Ben recognised the green notebook before he recognised the woman carrying it.
She was standing outside Waterloo station, checking her phone with her thumb tucked into the cuff of a navy coat. The notebook was held shut by a black elastic band. On its cover, a small silver sticker was peeling at one corner.
He had seen that notebook in a meeting room three years earlier.
At the time, its owner had been introduced as Nora, the designer who would rescue their company’s disastrous annual report. Online, she was TuesdayBlue, the woman he had been talking to on an ABDL forum for six weeks.
Ben stopped beside a man arguing with a folding bicycle.
His phone vibrated.
TuesdayBlue: Navy coat. Green notebook. Trying to look less nervous than I am.
He was thirty-four. He had a mortgage, a sensible pension and, apparently, no idea how to walk the remaining twelve feet.
TuesdayBlue
Their first exchange had been about something unremarkable: whether to mention an ABDL interest before a first date or wait until there was a reason to trust the person.
Ben had written a long answer. TuesdayBlue had replied that he seemed to be planning a presentation rather than a conversation.
He had liked her immediately.
After that, they talked about work, terrible rented flats, adult diapers, the embarrassment of explaining a private interest, and how neither of them enjoyed being treated like a list of preferences. She liked old cinemas. He cooked elaborate meals on Sundays and ate the leftovers until Thursday.
They had exchanged first names and ages before arranging to meet: Nora, thirty-one; Ben, thirty-four. Her profile photo showed her in sunglasses. His was a distant photograph taken on a walking holiday, mostly landscape.
Neither had connected those details to a project that had ended three years ago.
Now she looked up.
For a second, her face remained politely expectant. Then she lowered the phone.
“Annual report Ben?”
“TuesdayBlue Nora?”
A bus pulled away behind them. Neither moved.
Then she looked at the notebook under her arm.
“I knew I should have bought a new one.”
A different kind of meeting
They found a small café away from the station. Ben chose a table near the back, then wondered whether choosing a table near the back looked suspicious. Nora watched him move a chair twice.
“We can stop,” she said. “If this feels too close to work.”
“You don’t work there anymore.”
“Neither does that stop it feeling strange.”
He appreciated that she had said it first. They had never been colleagues in the same department, but she had once seen him in a room full of people who believed they knew him. The overlap made the private messages on his phone feel suddenly louder.
“I’m not worried about you,” he said. “I’m recalculating the size of London.”
“Apparently about six people.”
They ordered tea. Hers arrived in a pot that dripped onto the saucer. His came with a biscuit wrapped in plastic, which he spent too long trying to open quietly.
Nora remembered his habit of putting meeting papers into perfectly aligned piles. He remembered that she had once removed the word “innovative” from a document seventeen times.
“Eighteen,” she said. “You put one back.”
He smiled. Some of the tension went with it.
The invitation she remembered
As the café emptied, their conversation found the pace it had online. They talked about the forum and why it had been easier to be direct there. Nora had mentioned her own ABDL interest early in their messages. Ben had spent two days deciding whether that meant they had something in common or whether he was getting ahead of himself.
“Both,” she said when he admitted it.
“That’s reassuringly unhelpful.”
“You asked.”
Then she turned her cup by the handle and asked whether he remembered the last afternoon of the annual-report project.
He remembered a delayed file, a box of supermarket doughnuts and everybody wanting to leave.
“I asked if you wanted a drink,” she said.
“The team was going to the pub.”
“The team was already at the pub.”
Ben looked at her.
“I thought you were being polite.”
“You said you had laundry.”
He closed his eyes. “I did have laundry.”
“I’m sure it was urgent.”
She was smiling, but there was enough seriousness underneath it to make him put down his cup.
“I’d have said yes if I’d understood.”
“Well,” she said, “I’ve gone to considerable lengths to ask again.”
Beyond the usernames
They walked towards the South Bank after the café closed. The pavement was damp, and Nora stepped around puddles without interrupting a story about a client who wanted a logo to look “more Thursday”.
Ben laughed hard enough that she had to repeat the ending.
Near the river, she asked whether he would rather keep using the forum messages for now. He took out his phone and offered her his number. She entered it, then rang him while they were standing side by side.
His screen displayed an unknown caller.
“Very mysterious,” he said.
“Answer it.”
He did.
“Hello, Ben. Would you like to have dinner with me next week? This is a date invitation.”
“I’ll have to check the washing machine.”
She nudged his shoulder with hers.
“Yes,” he said. “I’d like that.”
Later, on the train home, he changed her contact name from TuesdayBlue to Nora. Then, after a moment, he added a small blue square beside it.