Never Google Heartbreak
Read Never Google Heartbreak Online
Authors: Emma Garcia
Table of Contents
Chapter 4: Top Tips to Look Your Best
Chapter 5: The Things We Do for Love
Chapter 7: A Soundtrack for Heartbreak
Chapter 9: Friends, Favours and Fuck Buddies
Chapter 10: Ten Dos and Don’ts to Impress Your Ex
Chapter 11: Falling Apart: Part I
Chapter 12: Falling Apart: Part II
Chapter 13: Will I Ever Get Over It?
Chapter 14: Family and Friends
Chapter 17: Sleeping with Friends
Chapter 18: Are You Compatible?
Chapter 20: Ten Break-up Commandments
Chapter 23: Getting Back with Your Ex
Chapter 27: Endings/New Beginnings
Chapter 29: I Thought He Was You
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Emma Garcia 2013
The right of Emma Garcia to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 444 74150 6
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
For my trio of Leos with love and gratitude.
‘Look, there’s a patch of blue sky over there.’
Maureen Tucker
‘
Illegitimi non carborundum.
’
‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’
John Tucker
Rob Waters proposed to me three months after I slept with him. I thought it was one of those whirlwind romances you read about in magazines at the hairdresser’s. Five years and two postponed weddings later, I’ve accepted it’s more of a slow burner.
In two months’ time, however, we will finally, actually be saying, ‘I do.’ This time everything’s booked: the Blue Room at Burnby Castle near his parents’, the reportage photographer and the Rolls-Royce. Rob has been very hands-on, which is great; it was his decision to go with the strawberry brandy snap baskets.
We’re keeping it informal. He’ll be in a navy blue Hugo Boss suit and pale pink shirt, the same pink as the bouquet roses. My dress is very simply cut with just the right amount of Chantilly lace. I sold the last two meringues on eBay.
We still have to pick out our wedding bands. They’ll be platinum to match the engagement ring. It’s funny but since he gave me this rock I’ve never taken it off, not even when he wanted to postpone the wedding the first time (he’s scared of churches) or the second (he felt funny about being thirty-five). I suppose I just love Rob Waters. I love him and not for all the obvious reasons like the fact he’s incredibly easy on the eye and absolutely loaded. I love the neat way he’s put together, his pouty lips and blond curls. I love the way he walks and how he sleeps curled up. I love the way he wrinkles his nose and sniffs when he’s concentrating. I’ve grown to love how he calls me ‘Bunny’. I don’t even mind when he screams, ‘Who’s a filthy little bunny?’ when we make love. I just say, ‘I am.’
He’ll be back from the gym soon so I’m making salmon with wild rice and chicory salad for supper, his favourite. I move around the kitchen and find I’m humming to myself. I’m certainly a very lucky girl to live in this fabulous apartment right in the centre of London, the greatest city in the world. I’m young(ish), in love and about to be married. I have everything I ever wanted.
The door slams. He’s back early. I go to the top of the stairs. He looks up, ringing bells in my soul with his handsomeness.
‘Hi.’ I smile. ‘Supper’s nearly ready.’
‘Hey, Viv,’ he says, and I know by his voice something is wrong. I go into the living room and wait. He must have had a bad day at work. He steps into the room and just stands there and the look in his blue eyes chills my blood. It’s a look I’ve seen before, twice before. His eyes search my face as he slowly, sadly, shakes his head.
‘Oh no,’ I whisper, and sink onto the Graham and Green sofa.
‘I can’t do it, Viv,’ he says, and I feel my heart snap like stepped-on ice.
Nevergoogleheartbreak.com – Self-help for Lovers
Rob Waters and I are ‘on a break’, taking time apart to discover what we want. Well, so he can discover he’s lost without me.
Moving out was my decision, a cruel-to-be-kind thing, like cutting back a lovely but straggly rosebush. You only do it to let something more beautiful bloom, and something beautiful will bloom for us when he realises what he’s lost and comes to get me back.
So yeah, no, just to be clear . . . We haven’t split up; we’re on a break – it’s different.
Obviously I was devastated when he cancelled our wedding . . . again (he doesn’t feel fully grown, spiritually speaking) and I didn’t want to leave, but I couldn’t stay, waiting like a spider with my wedding-dress web, could I?
I went upstairs that very evening and quietly started to pack. He asked me not to go, but this time something between us felt broken. I just left the dress and the veil hanging on the wardrobe door.
Now I have my own place, a little rented flat in north London. It’s fine. It’s what you’d call bijou. I was relieved when they finally got the sofa in (by taking the legs off and shoving for an hour). It’s funny, that sofa looked tiny at Rob’s.
