No-One Ever Has Sex On A Tuesday: A Very Funny Romantic Novel (28 page)

Suzie’s shaking hand hovered in mid-air and a weak smile sat frozen on her lips. She stared after him in a daze.

“What was that?” cried Drew. “Go on. Go after him now. Tell him. I know you can do it.”

She turned her head to meet his incredulous face.

“I can’t,” she whispered shaking her head slowly.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because,” she said looking away in shame. “Because,” she tried again knowing she was about to look ridiculous.

“Please don’t say what I think you’re going to say,” pleaded Drew.

“Because I love him,” she blurted out unable to look up and endure Drew’s reaction. What was she supposed to do when she’d been ambushed the minute she’d set eyes on Alex. All the anger and hurt had been kicked into touch by a full on attack of longing and desire.

She forced herself to look up only to be met with a look of total bewilderment on Drew’s face. The last thing she could do was explain it to him. She couldn’t even explain it to herself.

“Sorry,” she muttered as she rose unsteadily to her feet and reached for her coat off the back of her chair.

“Sorry,” she said again as she stumbled against her chair and set off across the office. She couldn’t bear to look at Drew’s disbelief any longer. She knew he was right but she loved Alex which somehow did not allow for angry confrontations over an entirely unacceptable, unceremonious dumping. She loved Alex which meant that all she could deal with right now was a moody post-mortem to work out exactly where she had gone wrong and more importantly, whether she could do anything about it.

Chapter Two

Dear Trish,

I envy you I really do. Your husband clearly still loves you or else he wouldn’t be offering to come home and re-create what you once had by playing out his sexual fantasies, would he?

Of course you shouldn’t do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable but I suggest you sit down and talk to him and agree what you are both happy with. I must also point out that PVC is not flattering to the fuller figure but I can recommend Marks & Spencer’s thongs, generally available in a size 18, along with matching large-cup-size bras. I would also recommend that you attend a spinning class with your husband but maybe choose a different gym this time.

Take this chance Trish, because if you really love someone they are worth fighting for.

Good luck

Suzie

Suzie had been on the bus home desperately mulling over her relationship with Alex when she realised her early exit from the office meant she was about to miss her 4’oclock deadline to submit her agony column. She only had to finish the reply to Trish’s problem but she knew now how ill-advised her initial response had been. The last thing Trish needed was to be told to take a blowtorch to her husband. Trish had a chance at rekindling her love and you had to make the most of your chances. Trish needed encouragement, not to have her hopes shot down in flames. She tapped out a revised response on her phone and forwarded it to the office just in time, hoping she’d told Trish what she needed to help save her relationship.

No longer distracted by the task in hand she gazed through the toddler-snot obscured windows of the bus at the grey dripping streets of Manchester and wondered what on earth she could do about her own love life. Gloom engulfed her as they hissed to a stop on the high street outside the brightly-lit windows of McDonalds and she did what she always did at this point in her journey home. She couldn’t help herself. She looked over to the table and chairs nestled in the corner of the left-hand window and re-lived the moment. The moment when Alex had first kissed her.

It had been all of six months ago at the end of what she’d felt was one of the happiest days of her life. After all you don’t often get to pull the man at the top of your list do you? Number five maybe, if you’re really lucky, but a number one – when does that happen? She and her best mate Jackie had started doing TFLPBs (Top Five Lists of Possible Boyfriends) way back in their teens, mostly so that they could laugh hysterically at one another’s taste in men (although Jackie never found it funny that Suzie gave Rick Astley a run at number one for eighteen weeks). Jackie no longer needed a list, being happily ensconced in her second marriage but Suzie still had one, updating in her head almost as regularly as the London Stock Exchange. It was her security blanket, essential to reassure herself that she hadn’t yet reached the bottom of the dating pit. Sadly she had been forced to make the list more realistic as the years passed by. Famous people fell by the way side in her twenties, highly attractive men were struck off in her early thirties and now, quite frankly, her list mostly consisted of men who were single and didn’t repulse her. This was why Alex had been such a revelation. A single man, in his thirties, and absolutely gorgeous. He’d gone straight to the top of her list when he’d arrived at the paper at the beginning of the year to head up the sales and advertising team.

