Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (47 page)

‘I’d better be getting back,’ Hope said without much enthusiasm because it was inevitable that she and Jack were going to have a row. ‘But I’m glad that we got to talk.’

‘Me too. Wish it had been about happier stuff, like that horrible girl on
X Factor
.’

‘The one who looks like she needs a good scrub with a bar of carbolic and some steel wool?’ Hope clarified grimly.

‘Urgh, yes, and why is she always rapping? Because she can’t hold a fucking tune, that’s why.’

Now Hope really wanted to stay for another bottle and a bitch about the current crop of
X Factor
finalists, but Susie and she didn’t get to do that any more. She stood up, put on her coat and tried to ignore Susie’s slightly injured air. ‘Anyway, glad we’ve got it all sorted,’ she said briskly.

‘Yes, I’m glad we got a chance to chat things out,’ Susie said. ‘But you should know, if things don’t work out with you and Jack, I’ll have him back in a heartbeat. Just so we’re clear.’

Hope still couldn’t even begin to understand the thrall that they had over each other, but she would do everything in her power to make sure that Susie didn’t welcome Jack back with open arms. And open legs, too. That charming little thought set Hope’s face into hard, unforgiving lines. ‘I can
not
make it any clearer, just leave us the fuck alone,’ she said, as she picked up her bag. ‘And if you come round and
start
hammering down the door again, I’m calling the police.’

As Hope walked back across the square she realised, when she tripped over a perfectly level piece of pavement and almost landed on her face, that she wasn’t on first-name terms with sober. But she wasn’t drunk enough to charge into the flat all riled up and ready for a row. She was clinging to the belief that they were fine, but she didn’t want to risk her temper being responsible for Jack reverting to his new and disturbing habit of stuffing a week’s worth of boxer shorts, socks and T-shirts into his holdall and storming off into the night.

Her mind made up, Hope vowed that she was going to keep herself and her temper in check, even rummaging in her handbag for an elastic band, which she slipped on to her wrist before turning her key in the lock.

All the lights in the flat were off when she opened the front door and, for a moment, Hope felt icy fingers walk down her spine because maybe Jack
had
changed his behaviour and this time he’d stormed off before they’d even had a row. Then she saw a faint sliver of light under the bedroom door. She took a deep breath and opened it.

‘I’m back,’ she said cheerfully to Jack, who was in bed with his laptop on his knees and glanced up warily when he heard her voice. ‘I’m gasping for a cuppa. Do you want one too?’

Jack looked at her from under his lashes, and Hope knew he thought she was toying with him and that any minute now he was going to have the full wrath of Hope Delafield unleashed on him while he was half naked and utterly defenceless. It automatically made Hope want to snap at him that he could make his own bloody tea, because she didn’t lose her temper
all
the time. She lost her temper when she was provoked; like when, for example, he acted like an emotionally tone-deaf idiot.

She gave him a perky smile. ‘Tea? Or shall I make hot
chocolate?
I think we’ve still got the Fortnum & Mason stuff I was given last Christmas.’

‘Hot chocolate would be great,’ Jack agreed, closing the lid of the laptop. ‘I put the apple crumble back in the fridge.’

‘Thanks,’ Hope trilled. ‘We can have it tomorrow.’

She had a moment on her own in the kitchen to twitch her limbs in sheer annoyance, before Jack appeared. He’d pulled on jeans and socks and was holding her hot-water bottle.

‘I’ll make this up for you while you’re doing the hot chocolate,’ Jack muttered. ‘How’s the period pain?’

‘Red wine is a great anaesthetic,’ she said dryly, and Jack smiled, then stopped smiling as it occurred to him that this too could be another trap. ‘I’ll just go and get into my jammies, then.’

It wasn’t until they were both sitting on the sofa sipping from mugs of hot chocolate, with real chocolate melting at the bottom, that Jack voiced his concerns. ‘I know you’re going to yell at me, so can you just do it? I didn’t think anything was worse than you yelling, but, actually, I think the anticipation of the yelling is worse than the yelling itself.’

Hope pursed her lips. ‘You sure about that?’ she enquired. Jack tensed up and she was sure he was going to bolt. ‘Look, I’m not going to yell.’

