Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (61 page)

Hope started as Jack’s hand closed over her breast and gave it a quick friendly squeeze. ‘Ten minutes,’ she insisted. ‘At least ten minutes of foreplay before the knickers come down.’

‘Is that before or after you drink your tea?’ Jack’s hand crept down because it was the turn of her left buttock to get a squeeze.

‘I’m excellent at multi-tasking,’ Hope reminded him as she twisted out of range of his hands. ‘Right, I’m on knicker duty, you get on with the tea-making.’

It was all clear to Hope now. Intimate relations would have sorted them out weeks ago if Angela hadn’t tried to get all smart and reverse psychology on them. If they’d been having sex, then
obviously
everything would have been better, and there would have been none of that business with Wilson. She couldn’t feel guilty about the night because it had been wonderful and Wilson had been wonderful, but maybe it had been nothing more than finding solace with another man because she was skin-starved and desperate to be wanted by someone and Jack wasn’t there any more.

But Jack was right there in the kitchen now and tunelessly whistling as he waited for the kettle to boil and if they had sex now and set the alarm for ten, they could probably have sex again in the morning and still make it back to Whitfield in plenty of time for dinner.

Taking off her sopping leopard faux-fur coat was a step in the right direction, especially as it smelt of wet dog. Or
maybe
it smelt of wet leopard. A fake wet leopard, Hope decided as she tugged off her black knee-high boots without unzipping them first and nearly fell over.

Hope kept all her sexy stuff in the bottom drawer of her nightstand, even though her sexy stuff consisted of one pair of black lace knickers, a copy of
The Story of O
, which squicked her out rather than turned her on, a Rabbit, which Jack had brought her with the ridiculous idea that she’d let him watch while she used it, and a pair of pink fun-fur handcuffs, which were far more tacky than they were sexy.

Really her collection of sexy stuff was pitiful, Hope thought, as she yanked off her tights and boring white cotton pants and threaded one foot through her seductive black lace boy-cut shorts, which chafed her unmentionables if she wore them for too long. Putting them on standing up proved to be far more complicated than Hope had expected, so she lay down on the bed.

The room whirled around her once she was horizontal, and Hope had to shut her eyes for a second so everything stopped whirling and stayed still like it was meant to. It was so comfy that ten more seconds couldn’t hurt, and Hope thought about sitting up to put her knickers on but that would have required a Herculean effort on her part, and when Jack came in with her tea not two minutes later, she was naked from the waist down, the knickers clutched in her hand, and snoring gently.

‘HONESTLY, HOPEY, YOU
don’t have to keep apologising,’ Jack said the next morning, when he got behind the wheel of their Nissan Micra, which spent most of its days parked several streets away and covered in a tarpaulin. ‘The first ten times was enough.’

‘But I am sorry,’ Hope croaked. ‘Not just for falling asleep when I promised you intimate relations, but for throwing up all over the bathroom floor an hour later.’

‘Yeah, well I am still kind of pissed off about that,’ Jack admitted, as he pulled away from the kerb. ‘Usually you’re really good about being sick in disposable containers or on easy-wipe surfaces, but I’ll let it go just this once if you promise to stop calling it “intimate relations”.’

Hope glanced at Jack suspiciously. He’d have been well within his rights to be seething, even though she had already walked down to Marks & Spencer to stock up on snacks for the journey as an act of contrition. Well, contrition and a futile attempt to clear her pounding head.

She unscrewed the top from her bottle of Diet Coke and swallowed another two paracetamol. They really needed to start working soon. ‘I can’t take music right now, shall we listen to Radio 4 instead?’

‘Radio 4 is for old people,’ Jack said indignantly, but the ready smile of the last few days was hovering on his lips, and Hope was relieved that going to sleep on the job, or
before
the job had even got started, hadn’t undone days of goodwill. ‘What about a podcast?’

They were becoming experts at compromising, Hope thought to herself a little smugly, as she nixed the idea of listening to a whole load of musos waffle on about the recording of some classic rock album and agreed to a
Doctor Who
podcast. Soon they were heading through North London to join the M1. Jack didn’t even get angry when the satnav directed him to Brent Cross Shopping Centre, and it took them half an hour to get out of the car park.

‘This good mood of yours, how long is it going to last?’ Hope asked, once they were on the motorway. ‘It’s starting to freak me out a bit. You are allowed to be grumpy if you want.’

‘But I don’t feel grumpy. I feel really happy,’ Jack said simply, turning his head ever so slightly so that he could smile at Hope, before quickly averting his gaze. He didn’t like driving on the motorway and preferred to give the road ahead his full attention, but he liked being driven by Hope even less because she crunched the gears and didn’t give the road ahead enough of her attention. ‘You’re going to be really happy, too, when you open your Christmas present. Ecstatic, in fact. Pity that we’re expected to stay in our respective houses, because you’ll be wanting to give me some serious intimate relations as a thank you.’

