The glug of my glass makes me smile. The way the crisp white wine exits its bottle and slides down gratefully into my glass, landing with a glug, glug, glug.

I feel the flush of blood tinge my cheeks as Dave pulls the bottle away and I raise my glass to my lips.

Is this my fourth? Or maybe my fifth?

There’s so much chatter and music in the restaurant it’s now very hard to direct my thoughts.

I need to remember to take the bread out the freezer when I get back.

“You were telling us Zoe of your misspent youth,” Mary chimes in, her voice ringing like a bell.

I raise my eyebrows knowingly.

“I think I’ve shared enough stories,” I offer and laugh.

“That sounds like you need another bottle of wine,” Dave announced and gestures to the waiter. The old couple at the table next to us crow at him as he topples out of his seat to get his attention.

In this lighting you can really see how his hair is thinning. Poor Dave.

“Trust me, there are some things you don’t want to know,” Ollie says slyly next to me, knowingly sipping his scotch.

Is that just his first?

“Oh really?” I turn to face him. Ollie isn’t losing his hair. Thank God.

He’s had one or two unfortunate cuts in the two decades we’ve been together, nothing so drastic as to make me want to move back in with my parents.

Not really.

He nods fervently.

“It’ll make your toes curl!”

I playfully hit him on the shoulder, but I think I don’t judge my own strength and he winces, his whisky now sloshing in its dram glass.

“Alright,” Dave clasps his hands together and the waiter replaces our bottle. Zoe’s beady brown eyes are alight. “How about the story of how you got together?”

Silence descends.

“Of how we got together?” I repeat. I’m sure that’s what he said, but it is really so loud.

Zoe nods eagerly and grabs the bottle. Glug.

“You tell it, Mrs Henderson,” Ollie wraps his arm around me. “You’re the storyteller after all.”

I gulp.

Glug.

“Oh now this is taking me back,” I wipe my hair away from my face.

“It wasn’t yesterday,” Ollie chortles to himself and his whisky. He shows no signs of butting in.

Of all the moments he decides to speak over me.

“Well, it was a long time ago,” I begin.

“Yes, we’ve established that,” Zoe throws back some wine. Stupid Zoe.

“Of course,” I smile blandly. Is it really warm in here? “I had just come back to university after the Christmas break.”

“Summer,” Ollie interjects. There’s something off in his tone.

“Summer,” I smile sweetly, he might as well take over but he doesn’t. “And I return to my flat to discover the alarm is losing its battery. I go next door to find help, and low and behold there is my future husband. Having lived right next door for a year then, right under my nose.”

Zoe and Dave look at us adoringly.

“That is sooo cute!” Zoe comments nasally.

“And to think we met on an app!”

Next to me, Ollie is still looking at his dram glass but now the whisky is all gone.

Glug.

“That’s not how we met,” he remarks awkwardly. “That’s how you met Justin, your boyfriend before me.”

Now my cheeks feel as cold as the ice in the wine bucket.

Zoe and Dave have also shut up.

“We met at a postgraduate conference in 2003,” Ollie adds and I slink into my seat. “You couldn’t remember where you parked your car.”

I reach for the bottle.

Glug.