They meet in the Dove on Broadway Market. They drink beer and talk about music and food. He is a chef. He knows nothing about politics or books. He has no high test scores. He left school to go to culinary college and has lived in Paris and Marseille and speaks fluent French. She feels she has been waiting her whole life to meet a man with no high test scores who speaks fluent, backstreet Marseille slang. He does not flirt. When he takes off his cap, she sees that he is starting to go bald. She sees his small reflexive flinch as he monitors her reaction. But now, two hours into their date and several pints down, she has no reaction to monitor because by now she has decided that he could have lost all of his hair and she would not mind. He tells her that one day, he would like to own a restaurant. No pretensions, local food. Simple cooking. He asks her about herself. She tells him about her job, working for a small company, pairing community projects with big banks. The office on the edge of Canary Wharf. Queuing up on her lunch break with all the suits. She makes it sound funny. She tells him about a five-a-side football match between local kids and a German bank. How the kids creamed them. How pleased she was. He likes this story, as she hoped he would. About the Bengali women’s group she took to a meeting this morning at the Bank of America, nervously fluttering in their saris like beautiful birds.

“That’s good,” he says. “That’s good work. Those bankers. You should take that lot of bastards for whatever you can.”

“Yeah,” she smiles, “I’ll drink to that.”

When he goes up to get more drinks, she sees that he is trying to hold his stomach in. By the end of the third pint he has stopped trying. They kiss on the street outside, their hands in each other’s hair.

They go back to his place. It is a large studio in a run-down block overlooking the canal. He has a futon and a wall of records. He plays her vintage reggae and opens a bottle of wine. The bed is messy and he hastily covers it with a blanket.

“I wasn’t expecting anyone back here,” he says. She believes him, and she likes him even more. They are hungry and he says he will cook. She watches him chop vegetables with startling efficiency. He must be drunk but his knife does not slip. His tattoos. His wide forearms. Lissa was right. What she needed was a bear.

He cooks pasta with capers and chili and fresh tomatoes. It is unbelievably delicious. After they have eaten, they have sex on the unmade bed. She is astonished by how lovely he is to fuck.