‘But you went to the pub with Susie and I
know
you must have talked about me, so why aren’t you shouting?’

‘Because I was friends with Susie for a long time … well, quite a few months before she became
your
special friend, and we needed to clear the air,’ Hope told him. ‘And yes, of course we talked about you. It’s natural, just like you and Susie must have talked about me. It’s only when it’s just you and me that we don’t talk about Susie.’

‘We talk about Susie in therapy,’ Jack insisted doggedly. ‘We agreed.’

‘But we haven’t talked about Susie, we’ve just skirted
around
the subject.’ Hope put down her mug so she could pull up her legs and shift until she was facing Jack, rather than sitting alongside him. ‘It’s going better than I ever dared to think it would, but this therapy is only going to work if we use the sessions constructively, rather than as a plaster that we only pull off once a week to see how the wound is healing.’

Hope was quite proud of that little analogy, and there was no need for Jack to look as if he didn’t understand what she was talking about. ‘I don’t know why you have to bring this up when I’ve already told you that everything’s going to be fine.’

‘Yeah, but then Susie shows up and you won’t talk to her, and you won’t talk to me, and I feel like if I want to talk to you about how you deal with this stuff, or how you
don’t
deal with it, you’re going to walk out rather than have a discussion about it,’ Hope said in a calm and measured voice like she was trying to soothe a feral animal.

‘That’s because you yell.’

‘I. Am. Not. Yelling. But I am telling you that the way you handled breaking up with Susie, and Susie trying to break down our door tonight, was pretty much the same way you handled me – and it’s not cool.’ Hope held up her hand when Jack opened his mouth to protest. ‘It’s not cool, and you need to know that it’s not cool so it never happens again.’

‘But I don’t like confrontations. That doesn’t make me a bad person,’ Jack burst out. ‘It’s like, one moment everything was ticking along and I knew where my life was going was OK, and now I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. It’s fucking scary, Hope.’

Sudden and sweet relief swept over Hope because, yes, they were back together but, finally, Jack was opening up. He was being honest with her and she could begin to understand why he’d been behaving like such an insensitive arsehole. She could cut him some slack, instead of secretly
resenting
him. ‘But you don’t have to go through this alone,’ she said, stroking her hand down his cheek and feeling ridiculously pleased when his hand held hers in place. ‘I’m here. I want to help, don’t shut me out.’

‘But even when you don’t yell, you want me to confront all the shitty things I’ve done, and I could say that I don’t know why I did them, but maybe it’s just because I’m a shitty person,’ Jack said, nuzzling against Hope’s hand. ‘I knew what I was doing with Susie wasn’t right, but I did it because it was easier than figuring out what was wrong with us.’

‘What
was
wrong with us?’ Hope asked, and Jack shrugged helplessly because there hadn’t been one landmark day when their relationship had started to flounder, it had been a gradual drip-drip-drip that had suddenly turned into a tidal wave. ‘We should have been having more sex, shouldn’t we? Exciting, kinky sex with props and costumes.’

Jack blanched as if the idea of Hope in a French maid’s outfit, complete with feather duster, wasn’t what he had in mind. ‘More sex, maybe,’ he said. ‘But nothing
too
kinky, and I’d never have dressed up in a Plushy costume no matter how much you begged.’

Now it was Hope’s turn to blanch and swat Jack with a cushion. ‘Ewwww! We can get better at sex,’ she said earnestly. ‘Look how good we got at running. I can do twenty continuous minutes now without feeling like I’m about to die.’

‘Honestly, Hopey, the sex was OK, I just wish there’d been more of it,’ Jack insisted as he put down his empty mug and stretched out so he could lie on the sofa with his head in Hope’s lap, which wasn’t the sign of a man about to disappear into the night with approximately one-tenth of all his worldly goods and chattels. ‘It was more that I felt like life was passing me by, and that I was already settled down, and the only thing I had to look forward to was being even
more
settled down when I should be doing wild and exciting things.’