Every day I wake up and remind myself he’ll be swinging by any minute, telling me he’s made a terrible mistake, he does want to marry me and it’s all back on.
Anyway, since I left, he hasn’t really been in touch (except to text me to ask if I knew where his hockey pads were) and I’ve developed a strange fascination. I’m finding myself researching heartbroken people. I’m obsessed with them. I’ve been collecting the details of other people’s break-ups and Googling words like ‘heartbreak’, ‘spinster’ and ‘dumped’, to see what’s out there. I haven’t been dumped, obviously, but I’m just interested. I can tell you there’s a whole lot of misery online. I’ve also begun to collect self-help books. I spend whole evenings in bookshops browsing through the personal growth section. There are many strategies you can use to help yourself. If only those broken-hearted people online knew!
Then I started thinking about putting all this together on a website. I’m thinking it’ll be something hopeful and upbeat, funny even, like an online magazine about relationships. The kind of place where self-help meets heartache, if that makes any sense. I’m thinking there’ll be case studies, top tips, an agony aunt forum – even a dating page. I know someone at work who might build it for me.
Yes, so that’s what I’ve mostly been thinking about these past few weeks since I left Rob. It’s kind of a project to throw myself into so I don’t spend every spare moment pining for him.
I do spend every spare moment pining for him, though. I wonder what he’s doing all the time, every second. But I’m not broken-hearted – as I said, we’re just on a break. And that’s what I think to myself every night as I take his T-shirt from under my pillow, hold it to my face and breathe in the last musky traces of his smell.
Case Studies
‘
That morning I remember he was very keen to have sex. Afterwards I went to work as normal. At about half nine he sent a text: “I’m moving out.” That’s all it said. When I got home, he’d gone. It was the secrecy that really got me, how he’d arranged everything behind my back.
He took all the cutlery. After two years of living together, he left me without so much as a spoon to stir my tea.
’
Debbie,
28
, Glamorgan
It’s Monday evening at Posh Lucy’s, Battersea. We’ve been scouring the internet for more break-up stories for the website.
‘There was a girl I used to work with,’ I say.
‘Hmm?’ replies Lucy, without looking up.
‘And she caught her fiancé in bed with their eighteen-year-old neighbour.’
‘Nasty.’
‘She used to go round to his place after that and hang about outside. Like, every night.’
‘Why?’
‘So she could see him.’
‘Isn’t that stalking?’
‘And she left little anonymous notes . . . loads of them, Sellotaped to his door.’
‘Poor, sad woman.’
‘That must take dedication. Imagine that – every night.’ I consider going to Rob’s and doing something similar, but he lives on a very busy street and I know all the neighbours because I lived there myself for five years.
I pick up the phone just to check a text hasn’t come in.
‘Ring him,’ says Lucy.
‘I can’t ring him. As I’ve already explained to you, I’m waiting for him to ring me.’
‘So you were about to marry him and now you can’t even talk to him?’
‘I can’t ring him after I moved out, can I? What would I say? “Hi there. Have you missed me yet? Shall I come back? Want to get married?”’
‘What if he doesn’t ring you?’
‘He will. It’s about time now. He’s had the first week for it to sink in, the second week to enjoy his freedom, go to the gym, watch the rugby and all that, and another week to realise he’s lost without me. He’ll be calling anytime now. It’s textbook stuff.’ I glare at her. Making her accept this theory is extremely important.
‘Okay.’ Lucy shrugs and drains her glass. I finished mine ten minutes ago. I suddenly wish I had a cigarette; it’s been quite an intense evening with all these dumped stories. It makes me so glad I haven’t been dumped.
Lucy collects up the glasses. ‘Want another?’ She walks with perfect posture to the kitchen. I consider the gleaming surfaces and unblemished white carpet of Lucy’s flat. I read somewhere that the state of a woman’s house is linked to her state of mind. If that’s true, then Lucy must be mentally extremely healthy. Lucy’s always been sorted, though. At university she interior-designed her dorm room. She had a colour scheme, a new colour television, taffeta curtains and scented candles. In my room next door I had a new washbag and thought myself swish. I nearly died when she knocked and introduced herself, with her perfect accent and her ‘Fancy a G and T?’ I was amazed at how nothing ever fazed her. I called her ‘Posh Lucy’ and she started introducing herself like that at the Freshers’ Ball, as though it were some sort of title: ‘Hi, I’m Posh Lucy and this is my little friend Vivienne.’