Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (22 page)

Even thinking his name sent a shooting stab of pain to the base of Hope’s skull. She was going to fucking kill him. And then she might fucking kill herself because it was the only way she could think of not to feel like
this
.

With murder on her mind, Hope didn’t bother with the Piccadilly Line but stuck out her hand the minute she hit Holloway Road and saw a cab with its light on. It was late in the afternoon and there was little traffic going into town. The taxi pulled up outside the Magnum Media building a scant twenty minutes later. Hope stuffed a £20 note in the driver’s hand and insisted that he could keep the £7.40 change because she couldn’t wait the vital ten seconds for him to count out the money.

Then she marched into the chrome and marble lobby, up to the reception desk, and said that she had an urgent delivery for Jack Benson on
Skirt
magazine. The receptionist dialled Jack’s extension even as she directed Hope to the lifts.

She could see Jack waiting as the lift doors opened on the fourth floor. For one moment he looked utterly flummoxed to see Hope standing there – he even did a swift double-take before he smiled. Hope wanted to smack it right off his face.

‘This is a nice surprise,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I thought you
were
meeting up with Lauren and Alli for a night of hard drinking.’

‘I am,’ Hope said, and she marvelled that she could sound reasonably sane. ‘I found your phone.’

Jack allowed himself one small sigh of relief then tensed up. ‘Oh, really? Where was it?’

‘Well, you were right, it
was
charging on the chest of drawers this morning when I took it and put it in my bag,’ Hope said without even a flicker of guilt because she’d got over
that
a couple of hours ago.

‘Right.’ Jack nodded. The tips of his ears were so red they looked as if they might start smoking. ‘So, did you mistake it for yours?’

‘No, I knew it was yours.’ Hope struck a pensive pose, one hip jutting out, a finger on her chin. ‘It was a moment of madness because I was still convinced there was something going on between you and Susie, and I had to know one way or another. I’ve spent most of the day wrestling with my conscience.’

Jack was almost dancing on the spot, unsure if he should back away or move closer to snatch his phone as Hope pulled it out of her pocket. ‘But you didn’t look through my phone, did you?’ he asked shakily. Hope could see his fear and uncertainty, but then he shook his head. ‘Of course you didn’t, because you always do the right thing.’

Hope held up the phone. ‘Guess again,
Jacky boy
,’ she snarled as she hurled it on the floor, which was covered in the same marble tiles as the downstairs reception area. Jack gave a bellow of rage – or was it panic? – as the phone landed and it was too soon to assess any damage, especially as Hope was now stomping on it. She wasn’t wearing her Converses today but her Doc Marten brogues that Jack always said made her look like a lesbian or a policewoman. Or a lesbian policewoman. But Hope was really appreciating how the thick rubber soles could inflict maximum hurt on an iPhone. The glass and innards had shattered into tiny
pieces,
though, frustratingly, the stainless-steel backing was merely buckled, even after Hope had jumped up and down on it repeatedly.

For weeks now, every time she’d got mad at Jack or suspicious of Jack she’d told herself she was acting like a crazy woman, but now she
was
acting like a crazy woman, and in front of a small horrified gaggle of
Skirt
employees gathered by the big double doors that led to the magazine’s offices. In fact, Hope didn’t know why acting like a crazy woman got such a bad press when it felt
so
good.

‘There!’ she said, kicking what was left of the phone over to where Jack stood, his arms limp, his mouth hanging open in disbelief. ‘You can have it back now.’

‘You had no right,’ Jack mumbled when he finally regained the power of speech. ‘No right …’

‘I had every fucking right!’ Hope shouted. ‘You said it was over. In fact, you said nothing had ever happened. You
promised
you’d never, ever contact her again, and all the time, you were fucking each other. For months! You’ve been fucking her, and cheating and lying to me. You’ve looked me right in the eye and lied to me.
To me!
’

Jack opened his mouth, then closed it again when he heard a gasp and a few shocked giggles coming from his colleagues in the corner. He stepped over the high-tech mess that used to be his iPhone to grab Hope by the arm and tug her down the corridor.

‘Get off me!’ she spat out, pulling her arm free so she could swing it back and smack him, with one loud vicious crack against his left cheek. Jack barely reacted, because suddenly he had Hope in an artboy version of a Vulcan death-grip, and he yanked her, squirming and wriggling and telling him that he was a ‘fucking bastard’, into a little kitchen, which smelt of gone-off milk and microwaved food, and slammed the door shut.

It was just the two of them in a stinky, confined space. They were both breathing hard and everything about Jack
that
Hope had loved – his thick, brown hair that she always wanted to run her fingers through, his guileless blue eyes, the planes and angles of his face, even the gangliness of his limbs – she now hated. She could hardly bear to look at him.

‘Why?’ she demanded. ‘Why didn’t you dump me when you first started fucking each other, or when I caught you together? You obviously had no intention of giving up Susie, so why didn’t you give me up instead?’

‘Because I fucking love you!’ Jack shouted, as if it was obvious. ‘I love you, all right?’

‘No, it’s not all right,’ Hope hurled back at him. ‘You were hedging your bets, weren’t you? Because Susie has a low boredom threshold and you wanted to make sure that good old Hope was still waiting in the wings. Have you any idea how that makes me feel?’

‘You don’t understand … you don’t know what I’ve been going through.’ Jack stopped as soon as he realised how extremely lame that sounded, or it might have been the inelegant snorting noise Hope was making.

‘It’s not just about me though, is it? What about Wilson? It was obvious that neither of you gave a toss about his feelings either.’

Now it was Jack’s turn to scoff. ‘Since when do
you
give a toss about Wilson?’

