Read Online Let's Call the Whole Thing Off by Jill Steeples - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jill Steeples
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I’d never be able to go back and live there. Not with Sophie. A huge pang of sadness swept over me.
No more drink-fuelled evenings watching soppy films and endless episodes of
Come Dine with Me
and
Dinner Date
. No dancing around the living room to Katy Perry as we acted out our own twenty- plus version of ‘Teenage Dream’. No late-night baking sessions of cupcakes or cookies to satiate our chocolate cravings.
However much I didn’t want to think about it, I could just about imagine meeting another man one day – if I ever wanted to, that is, which at the moment looked wholly unlikely; but to find another bestie like Sophie, with all our shared history and experiences, it was never going to happen.
I scrubbed my face with the flannel, washing away the tears.
The thing was I still couldn’t really believe what I’d read in that diary. It’d been like reading about a stranger. I was half expecting someone to come running to my side to explain that it had all been a huge misunderstanding and that if I just came home again my old life would fall straight back into place. Only that was complete and utter fantasy, I knew. I’d seen from Ben’s guilt-flecked features that everything I’d imagined and more about Ed and Sophie had been only part of the truth.
For all my other life disasters Sophie had been my go-to person. The one person in the world who I could totally offload on. Hell, I’d even bent her ear about Ed; his unreliable time-keeping, his annoying habit of clearing out his teeth with the edge of a business card and his undying devotion to the poker channel. She’d listened and laughed as I’d indulged in a bit of boyfriend bashing, but now I wondered if she’d secretly relished those conversations, knowing that she’d be sharing my little snippets later with Ed when they’d be able to laugh together over the stupid deluded girlfriend. I cringed thinking about the time I’d given her a blow-by-blow account of when we’d made love in his dad’s shed without leaving out any of the gory details. She hadn’t batted an eyelid.
Still, the way I saw it, I had one of two options. I took another slug of champagne to get my thoughts absolutely straight in my mind as a new determination filled my water-soaked veins. Either I spent the rest of this week and the rest of my life drinking myself into a stupor, torturing myself with images of what Sophie and Ed might have got up to, trying to fathom out why they actually did it in the first place and only driving myself mad in the process or else I had to put the whole sorry episode to one side and start all over again.
Now either that meant starting over with someone new, which I couldn’t even begin to imagine, or it meant being the bigger person, thinking about everything I had to lose and maybe, just maybe, learning how to forgive Ed.
Which I couldn’t even begin to imagine either. No, whatever way I looked at it I could see no way out.
Still, other people had much worse things to contend with. I’d only being dumped on by my fiancé, been screwed by my best friend and been made homeless. You had to look on the positive side. And didn’t they say that the best revenge was being happy, living well.
Hell, if it bloody killed me, I was determined to live well and happy, if only to spite Ed and Sophie.
***
For supper I decided to give the hotel’s rosette-starred restaurant a miss and opted for fish and chips from a kiosk on the seafront instead. With a smothering of salt and vinegar and eaten from the polystyrene box, it tasted sublime. Much better than anything my local, or rather my ex-local, shop had dished up. It was a sad fact of life but my broken heart had given me a permanently ravenous hunger, but just as now wasn’t the time for slumming it, it also wasn’t the time for watching my calorie intake. I had my emotional well-being to think of and that meant keeping my blood sugar levels high. I found a bench to park my bum on and looked out
No more drink-fuelled evenings watching soppy films and endless episodes of
Come Dine with Me
and
Dinner Date
. No dancing around the living room to Katy Perry as we acted out our own twenty- plus version of ‘Teenage Dream’. No late-night baking sessions of cupcakes or cookies to satiate our chocolate cravings.
However much I didn’t want to think about it, I could just about imagine meeting another man one day – if I ever wanted to, that is, which at the moment looked wholly unlikely; but to find another bestie like Sophie, with all our shared history and experiences, it was never going to happen.
I scrubbed my face with the flannel, washing away the tears.
The thing was I still couldn’t really believe what I’d read in that diary. It’d been like reading about a stranger. I was half expecting someone to come running to my side to explain that it had all been a huge misunderstanding and that if I just came home again my old life would fall straight back into place. Only that was complete and utter fantasy, I knew. I’d seen from Ben’s guilt-flecked features that everything I’d imagined and more about Ed and Sophie had been only part of the truth.
For all my other life disasters Sophie had been my go-to person. The one person in the world who I could totally offload on. Hell, I’d even bent her ear about Ed; his unreliable time-keeping, his annoying habit of clearing out his teeth with the edge of a business card and his undying devotion to the poker channel. She’d listened and laughed as I’d indulged in a bit of boyfriend bashing, but now I wondered if she’d secretly relished those conversations, knowing that she’d be sharing my little snippets later with Ed when they’d be able to laugh together over the stupid deluded girlfriend. I cringed thinking about the time I’d given her a blow-by-blow account of when we’d made love in his dad’s shed without leaving out any of the gory details. She hadn’t batted an eyelid.
Still, the way I saw it, I had one of two options. I took another slug of champagne to get my thoughts absolutely straight in my mind as a new determination filled my water-soaked veins. Either I spent the rest of this week and the rest of my life drinking myself into a stupor, torturing myself with images of what Sophie and Ed might have got up to, trying to fathom out why they actually did it in the first place and only driving myself mad in the process or else I had to put the whole sorry episode to one side and start all over again.
Now either that meant starting over with someone new, which I couldn’t even begin to imagine, or it meant being the bigger person, thinking about everything I had to lose and maybe, just maybe, learning how to forgive Ed.
Which I couldn’t even begin to imagine either. No, whatever way I looked at it I could see no way out.
Still, other people had much worse things to contend with. I’d only being dumped on by my fiancé, been screwed by my best friend and been made homeless. You had to look on the positive side. And didn’t they say that the best revenge was being happy, living well.
Hell, if it bloody killed me, I was determined to live well and happy, if only to spite Ed and Sophie.
***
For supper I decided to give the hotel’s rosette-starred restaurant a miss and opted for fish and chips from a kiosk on the seafront instead. With a smothering of salt and vinegar and eaten from the polystyrene box, it tasted sublime. Much better than anything my local, or rather my ex-local, shop had dished up. It was a sad fact of life but my broken heart had given me a permanently ravenous hunger, but just as now wasn’t the time for slumming it, it also wasn’t the time for watching my calorie intake. I had my emotional well-being to think of and that meant keeping my blood sugar levels high. I found a bench to park my bum on and looked out
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