Dan Taylor Is Giving Up on Women Read Online Free

of the file management system. Sometimes her summery blonde hair tickled my neck. It was the kind of delicate incidental physical proximity that makes a man imagine so much more. It was disturbingly reminiscent of imagining myself in love with the new Cypriot girl working at my local barber’s, just because she always brushed against me softly while using the razor on the back of my neck.
    That situation caused me to make a fool of myself by suggesting dinner to her after my fourth haircut in less than a month, thereby condemning me for ever after to using the expensive and not quite as good salon two doors down.
    Sigh.
    Anyway. Janice had followed up the lesson with a quiet gossipy chat about my predecessor, which I interpreted as a manifesto about her power in the office.
    Turned out the guy whose job I now had was ‘disappeared’ one day with only mutterings about some form of inappropriate online behaviour emerging from management. I learned he’d been seeing Janice for a while, but dumped her to go back to his ex, with whom he’d had a baby. I was invited to agree with her that this was shocking and atrocious behaviour on his part. It was shortly after this that a ‘routine’ review of the Internet history for his computer had discovered a cache of smut. Janice said it had to be him that was looking at
Lonely Farmers Go Wild
, as no one else would have had the passwords to get on his computer — excepting herself, of course. She darkly suggested that after he’d got back with his ex finding filthy pictures of slutty-acting old cows was to be expected. A moment had passed when it looked as if she was reliving some moment of righteous vengeance, before she brightly offered to show me where the stationery cupboard was, and invited me to the pub after work to meet some of the other guys.
    No, I thought, staring blankly at my monitor, best to try not to disturb her first thing, on the first day back after a long break. Janice was not a person to disturb after a holiday.
    I sat and closed my eyes and let my fingers hover over the keyboard, hoping some kind of muscle memory would kick in and my hands would fly over the right keys. ‘Bigwilly90’ suggested itself, and I sat there pondering pressing the return.
    ‘Back in zis shithole, eh, Danny?’
    Delphine Montagne, the new business analyst, shimmered towards my desk, and I blessed again the atrociously sexist employment policies of our creepy boss, which saw the office full of unspectacular-looking men, and decidedly above-average-looking women. Delphine was twenty-seven and gorgeous, she had a lean runner’s body that meant she could wear the kind of archly fashionable high-street clothes always seen in the
Metro
, and bobbed Hollywood-red hair that must have cost a lot of money to get looking that natural. Her default facial expression was a frown that said she’d discovered the meaning of life, and wasn’t too happy about it. But catch her with the right joke and you could get a girlish laugh out of her that left nearby men grinning like simpletons, and women rolling their eyes. Add to that she was French, and you basically had a combination that knocked me flat on my back, waiting for my tummy to be tickled.
    ‘Did you get my text?’ she asked.
    ‘Text? No. Everything OK?’
    ‘It was New Year’s Eve, just wishing you a happy new year. And also to say zat Alex was being a shit again.’
    ‘Really? That’s terrible. Sorry I didn’t get it — you know how it is with New Year’s Eve texts…’ I now vaguely remembered having received a message, but I think it was at a point on that long dark night of the soul when I was trying to get some feeling back in my feet after walking through London for two hours in the freezing cold, and trying to work out who was more drunk and morose, me or the cab driver.
    ‘So aside from New Year’s did you have a good Christmas home in Paris?’
    ‘Ugh. My family, Danny. My sister. My mother. And then there was Jean