‘I thought we weren’t going to call it that any more?’ Hope folded her arms and tried not to think about the ordeal that lay ahead, including the separate bedrooms in separate houses, which was more about Caroline and Marge not being able to agree who should host the golden couple than for reasons of propriety. It was much, much nicer to think about the Christmas present that Jack had been bigging up all week. ‘So, what is it, then? Give me a clue.’

‘It’s vintage, and I think it might make your mum even happier than it makes you,’ Jack said obliquely.

‘My mum hates anything vintage. She says it’s just second-hand, and somebody probably died while they were wearing it.’ Hope ripped open a bag of Percy Pigs and shoved one in the direction of Jack’s mouth, which he opened obediently. ‘So, is it something I can wear?’

‘Yeah, but it’s not clothing.’

‘Hmm, is it an accessory?’

‘Kind of.’

‘It either is, or it isn’t.’

Jack shook his head. ‘It’s not so much about what it is, but what it symbolises.’

‘So, what does it symbolise?’

‘Well, how much I love you, for a start,’ Jack said with the same direct, matter-of-factness that made Hope feel a bit teary. ‘Shall we stop at Scratchwood Services for the first cup of coffee of our trek to the ancestral homeland?’

‘Like you even have to ask.’ They always stopped for a coffee at every other service station, which also meant stopping for a pee at every other service station. It broke up the journey. ‘I didn’t think we’d get here again.’

‘We always get to Scratchwood. It’s inevitable when you join the M1 at Brent Cross.’

‘No, I meant a metaphysical here,’ Hope said. ‘You and me together again. I mean, it was less than a week ago that I—’

‘Don’t say it,’ Jack said a little sharply. ‘I don’t ever want to think about that, about you and him, the fact that there was a you and him, even if it was just for one night.’

Hope sighed. ‘I’ve said I’m sorry. Repeatedly.’

‘I know you are, and I don’t want to get into all that again either.’ Jack quickly patted her knee, then put his hands back in the ten to two position on the steering wheel, before he could lose control of the car and have them hurtling into the path of a juggernaut. ‘But I’ll tell you one thing: the fear of losing you really made me get my shit together.’

She wasn’t sure exactly how she was meant to respond to
that.
It made her feel rather like a toy that Jack had outgrown, until he’d seen how much fun someone else was having with it. But maybe Jack’s reasoning wasn’t the issue here so much as the end result, especially as the end result involved Jack finding everything about her, including her hangover, endearing and saying stuff like, ‘You know, I could give you your present early, if you like. Because this present is so amazing that I think when the mums see it they’ll completely cave on the whole issue of us sharing a bedroom.’

‘This present sounds miraculous,’ Hope said with a giggle. ‘Does it also cure cancer?’

‘Well, it’s not
quite
that good.’ Jack turned into the slip road that led to Scratchwood. ‘Actually, your present is in two parts. You have to read the first part while I go and get our coffee, and then you can have the second part.’

‘It has parts? And one of the parts is readable?’ Hope was intrigued. Maybe the readable part was actually a ticket to a fairytale country cottage with full amenities and absolutely no Caroline Delafield in it.

‘That’s what I said.’ Jack parked the car. Then he pulled a crumpled sheet of paper out of the glove compartment, even as he unbuckled his seatbelt. ‘Just read it and then you can have the rest of your present.’

Hope reminded Jack that she wanted an extra shot of espresso in her coffee before he closed the car door, then glanced at the piece of paper. She’d seen it before. In fact, she’d ripped it out of the A4 pad she used for her lesson plans and given it to Jack last Sunday morning, when they’d gone to the Landsdowne Arms in Primrose Hill for lunch, and had agreed to sit there and take an hour to do their homework for Angela. Not rushing through it. Not doing it at the last moment. Not snarking about it. But giving it due care and attention.

She smoothed out the paper and began to read:

REASONS WHY I LOVE HOPE DELAFIELD

Hope read the list twice and she knew for certain that Jack really did love her. No matter how he felt about Susie, his love for her hadn’t disappeared. It had gone through some changes, but it was still there. He loved her and that was the important thing, it would keep them together, even though Hope wasn’t entirely sure that she recognised the Hope that Jack was in love with. His Hope seemed flaky and unsure of herself unless she was in the kitchen. Also, though he claimed he didn’t want any, he seemed awfully fixated on the subject of children lately.

Her phone beeped with a text from Jack.
Stuck in a monster queue. Might be some time. Do you want a muffin?

While she was waiting, there was no harm in reading her own list to see how it compared, although hers was very much a work in progress. She’d thought she’d have no problem coming up with at least fifty reasons why she loved Jack, but last Sunday there had actually been a lot of pen-chewing and wondering if they should have done their lists after lunch, because she’d been finding it hard to concentrate while surreptitiously glancing at the menu written on the blackboard on the wall behind him. Still, she’d kept at it for the allotted hour with the idea that she’d revise and rewrite her list at a later date, and as Jack was probably going to be ages, now was the perfect time.