‘You used to say that love was for losers,’ she reminded Susie. ‘And you also said that you didn’t even know what love felt like.’
‘Now I am in love and it feels awful. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, and if you and Jack had a pet rabbit, I’d have tried to boil it by now,’ Susie spat, threading her hands through her hair. ‘I don’t know who I am any more, and I don’t know why I love him when he’s such a fucking coward.’
‘We can’t talk about him,’ Hope said firmly. ‘He’s not up for discussion.’
‘Oh, please,’ Susie drawled. ‘The reason you’re sitting here is because you feel like you’ll go mad if you don’t talk about it. I mean, the way Jack has played us both; same shit, different girl. And do you want to know how he dumped me in the end?’
‘No, I really don’t,’ Hope gasped.
‘Well, I’m going to tell you anyway!’ Susie almost shouted, shifting around until she and Hope were almost bumping noses. ‘He waited until I’d gone to work, and then he packed up all his stuff, sent me five rambling text messages about his dad and your dad coming down for the weekend and how it was all complicated, blah blah blah, and then I get a text at one on a Monday morning, saying that he was going to have couples counselling with you and it was probably for the best if he didn’t see me. Then the fucker turned his phone off.’
Oh Jack, what have you done? Hope thought sadly. ‘So, he never called to explain things properly?’ Hope asked, though she already knew the answer.
‘Did he, fuck!’ Susie supplied. ‘And now I hate him and I love him and I’ve turned into one of those girls from a really cheesy rom-com. I even tried eating chocolate.’
‘But you hate chocolate,’ Hope said, because Susie normally couldn’t stand the stuff. It had actually been a serious black mark against Susie, because a person who didn’t like chocolate was obviously a person who was seriously flawed, until Susie had started shagging Jack and the black mark had become so big, it had obliterated everything in its path.
‘I hate chocolate and I hate long, hot baths with scented candles and listening to Adele and shopping as retail therapy and all the other lame things you’re meant to do to get over someone,’ Susie ranted. ‘None of them work, and I still feel like shit, and the worst thing of all is that I still want him – and I’m sorry, Hope, I really am, but I know he wants me too.’
‘Wanting isn’t the same as loving,’ Hope countered, even as she tried to process that Jack – Jack! – could arouse such deep passion. But that kind of passion simply couldn’t endure for thirteen years, not without both parties suffering from nervous exhaustion and frequent UTIs.
‘You’re frowning,’ Susie noted. ‘I’ve pissed you off, haven’t I?’
‘Of course I’m pissed off with you,’ Hope insisted, and it was the truth, but she was only a little bit angry these days, which might have something to do with the counselling and Angela’s attempts to encourage her impulse control, and because there was no need to be angry any more. Jack had said they were going to be fine, and it was the only thing he’d said in the last few months that Hope had believed. The soft, melting way he’d looked at her last night before he said it had cut through all her doubt and mistrust, so she could afford to be magnanimous. ‘But it doesn’t matter any more. I’m not glad it happened, and if I could erase what you did, I would, but Jack and I are closer than we’ve been in ages.’
‘Yeah, but you’re not very good at reading Jack, are you?’ Susie pointed out belligerently.
‘I can read him just fine,’ Hope rapped back and actually she was starting to get angry now. ‘I’ve known him my entire life. I’ve been his girlfriend for half that time so I understand Jack better than you ever could.’
‘You’re so good at understanding him that you didn’t even know he was cheating on you!’ Susie shook her head as if she couldn’t believe the depths of Hope’s delusions.
‘Well, I’m not going to make that mistake again, am I?’
‘Ha! Ha!’ Susie jabbed her finger in Hope’s direction. ‘So you do think that Jack will cheat on you again.’
‘Who do you think you are? Judge bloody Judy?’ Hope slammed down her glass, then folded her arms tightly so she wouldn’t be tempted to use them for hurting. ‘For fuck’s sake, Susie! Just get over it. Get over Jack, because it’s finished. If he wanted to be with you, he’d be with you. Find someone else. Go back to Wilson, if he’ll have you, though I very much doubt it.’
‘Yeah, right, like that’s ever going to happen when Jack is the only man I want to be with,’ Susie scoffed, and she seemed to be calming down now, almost as if she knew that she’d never be able to match Hope’s rage, so there was no point in even trying. ‘Actually, Wilson’s been really understanding about the whole thing. Well, when he wasn’t telling me what a selfish, home-wrecking bitch I was.’
