Getting Over Mr. Right (34 page)

“I promise,” I said. “I will make sure he takes me somewhere great, that he pays for dinner, and that he doesn’t get laid as a result.” Thank God I hadn’t told her that Michael had already suggested his house as the venue for our long-awaited reunion. Becky would not be impressed by that. “But you must
understand why I have to do this. There are so many questions.”

“But there’s really only one answer,” said Becky. “He dumped you on Facebook. He didn’t love you, Ashleigh. That truly is the bottom line.”

Despite the fact that Michael had suggested—and I had agreed—that we meet at his house, an option that required close to zero sartorial effort, I’m sure you won’t be surprised that I spent the greater part of the following day in a beauty salon, prepping myself with the kind of care and attention I would ordinarily reserve for a black-tie event. Or, I imagined, for my own wedding.

“There’s no need for you to get your bikini line done,” Becky reminded me when we spoke on the phone at lunchtime, “because you’re not sleeping with him, remember?”

“I remember,” I said. Though, of course, a bikini wax was the very first treatment I had subjected myself to that morning. I told myself that it had nothing whatsoever to do with meeting Michael. It was purely a matter of essential upkeep. I might decide to go swimming, for example. The fact that I hadn’t been swimming in about eight years was neither here nor there. Why shouldn’t I be grabbed by the urge to throw myself into the local lido and bob among the wart plasters at any moment?

I was getting very good at making excuses for myself, even to myself, wasn’t I?

Anyway, even though I say it myself, I looked the best I ever had as I walked out of that salon. My newly coiffed hair bounced and gleamed. My freshly exfoliated skin glowed as though I had just come back from a holiday in the Maldives. My nails were impeccably polished. I felt lighter and lovelier
than a girl in a shampoo ad. If Michael was ever going to fall in love with me again (you’ll note I was still assuming that he had been in love with me before), it would be that evening. I was in full bloom.

I arrived at Michael’s apartment at eight o’clock on the dot. I was wearing a chic knitted dress and knee-high boots with impressive heels. I was working it. I had even received a whistle from the taxi driver who dropped me off outside River Heights.

Michael was wearing a pair of ratty old jeans and a sweatshirt.

“Oh,” he said, when he saw me and clocked that I had come empty-handed. “I was rather hoping you might have picked up a bottle of wine from the off-license on your way over. I haven’t got anything in the flat.”

Was that it? Eight months since we had last seen each other. No big hug. No comment on how lovely I looked. Not even a
So good to see you
.

“Wait there,” Michael said. He nipped back into the house to pick up a jacket. “We’ve got to have something to drink.”

So we walked to the off-license, which was somewhat difficult in my glamorous new boots. Still …

“I’m glad you could come over tonight,” he said as we walked. “I’m snowed under at work so I wanted to be able to stay at my laptop until the very last minute.”

“Oh,” I said. And there was me thinking that his cooking for me was supposed to imply that he wanted to make an effort.

“How have you been?” he asked.

“I’ve been fine,” I said.

“You look well,” he commented. At last he had noticed.

“Thanks,” I said, fluffing my hair.

“Have you got nail varnish on?”

I looked at my nails as though I were surprised to find them so pink and pearly.

“You never wear nail varnish,” he said.

“These days I do,” I replied.

“Oh.” Michael widened his eyes. I felt a small ripple of pride. I had obviously wrong-footed him with my new well-groomed self. The fact that ninety-nine days out of a hundred I still didn’t look anything like this at all was not relevant. I had wanted Michael to think that I had raised my game since he chucked me and I allowed myself to think that he believed I had.

“Well, it looks nice,” he said. “Lady-like.”

We were at the off-license. He held the door open for me.

“Usual?” he said.

“Okay.”

Our usual was a bottle of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, the rough southern Italian red that went fantastically well with takeaway anything. That wine was cheap as chips but I took it as a good sign that he asked me if I wanted our “usual” rather than push out the boat with something flashy and more expensive. It seemed nostalgic, and that suggested to me that he had been remembering me with fondness, rather than as the mad cow he had threatened with legal action.

“Shall we go halves?” I asked, as he placed three bottles on the counter.

“No,” he said. “Don’t be silly. I’ll pay.”

Sure, the wine was only £4.59 a bottle, but I took that as a good sign, too. He was treating me.

Back at his place, we ordered takeaway from the local Indian, though he didn’t order his usual.

“Watching my weight,” he said, patting his stomach.

He was a little paunchier than I remembered. He had always been paranoid about getting “man-boobs.” I must have spent a good five hours of my life reassuring Michael that he didn’t have tits. Never would have. And since the breakup, I had spent a good deal more time fantasizing that when I saw him
again, I would tell him that I had been lying. He had a better cleavage than Eva Herzigova. But when he gave me the opportunity to tell him what a fat, middle-aged knacker he had become, I just told him, “You don’t need to worry about your weight. You look in great shape.”

“Well, I’m still going to the gym,” he said. “Got to keep in shape.”

“I’ve been going, too,” I responded. “Pilates mostly.”

“I hear that’s really good if you suffer from back pain.”

“It is,” I confirmed.

“I get terrible backaches sitting at my desk all day,” he muttered.

