Slightly smug. Funny enough to hide the gap. Good hands. Bad follow through. Eyes that make me feel picked even when I am clearly one of a few options.
The decent ones exist. I have met them. They text when they say they will. They ask about my shift. They do not make me earn basic warmth. And something in me goes oddly flat, like the film has started in the wrong place.
Then trouble walks over and the film starts properly.
Chemistry is not evidence
This is the lie I keep buying. If it feels sharp, it must mean something. If my stomach drops, it must be important. If I want him immediately, that has to be more honest than liking someone slowly.
It is not more honest. It is just louder.
I have confused heat with truth for years. A man can look at me like he already knows how the night ends and I treat that like a personality. I treat it like he has seen me. He has seen a version. The version that arrives ready, lip product on, jokes loaded, no awkward pause where I might ask what this is.
Trouble is very good at that look. That is why it works. It borrows the feeling of being chosen without doing any of the choosing.
By the time I notice the difference, I am already inventing a Saturday that does not exist.
Familiar trouble feels like home
I wish this was just about fit lads in London and bad decisions after one drink. It is a bit of that. It is also the older thing I do not advertise.
Quiet used to mean danger in my house. Warmth that vanished used to mean I had to be fine about it. So a man who is hot and then slightly gone does not feel strange to me. It feels like a language I already speak.
The kind ones feel foreign. I keep waiting for the drop. When it does not come, I get suspicious. When it does come with the nice eyes crowd, I think, there it is, at least I was right.
Being right about a bad idea is not the prize I think it is. It is just me protecting a story. I pick the man who will confirm I should not have asked for more. Then I get to stay cocky about it.
Look at me. I knew. I always know.
Knowing and still saying yes is not wisdom. It is a habit with nice eyes.
The night always starts the same
He is late, or he nearly did not come, or he has to be up early. There is already an exit built in. I tell myself that makes it casual and therefore safe.
We talk like we have met before. Maybe we have, in the general sense. Different face, same weather. He likes that I am blunt. I like that he does not flinch when I am filthy. Someone touches a glass. Someone suggests we get out of there.
In the morning I can still see the coat on the chair and the whole thing looks obvious. Of course. Of course it was this.
He will be warm in the doorway and thinner by the afternoon. Or he will stay in the chat just enough that I keep the tab open. Or he will do the most insulting version, which is being lovely in private and unusable in daylight.
My flatmates do not even need the name anymore. They can tell from my face in the kitchen. They make tea. They do not give the speech. They have heard it. I have given it to myself.
I keep calling it a type like that makes me sophisticated
Type sounds chic. Type sounds like I have taste. Type lets me wear the pattern as a joke instead of a problem.
My type is trouble with nice eyes. People laugh when I say it. I laugh too. It is a good line. It is also a way of staying loyal to the thing that keeps bruising me.
I do not want a project. I do not want to fix a man. I want the feeling of standing next to someone who could ruin my week and choosing it because at least the week will not be boring.
Boring is the fear under all of this. A kind man, a normal dinner, a text that arrives when it should. Part of me hears that and thinks, is that it. Part of me would rather have a story than a steady Tuesday.
Then Tuesday comes anyway. I am at work. Radio on. Rota in my pocket. Checking a chat that is doing nothing. The story was not even that good. It was just loud.
What I am trying, badly
I am not going to pretend I have retired from bad ideas. I have not. I still clock a nice coat and feel my whole posture change. I still say yes faster than I think.
I am trying to pause for the length of a song. That is it. One song. Long enough to ask the ugly question. Do I like him, or do I like that he feels like every other mistake I already survived.
If the answer is the second one, I am supposed to go home. Put the kettle on. Take the face off. Write it in the diary like a person who wants a life, not just a night that proves a theory.
Sometimes I manage it. Sometimes I do not. Honesty is not the same as discipline.
The men with the nice eyes will keep existing. London is full of them. The point is not that they stop walking into pubs. The point is I stop treating the drop in my stomach like a green light.
It is usually just recognition. Oh. You. I know this coat.
I can spot a bad idea from across the room. That was never the talent. The talent I actually need is walking away while it is still only a coat and a pair of eyes and not another week I will have to get over at work.
I still say yes more than I want to admit. I am trying to say it less. That will have to do for now.
