Nadiya Khan - A Love Story
This story is about a young solicitor who, one ordinary weekday morning, is served by Nadiya Khan, a middle-aged checkout lady at his local supermarket. For Adam, it is lust at first sight and he is determined to take things further.
Comments welcome as always.
Sylviafan
If you'd asked me before that fateful Wednesday in March that I was going to fall for a middle-aged lady of Asian descent with long grey hair, I'd have laughed at you. What I didn't realise at the time, and what I've subsequently come to believe, is that there are physical appearances which might not necessarily conform to one's pre-conceived idea of beauty, but when one actually sees them in the flesh - wham! Call it raw sexual attraction if you like. It's a very personal thing; somebody else may see no attraction at all in the object of your desires. Furthermore, you don't have any control over it and it can hit you in the most unexpected places. Like a supermarket checkout.
In fact I shouldn't even have been in the supermarket, but I'd been out to see a client and both the supermarket and my house were, at a pinch, on the way back to the office so I thought I'd sneak in and do my weekly shop in company time. Not that my weekly shop was particularly burdensome; I still ate a lot of meals at my parents' house and when I ate at home it was as often as not a takeaway meal. Not very sophisticated, I know.
I should introduce myself. I'm Adam, Adam Slater, and I work as a conveyancing solicitor in a large law practice in a Midlands city in the UK. The work's mostly commercial but we do private house sales too and a few other bits and pieces. I've been there since finishing law school, which was six years ago, and I'm very happy with my career; if I work hard and toe the line I can expect to be made partner by the age of forty - that is if I'm not caught skiving off on company time!
Appearance wise I'm pretty ordinary. I suppose my best features are my hair, which is thick and black and wavy, and my eyes, which are deep blue, both a legacy of my Celtic origins; my mother is from Cork. I'm average height, five nine and about a hundred and fifty pounds with regular features, apart from my nose which got broken in a rugby game at school. I could get it fixed but that feels a bit vain; also, I harbour a secret delusion that it makes me look more interesting.
One of the reasons I went shopping that morning was because at weekends the supermarket was a nightmare: full carpark, choked aisles, empty shelves and mammoth queues at the checkouts. This Wednesday, at just after ten thirty, it was virtually deserted as I wandered up and down the aisles with my trolley listening to Motown being played over the PA system.
It was pretty empty at the checkouts, too. Perversely there seemed to be more of them open than there were on a Saturday morning so I just headed for the nearest one, where the checkout operator stood waiting for the next customer. She smiled at me as I arrived at her bay and started loading my goods onto the conveyer belt, but I didn't really look at her, I was just vaguely aware of long, grey hair.
I got my first proper look at her after I'd emptied my trolley and put a "Next Customer Please" divider down behind my groceries, although there was nobody behind me. I pushed my trolley past the Perspex screen, which was still in place three years after Covid, and looked across at the checkout operator. And wham!
The first thing I noticed was her hair: closer up I could see that she wore it in a fringe across her forehead and at each side of her face it fell to below her shoulders in a thick, straight, grey curtain. In fact "grey" doesn't really do it justice. It was a deep and vibrant grey, if that's not a contradiction in terms. Almost metallic, with a slight hint of something warmer, violet perhaps. I'd never seen hair like it.
Then there was her face: well-defined lips, high, prominent cheekbones, a hooked nose and dark eyes, surmounted by thick, black eyebrows, her skin the colour of caramel. It wasn't a classically beautiful face but it was striking, characterful. The face of somebody that I would like to get to know, to talk to and to understand.
'Would you like help with your packing?' she asked; they always ask that whether you're eighteen or eighty. Her voice was clear, the accent melodious but not of the East, as her looks indicated, but somewhere closer to home, London or the Home Counties perhaps.
'I'll be fine,' I told her, the words almost sticking in my mouth. She started swiping my items through the bar-code reader and I shoved things into my bags, torn between wanting to look at her and trying to keep up with the packing.
She waited patiently as I stuffed the last few things in and hefted the bags back into the trolley.
'Have you got a loyalty card?' she asked.
I fished out my wallet and presented the piece of plastic. 'One of my most treasured possessions,' I told her, facetiously.
'I'm very pleased to hear it,' she smiled as she scanned it, displaying very white, even teeth. I smiled back and took the opportunity to look at her name badge.
You were served today by Nadiya
, it said.
'That's fifty pounds and fifteen pence,' she told me. I swiped my debit card and the till churned out a receipt and a couple of vouchers. 'There's five pounds off your next shop,' she said, laying them down and pointing to one with a tapering finger, the nail cut quite close. 'But it's only valid for a week.'
'Great,' I said, trying to muster some enthusiasm whilst looking at her hands for evidence of a wedding ring.
I threw the receipt and vouchers into one of the bags and gave her a last smile. 'Thanks, Nadiya,' I said, lengthening the first "a" and hoping I was pronouncing it correctly.
I got a big smile in return which lit up her face and made her look even more ridiculously desirable to me. 'Thank you,' she said, 'and enjoy the rest of your day.'
I wheeled my trolley out into the carpark in a bit of a daze, wondering where I'd parked my car. After I'd loaded the stuff into the boot I sat in the driver's seat drumming my fingers on the steering wheel. What was that all about? I'd just had a five-minute interaction with a supermarket checkout lady and I was feeling like I'd had a visitation from the Archangel Gabriel. What was it about her that had affected me, I asked myself. On the face of it she was nothing like my type; I generally went for leggy blondes with full breasts. Well Nadiya certainly wasn't blonde and although she'd been wearing the utilitarian uniform of the supermarket worker, I doubted that she was either leggy or full-breasted. Then there was her age. She had to be fifty if she was a day.
But she had affected me. That amazing grey hair, her skin tone, her rather hawk-like face, her smile with those white teeth. And something about her manner had attracted me, too. An air of friendliness, of self-composure, of being comfortable in her own skin. And she wasn't wearing any rings, I had registered.
I drove to my house and unloaded the groceries, then I went on to work, where I faffed about for a couple of hours, thinking about Nadiya, until mid-afternoon when I got a grip on myself and concentrated on my paid employment.
For the next few days I pushed thoughts of the checkout lady out of my head as soon as they crept in, which was frequently. It was ok at the office where there were numerous displacement activities, like work, but at home I seemed to think about little else and I lay awake at night thinking of her and resisting the urge to masturbate, as though that would somehow consummate my fixation.
By early the following week I had accepted that I was going to go into the supermarket on Wednesday morning and see if she was there. Just to convince myself that I was being foolish, I told myself. It wasn't hard to arrange another illicit couple of hours away from the office and ten o'clock saw me wandering the aisles with my trolley, the Motown now replaced by eighties pop.
Thirty minutes later I approached the checkouts and yes, about halfway along the row I could see her distinctive grey hair. I approached the checkout at about the same time, as luck would have it, that she was finishing with her current customer.
'Hello,' I said after I'd loaded my stuff onto the conveyer. My heartrate had increased and my guts felt queasy and liquid. She was just as desirable as she'd been the week before, and just as unobtainable! How did you go about asking a checkout operator for a date? And what were the chances that she'd accept?
'Hello,' she replied, smiling at me and starting to scan my items through the barcode reader. And again I was torn by the need to pack my items and the desire to examine her more closely.
'Have you got your loyalty card?' she asked after all my items were packed. I fished out my wallet and held it out for her to scan. She surprised me by looking up at me with a grin on her face.