“How’s work?” I asked.

“Oh, you know,” said Michael. “Work’s work. Things have been busy because the government keeps changing the law to claw back some of the money they wasted bailing out the banks. It’s making the firm a small fortune as we try to prevent them from robbing our clients.”

“Sounds exciting,” I said. Not really.

How odd that I had spent the last eight months having arguments with this man in my head and now we were having such a bland and pleasant conversation. I had waited for so long for the opportunity to tell him what an arsehole he had been and now I was listening sympathetically as he told me about some new bloke at work who seemed determined to kill all Michael’s pet projects.

Meanwhile the first bottle of wine slowly disappeared. And then the second. And a little bit of a third.

By this point we were sitting side by side on the sofa. Michael had positioned himself there as we ate the Indian takeaway on his glass coffee table and came back to sit beside me again after clearing the leftovers away. Slowly we had moved closer and closer together so that from time to time our knees touched before one of us noticed and moved to preserve a
physical gap. Now Michael reached out and gathered my hair in his hand, as though he were making a ponytail. He tugged at it gently, playfully. I pushed his hand away.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just had the urge to touch it. Your hair looks great. It’s so silky.”

“Thanks,” I said, managing to sit on the urge to say,
I just had it done
.

“You always had great hair.”

“You’re very kind.”

Thank God he hadn’t seen me before my hairdresser fixed the brown mess.

“And I’d forgotten just how pretty your eyes are. Such a lovely color. And such long eyelashes. Really beautiful.”

He looked deep into my eyes. I began to feel hot. In that moment I was every bit as nervous as I had been the very first time Michael and I went on a date, after I had stopped worrying what my friends would think if I dated an accountant and I started simply wanting him to kiss me. He moved a little closer. Was he going to kiss me now?

“Such a pretty mouth.”

He was.

The blood rushed to my face as Michael squashed his lips against mine. I didn’t resist. I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him back with gusto. This was it! This was the moment I had been waiting for! He wanted me again.

It wasn’t long before we had moved from the sofa to the bedroom, casting off our clothes as we went. Though even in the heat of passion I managed to cast an eye around the bedroom in search of anything that had changed. There were no new pictures. No photo of Miss Well-Sprung on the bedside table! The bed linen looked familiar. Even the Diptyque candle on the dressing table seemed to have remained burned to the same level. It was as though I had been away from Michael’s bedroom for a couple of nights rather than eight long months.

The sex, too, was exactly as it had always been. We whipped through our repertoire with the efficiency that comes of years of practice. He smelled the same. He felt the same. He said the same things at the same moments. Everything was as it had been. As it should be.

I was elated.

Well, perhaps not quite so elated as I had expected to be, if I was entirely honest … There were even moments when I felt as though I was outside my body, watching the action on the bed with a dispassionate and underwhelmed eye. I got nowhere near having an orgasm.

“That was great,” Michael said, as we relaxed back on to the pillows.

“Yes,” I said. It wouldn’t have been polite to disagree, but I was left feeling just a little unsatisfied. As I always had been, now that I thought about it.

“I’ve just got to …” Michael nodded toward the bathroom. “… clean my teeth. Make yourself comfortable.”

He obviously thought I was staying the night.

Was I?

While Michael cleaned his teeth, I took the opportunity to examine my surroundings more thoroughly. Sure, there were no new pictures, but now that I had a chance to breathe deeply, I noticed that the sheets didn’t smell the same. Had he changed his washing powder? There was a distinct floral scent to my pillow. And on the bottom shelf of the bedside stand I noticed a half-used tube of hand cream. Michael had definitely become more vain over the time that I’d known him, but had he really suddenly started taking care of his cuticles? I picked up the hand cream. Calendula-scented. Not the kind of thing a man would buy at all.

Michael was taking a long time in the bathroom. I could hear the tap running. But over that … Was he talking to someone? I crossed over to the bathroom door on the pretense of
looking for my knickers, which I’d discarded in that direction. With my cheek against the cool white wood, I tuned into Michael’s voice over the sound of running water.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I miss you, too. And of course I’ll come and pick you up at the airport. I can’t wait to see you. Of course I’m not still angry about that argument over Christmas. That’s all in the past. Everything will be different when you come back from Rio. I promise it will. I love you.”

Rio? I love you? He was talking to Miss Well-Sprung of course.

When Michael ended his call, I sprinted back across the room and arranged myself on the bed exactly as I had been when he went to “clean his teeth.” I heard him tweak the tap so that it wasn’t flowing quite so quickly now that he didn’t need to cover the sound of his conversation anymore. And then he really did brush his teeth, with an electric toothbrush. It was another three minutes or so before he emerged from the bathroom looking fresh and perfectly innocent.

“That’s a great view,” he said, regarding me naked against the pillows. I noticed he was still holding his BlackBerry. He waved it at me. “I’m a slave to this thing,” he said. “Can you believe someone from the office just called to ask me if I can be at a meeting at seven thirty tomorrow morning?”

I couldn’t believe it. Did Michael say
I love you
to all his colleagues?

Still, there was no further explanation. Michael got into bed beside me, placing the now silent BlackBerry on his bedside table with all due reverence. He snuggled into my side and kissed the back of my neck.