Read Online Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend by Sarra Manning - Free Book Online Page A

Hope couldn’t remember any instances when she’d caught Jack and Susie exchanging heated glances. Or sloping off together without any explanation and returning a long time later, all hot and flustered.
    But then she had spent most of the day getting very merry on the free cocktails supplied by the vodka company sponsoring the backstage hospitality, then queuing for the Portaloos. Still, Hope was sure that if there’d been something going on that day, she’d have noticed it. This was her boyfriend and her best friend they were talking about, after all. Or her ex-best friend and her ex … No, she couldn’t bear to think of Jack as her ex-anything. Couldn’t even form the thought.
    ‘I don’t remember them doing anything out of the ordinary,’ she insisted weakly. ‘Can you be more specific?’
    Wilson shrugged. ‘She’d send a text on her phone. A split second later, he’d get a text and read it with a smirk on his face. Then he’d text, she’d get a text, smirk, text, smirk, text.’
    ‘But that could have just been a coincidence!’
    ‘It could have been, except it looks like it wasn’t. You saw them together. What
did
you see, anyway?’
    Although Hope had been trying to convince herself that the heated embrace was a trick of the light and she’d put two and two together and ended up with a number that was way, way greater than four, when she cast her mind back to what she’d seen earlier, she had perfect recall of Susie’s hands inside Jack’s jeans, his hands on her tits, the hungry slurping sound as they kissed … God, it would be etched right into her cerebral cortex until the day she died.
    ‘I saw them kissing,’ she said, and she was amazed that her voice sounded so clear and calm. ‘And it was the kind of kissing that people do when they’re shagging each other but they can’t actually shag each other at that particular moment.’
    ‘Right.’ Wilson folded his arms. ‘You sure you’re not just jumping to conclusions? Because I’ve noticed that you tend to do that.’
    ‘I do
not
!’ Hope said indignantly, because she didn’t. Apart from the whole engagement-ring fiasco in Barcelona, but that was because Jack had unwittingly led her on. Besides … ‘Since when were you such an authority on me? You’ve only ever said about five sentences to me in the whole time I’ve known you.’
    ‘Well, maybe I might have taken the trouble to get to know you better if you weren’t always glaring at me or getting annoyingly drunk and giggly with my girlfriend.’
    ‘I don’t giggle,’ Hope informed Wilson icily, and the way she was feeling right now, she didn’t think she’d ever knowingly giggle ever again. ‘Anyway, we’re getting wildly off-topic. So, when you had these “suspicions”’ – Hope did air-quotes, which, pleasingly, made Wilson wince – ‘did you confront Susie about them?’
    ‘Well, no, not then,’ Wilson said.
    ‘But you did ask her about them later?’
    ‘I started to ask her but it just turned into an argument about me being half an hour late to pick her up the week before,’ Wilson said dryly.
    ‘So you didn’t pursue it?’ This was even harder than the time Hope had tried to get to the awful truth of who’d let Herbert, the class hamster, out of his cage.
    ‘To be honest, I didn’t want to start dragging up stuff if it meant that all my worst thoughts were confirmed.’ Wilson scratched his chin. ‘No one but a masochist wants to put themselves in a position where they’re likely to get hurt.’
    In all her rage and pity and getting really, really annoyed that Wilson was giving her the third-degree like this was all her fault, Hope had been forgetting something – this wasn’t just about her. Wilson was also an innocent victim in all this. She reached out to touch Wilson’s arm, which made him flinch, but then they’d never touched before. The slight displacement of air when they had leaned in and pursed their lips at a spot approximately