The only reason that she wanted to talk about Wilson, Hope told herself, was because she couldn’t bear to talk about Jack any longer. ‘Wilson and I hung out a bit,’ she said casually, making sure that she absolutely looked Susie in the eye. ‘Before Jack and I started counselling. Y’know, hanging out as mates.’
From the searching look Susie gave Hope, it was obvious that her casual voice hadn’t worked. ‘Just mates? I wouldn’t have expected that.’
‘No, neither did I, but he’s quite a nice bloke when you get to know him.’
‘I can’t believe I ever went out with him,’ Susie said, and Hope waited for her to follow through with her usual comments about Wilson’s prowess between the sheets. And right on cue: ‘We had nothing in common, except we both liked it when I sat on his dick—’
‘Please, shut up,’ Hope said, closing her eyes and trying to scrub her brain of the image that Susie had just conjured up. ‘So, listen, I don’t want to argue with you any more. This whole thing, it’s over, and you need to move on and you need to let Jack and me move on … together.’
Susie’s lips twisted. ‘How long is this going to go on for, Hopey? Have you got some sort of timetable in place to decide whether or not it’s working? Or are you going to keep letting Jack walk out, then come back, for the next twenty years?’
‘It’s going to work. It is working! We’ve only had four counselling sessions and we’re back together and everything’s great.’
‘So, what? Like, you’re properly engaged now, are you? Have you set a date?’ Susie asked, looking pointedly at the three silver rings on Hope’s right hand.
‘When we do, you’ll be the first to know,’ Hope said, scowling because that little dig had wormed its way right through to her heart. ‘Actually, you’ll be the last to know because this is it, Susie. It’s so over between you and Jack that he doesn’t want anything to do with you, which is why I’m sitting here having this conversation with you.’
‘But he can’t just end things without even saying goodbye properly,’ Susie protested. ‘I can’t believe that you and him are settling back into bland domesticity, not when he said that …’
‘What? What did he say?’ Hope challenged, her eyes flashing.
The other girl shrugged. ‘I don’t like to kiss and tell.’
Hope counted to ten. Then twenty. It wasn’t until she got to twenty-five that she was calm enough to say, ‘Stop trying to wind me up.’ She was even calm enough to pick up her glass again without worrying that she’d snap the stem. ‘This is so silly. We’re both grown women and we’re fighting over a guy like we’re still at school.’
Susie smiled slyly. It was a look that Hope knew only too well. A look that had led to both of them getting up to all kinds of no good, from buying skunk from a dodgy bloke in a pub to going skinny-dipping on a Cornwall beach at three in the morning. It was a look that Hope had really missed. ‘I’ll tell you what would be really funny,’ she said, gently nudging Hope’s elbow. ‘What would Jack do if we both decided to kick him to the kerb?’
Hope didn’t even have to think about it. ‘He’d have another steady girlfriend withi
n a fortnight,’ she said, ‘A month, tops.’
‘Nah, he’d go wild chasing after anything in a skirt. No way would he settle down so quickly.’
‘He totally would,’ Hope argued with absolute certainty. ‘He might jaw on about how he’s too young to settle down, but he went straight from living with me to living with you. Didn’t even think about getting his own place or establishing any kind of independence.’ She smiled a little smugly at Susie, who was still giving Hope her sceptical face. ‘Jack’s a settler. He hates changes, hates taking risks, unless they’re forced on him, and he’d hate the unpredictability of being with a different girl every week.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ Susie mused.
‘No maybe about it,’ Hope said, and suddenly it felt so right to be sitting in a pub with Susie. Men were meant to come and go, but best friends were meant to be there for ever.
‘The crappy thing is that when this whole situation settles down, however it settles down, you and me, we’re not …’ Susie tucked a stray lock of hair behind Hope’s ear. ‘We’re not going to be cool again, are we? Not like we were.’
‘There’s no way we can. Not after everything that’s gone on …’ Hope couldn’t finish the sentence because Jack and Susie were over, and she was sick of having to acknowledge that they’d ever been together. ‘It would be too weird. And how would it make you feel having to look at Facebook photos of romantic dinners and mini-breaks and stuff?’
‘It might not be that weird,’ Susie said. ‘My nan was engaged to my granddad’s brother before she married my granddad.’
‘Oh, right. Did your granddad’s brother die in the Second World War or something?’ Hope asked gently.
‘No! He went to Margate for a week with his work, and my gran copped off with my granddad while he was gone.’ Susie stuck out her chin. ‘And they all got over it. Used to go down the pub every Friday and Saturday night with Great-uncle Arthur, who ended up marrying this divorcée called Brenda. She was a bit of a goer. Listen, shall we get another bottle, before they call last orders?’
‘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 me
asured 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.’