She’d tried not to stalk him like a love-struck teenager but if she happened to go to lunch at the same time as him then so be it. She had to talk to him; she couldn’t just ignore him. And for some reason she genuinely drank more coffee on the days he worked in the office meaning she had to make more trips to the kitchen that was co-incidentally opposite his desk.

In the end she had Gareth the new editor to thank for getting them together. Gareth had thrown them all into a room on his first day and demanded they each come up with at least three ideas to boost sales of the struggling paper. When she’d flippantly suggested an agony column he pounced on it.

“Brilliant,” he said, flashing his best thirty-year-old, hot-shot Londoner smile at her. “Particularly as the dating section on the website currently gets more hits than your entire Lifestyle section,” he’d continued cuttingly. “I want it in by next week and liaise with Alex on what advertisers it can bring in. Viagra, Tampax, whatever – just make it pay.”

“You work on the content baby, I’ll bring Durex,” Alex had whispered that night during an extensive and drunken post mortem of the new editor in the pub with the rest of the team. Later he told her they needed to discuss the new column at length and could they do it in McDonalds because he was starving.

She’d told herself sternly as she staggered after him through Piccadilly that going to a fast food restaurant after a works drink did not constitute a date. However she couldn’t help but feel some excitement at the romantic potential of sitting next to him alone in a restaurant albeit surrounded by obese teenagers and anorexic looking tramps.

She could still taste that first kiss. Cheese with a hint of gherkin.

After he’d satisfied his appetite, to her absolute astonishment, he’d pulled her onto his knee in that very window and snogged her face off.

She could picture them now giggling like naughty school children oblivious to their abusive audience.

“I think you’re lovely,” he’d said when they finally came up for breath and a table of spotty youths had cheered.

She was practically swooning as a chorus of “Give ‘er one for me,” came from the next table.

“I’d like to,” Alex had whispered in her ear and she’d swooned again.

She’d taken him home to bed of course. She really didn’t see why not. She’d been stalking him for a few months so why waste time? And time was something she didn’t have the luxury of anyway. Long courtships were for twenty-something’s. Post thirty and you had to cut corners to find out fast whether he was going to be in it for the long haul. Delaying sex until after they’d dated a while was an indulgence she couldn’t afford.

Luckily their post McDonald’s consummation marked the start of a beautiful relationship and not a drunken shag between colleagues never to be repeated. It was with great delight that she had rung Jackie to announce that she was dating a number one off her list of possible boyfriends. An absolute first. Nearly twenty years it had taken her to bag a list leader. Now finally here she was, convinced it meant that he was the man she had been waiting all her life to live happily ever after with.

“Calm down,” Jackie had said. “I know what you’re like. You fall in love and you stop seeing sense. You watch way too many of those stupid romantic comedies. As I’ve told you time and time again, stop at the bit where it all goes wrong. They’re much more realistic that way.”

But this time she was convinced it was different. She was so happy she almost felt like she could be Meg Ryan. Before plastic surgery obviously. And before all the dodgy stuff with Russell Crowe. Really what was she thinking?

Still it had felt like they were on a fairytale roll. One month in and they were going out together every Friday and Saturday night. Two months in and he was spending every weekend at her flat. Three months in and they had embarrassing pet names for each other. Four months in and there was talk of love as they giggled under the duvet. Five months in and he’d taken her to his mum and dad’s Ruby Wedding party. She’d met his parents for goodness’ sake. He’d taken her to meet his parents and she was in her thirties. Surely he knew what that implied? And now six months in and they’d gone from that to a casual parting text. It didn’t make sense. She had to be missing something. Something must have caused this temporary wobble, she just didn’t know what.

An insistent beep from her phone interrupted her thoughts. She felt her heart leap into her mouth as her head instantly filled with the naked hope that it was Alex trying to get in touch to tell her it was all a mistake. Her fingers tripped over themselves in the scramble to open the text. Then her heart sank slowly and painfully back down as she saw Drew’s name appear at the bottom of a harsh reminder that under no circumstances should she attempt any pleading communication with Alex during her post break-up misery.