Hope knew
exactly
what he meant. Occasionally when she got an email from Justine extolling the virtues of living five minutes away from the beach, smaller class sizes and rippling surfer dudes on every street corner, she had an urge to empty her bank account, jump on a train to Heathrow and buy a ticket for the next available flight to Sydney. Maybe even stop over in Thailand for a month and tour the islands … ‘Yeah, wild and exciting does sound good sometimes.’ She stroked her fingers through Jack’s thick, shiny hair. ‘You know, there’s nothing to stop us renting out the flat and spending two years somewhere else,’ she ventured. ‘If we wanted to mix things up a little.’

‘What? Like Manchester or Brighton?’ Jack asked, doubt wrapping around every syllable.

‘No! Like Sydney or New York, or even working with a charity and going somewhere like Haiti or Tibet.’

‘But we’d have to get shots and even then we might still get malaria, and what if the people we rented to trashed the place?’ Jack demanded, his limbs going rigid. ‘I’m a graphic designer. I don’t have transferable skills. I’d be no use in the Third World.’

‘It’s just an idea,’ Hope said in a soothing voice, though she really felt like making her voice extremely strident. Jack may have thought he was yearning for thrills and adventures, but actually he hated anything outside of his neatly aligned, alphabetised comfort zone. Whenever they went to a festival, he packed loads of anti-bacterial hand-wipes and moaned on about how it was absolutely guaranteed that every single food-stall employee didn’t wash their hands after they’d been to the loo.

When they went to the beach, any beach, be it in Ibiza or Lancashire, Jack whinged about sand between his toes and freaked out if a seagull came within six feet of him. He wouldn’t go ice-skating, had made Hope promise on Blue
Class’s
lives that she wouldn’t try out for Roller Derby, and when she’d wanted to take part in a charity sky-dive, he’d told her mum who’d then spent a week emailing her stories about people who’d gone sky-diving and ended up paraplegics.

When it came to wild and exciting, Jack absolutely sucked. So, having an affair with Susie must have been the very zenith of wild and exciting for him. It was about as wild and exciting as he was ever likely to get.

‘I’m just saying that being with someone for a long time doesn’t have to be boring. Look at Elaine and Simon. They go to festivals and they still smoke dope, and in the school holidays, they load the teen witches into the camper van and drive to Europe,’ Hope explained, as she began to check Jack’s hair for headlice. ‘You couldn’t call Elaine and Simon boring.’

‘I guess not,’ Jack agreed. ‘I just get scared that we’re going to turn into our parents.’

‘Take that back! The day you join a golf club is the day I bash your head in with a shovel,’ Hope snapped, and she wasn’t even joking.

‘I do take it back. I never said it. I’m trying not to even think it.’ Jack stilled. ‘Are you checking me for nits? There hasn’t been another outbreak, has there?’

Hope gently cuffed Jack’s head when he tried to move. ‘No! Just force of habit.’ She continued to rake her fingers through his hair. ‘I think you’re OK and, well, do you think we’re OK?’

‘Yeah.’ Jack sounded a little amazed. ‘We can walk through our problems without anyone shouting …’

‘… or having a snit and flouncing out,’ Hope finished for him. She grinned down at Jack. ‘If Angela was here, I think she’d say that we’ve just had a breakthrough.’

‘Talking of breakthroughs … I figured something out while you were in the pub,’ Jack said. His voice had suddenly become so strained, it sounded like forming
words
was painful for him. ‘Can I be honest with you?’

Now it was Hope’s turn to still and stop checking Jack for headlice. ‘Gosh, that sounds ominous,’ she said lightly, though her light voice wasn’t working very well. ‘But, yeah, sure, go ahead. And no, I won’t shout or yell,’ she added, because she knew Jack would want a firm disclaimer before he opened his heart.

‘I promised I’d take the therapy seriously and not have any contact with Susie because … well, I know it seems like I was being a right bastard about it but it’s just … it’s why I couldn’t see her tonight. Couldn’t walk to the front door and tell her to go away. I couldn’t because, well, because …’

‘Because what?’ Hope prompted gently, and she didn’t know if it was because of the rich hot chocolate and the vats of red wine she’d consumed, but all of a sudden she thought she might throw up. ‘Because she’s even more scary when she yells than I am?’