‘Since Wilson knows exactly what I’m going through,’ Hope told him, though that wasn’t strictly true. Wilson had had a much clearer grasp of the depths of Jack and Susie’s deception than Hope, and he’d tried to warn her, but she’d refused to listen. But now the battle lines were drawn. Jack and Susie on one side, Hope and Wilson on the other. In fact, Wilson was like a kindred spirit, but his relationship with Susie barely counted as a relationship compared to the thirteen years Hope and Jack had racked up. So, there was no way that Wilson could ever feel as destroyed as Hope did. It just wasn’t possible. ‘Jesus, how could you do this? Did you never stop to think that what you were doing was
wrong
and that people were going to get hurt?’ Hope wrapped her arms tightly around herself. ‘You’re … you’re
vile
!’

‘Yeah? And what does that make you?’ Jack asked belligerently, though he had absolutely nothing to be belligerent about because …

‘Yes? So, I nag you a bit and sometimes I can be a bitch, but if that was really bothering you, you could have ended it,’ Hope said thickly. ‘You had options that didn’t involve fucking my best friend behind my back.’

‘I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about you going through my phone, even when I asked you not to …’

Hope knew what Jack was doing. Attack was the best form of defence, after all. And he was right, up to a point. ‘That’s bullshit and you know it. Stop trying to dodge the issue – this is not about your bloody phone.’

‘And then you come to my office and show me up in front of the people I work with,’ Jack continued, hands tensed as they clutched the draining board behind him. He was whipping up his anger bit by bit, but it couldn’t hold a candle to Hope’s fury. She didn’t know how she’d managed to restrain herself from smacking him again.

‘I don’t care about the people you work with,’ Hope burst out. ‘I don’t care what they think of me. And I really, really don’t care that they might realise you’re not the loveable cheeky chappy that you pretend to be.’

‘Look, I’m not going to talk about any of this with you until you can start acting like a calm, rational human being,’ Jack insisted once he realised that his attempts to deflect her attention away from his crimes weren’t working.

‘I don’t give a fuck about being calm and rational!’ Hope screamed, but her voice broke on the last defiant syllable.

‘You want to know why I’ve been seeing Susie?’ Jack asked her. ‘You really want to know?’

They were flinging words at each other now, not even bothering to check their tempers or remember that hateful
things
said in the heat of battle couldn’t be unsaid.

‘Go on, enlighten me,’ Hope choked around the sobs that were welling up. ‘Tell me why you decided to break my heart.’

‘Because she’s not on my case 24/7, that’s why,’ Jack said brutally. ‘She doesn’t moan at me about going to IKEA and throwing stupid pretentious dinner parties, or nag and nag about everything from getting up on time to changing lightbulbs …’

‘I have vertigo …’

‘Whatever. You’ve become so boring, Hopey. Like you’re a middle-aged woman trapped in a twenty-something body. In fact, you’re pretty much turning into your mother.’

Hope could only stare at Jack in horror. Her temper was fizzling away because there wasn’t room for anything other than the icy-cold realisation that the reason Jack had been fucking Susie, mad, impulsive, couldn’t-give-a-damn Susie, was simple. Susie wasn’t her and he was sick to death of her.

But Jack wasn’t done yet. ‘And since you really want to know, I’ll tell you something else about Susie – she’s actually fun to be around, in and out of bed. At least she doesn’t try to schedule when we have sex and then lie back like a sack of potatoes and think about lesson plans. And she doesn’t go on and on and on about wanting to get bloody married!’

Jack had finally finished hammering the last nail in the coffin that contained the bloated corpse that was their relationship, if his triumphant self-satisfied smile was any indication. ‘So there!’ it seemed to say. ‘How do you like that?’

The longer Hope stood there, arms still wrapped around her torso, silent and pinch-faced, the more his smile began to fade. ‘Right,’ she managed to say. ‘Right. Well. I guess that’s that, then.’

‘Yeah, it is,’ Jack said, but now his bravado sounded false. ‘And don’t expect me to turn up a few days from now
and
beg your forgiveness. It’s not going to happen.’

‘OK, yeah. That’s probably for the best because I never want to see you again,’ Hope told him, and God, she wished that she meant it, but it wasn’t true. She wasn’t Jack. And she couldn’t just stop loving him, even now. She’d always loved him and she wasn’t capable of
not
loving him.

THIRTEEN HOURS LATER
, Hope was woken by the impatient beep of her phone. She groaned, groped for the offending piece of machinery and knocked over a glass, a couple of books and a tub of hand cream.

Sitting up was an ordeal in itself. It felt as if the world was pitching forward and about to fling her off the edge. This wasn’t just a hangover courtesy of several pitchers of Margaritas and the tequila shots that the guys on the next table had kept buying Hope in a vain attempt to cheer her up. It was a hangover made worse by the fact that she’d cried for five hours straight and had leeched every last drop of moisture out of her body via her tearducts, before the alcohol could even start to dehydrate her.

After leaving Jack’s office, Hope had walked up Oxford Street, bawling her eyes out with every step, but had still managed to be on time to meet Lauren and Allison outside the Salsa Bar on Charing Cross Road.

She’d crumpled into their arms and their big girls’ night out had descended into every break-up cliché in the book. Lauren had gone to the Ladies and brought back a huge, industrial-sized roll of toilet tissue for Hope to mop her eyes with as she’d spluttered and choked her way through the saga of the iPhone and her ignominious role in it.

Somewhere around the end of the second jug of Margaritas, Hope had moved on to a snotty, tear-soaked account of her final showdown with Jack in
Skirt
’s
malodorous
kitchen, and by the time they were making major inroads into the fourth jug and the first round of tequila shots had been sent over, Hope was verging on hysterical as she tried to come to terms with her new single status.