She knew that Drew only had her best interests at heart but he didn’t really understand what it was like to be her. Mostly adrift, desperately casting out for someone to anchor her down. He’d had his anchor for so long he didn’t remember what it was like to be floating, completely untethered. So she had to call Alex. She owed it to herself at least to find out why he’d ended it. It could be something ridiculous after all. Something that could be mended immediately. She couldn’t let them fall apart for the sake of one stupid phone call.

For the first time that day she felt a glimmer of hope as the bus pulled up to her stop. She picked her umbrella up off the mud-soaked floor and stumbled her way to the front. Hope was some relief at least.

Unfortunately hope took a knock the minute she walked through her front door. As if on auto-pilot she glanced down at the shoe rack. Alex had taken to leaving his footie boots there so he didn’t have to race home every Sunday morning to pick them up on his way to a match. She’d moved her never-used trainers to be next to them, delighted by the vision of harmony. The boots were gone; a few flecks of mud remaining like ashes on the floor. She dropped her bag and sprinted upstairs to the bathroom. His toothbrush, mini aftershave and deodorant were gone too. He’d cold-bloodedly packed his belongings then shut the door behind him that morning already knowing it was the last time he was going to be in the flat.

She slumped her way back downstairs in a daze, desperately trying to make sense of it all. She mooched towards the kitchen in search of caffeine and something hideously fattening but was stopped in her tracks at the doorway. She gasped and her hand flew up to her open mouth. She leaned heavily against the doorpost shocked to be so devastated by the scene that lay before her. Her eyes wandered slowly over the embers of her last evening with Alex stacked messily on the kitchen counter in front of her.

Two empty bottles of red wine.

The end crust of a French stick.

A congealed cheese-fondue pot.

Half a dozen uneaten mince pies.

Two burnt down candles erupting down two old wine bottles.

Two dirty glasses. One with lipstick marks. Hers. One with greasy finger marks. His.

One broken coffee mug.

It was the broken coffee mug that made her want to curl up into a ball and weep. The mug that less than twenty four hours earlier Alex had knocked to the ground in a fit of passion, his hands all over her body making her giggle and gasp before she surrendered and allowed herself to be led to the bedroom. The coffee mug that had been broken in the lead up to what had been possibly their best sex yet, fuelled by the euphoria of Alex telling her he wanted to spend Christmas with her and her family.

She’d been so nervous about asking him. But as she kept telling herself, all the evidence suggested that she wasn’t entering dangerous territory. They spent all their time together, she’d met his entire family and she was on piss-taking terms with his mates. Even so she’d tried hard to be ultra-casual ensuring he hadn’t felt under any pressure to say yes.

“So mum’s cooking Christmas dinner this year,” she’d said whilst pouring him some wine. “D’you fancy coming?”

He’d looked at her for a moment then smiled and declared, “I’d love to,” before he lunged at her, knocking the coffee mug clean to the floor.

Her stomach lurched as she recalled her mind wandering to a place she hadn’t dared venture to in some time. Vivid images of roaring fires and twinkling fairy lights and Alex handing over the perfect gifts to all her family before he produced an extra special gift. A small box hidden in the Christmas tree containing a…

She groaned and wrapped her arms tightly around her realizing what an idiot she’d been. She’d gone too quickly for him, it was obvious. She’d asked him for Christmas and scared him off. It was okay for her to meet his family but it was clearly a step too far for him to meet hers. He’d panicked and that’s why he’d ended it. She’d made a mistake. One stupid mistake. Why oh why had she asked him? Why couldn’t she have just let it amble along? Let him set the pace rather than her.

She sank to the floor, head in her hands. She felt sick. Sick at her mistake and at the prospect of what Christmas now held in store. Her mother asking her nervous questions designed to reveal whether or not her ancient, husbandless daughter was actually a lesbian and her self-satisfied younger sister taunting her with the plans for her imminent hen-do.