Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (33 page)

Hope took no pleasure from Jack’s pain. The only other time she’d seen him cry was when he was seventeen and Bucky, the Benson family collie, had to be put down.

‘There are difficult phases in every relationship,’ her mother was saying rather unbelievably as Jack’s phone
started
to ring. ‘But sometimes they can bring a couple closer together.’

He scrubbed his face with the sleeve of his new, expensive-looking black jumper, gulped back a sob and answered his phone. ‘Hello, Mum.’

Of course it was his mum. Because it had been three minutes since Jeremy’s bombshell made Hope’s mum call early, and three minutes was the time it took for Marge Benson to leave the Delafields’ house, hurry next door, relay the terrible news to Jack’s dad that everyone’s favourite couple was on the rocks, then call her son to find out exactly what had been going on. Jeremy might have spilled the beans, but he obviously hadn’t told them why Hopey and Jack were no longer together and, again, Hope took no satisfaction from hearing Jack mutter fiercely, ‘Look, it wasn’t like that. I’ve been … well, I’ve been seeing someone else.’

Her mother was still jawing on, her tone verging on hectoring ‘… Obviously, Jack’s done a terrible thing, but Jerry says that you’ve put on weight and sometimes you don’t even wear a bra when you go out. What kind of message does that send out? It says that you’ve let yourself go. Of course Jack is going to stray if you’ve stopped making an effort …’

‘Thanks for the support, Mum. Do you have even the slightest idea of what I’ve been going through?’

Jack got to his feet and stumbled to the bedroom, shutting the door behind him so he could speak to his mother in privacy, though Hope was sure that he wasn’t getting such a hard time. Not Jack, their beloved only child who shot sunbeams out of his arse.

‘Hope, you know that we love you to pieces,’ her mother said, and it seemed to Hope, as if often did, that this alleged love was in spite of the way she’d turned out rather than being completely unconditional. ‘I’m just saying it takes two people to make a relationship, and two people to break one up.’

‘Yes, and those two people would be Jack and my former best friend. Oh, I’m forgetting that none of this is Jack’s fault; I drove him away because I’m a fat bitch who doesn’t wear a bra.’

‘There is no talking to you when you’re in one of your moods,’ her mother rapped back. ‘Obviously this hasn’t been easy for you, but it’s been quite a bolt out of the blue for us, too.’

‘The thing is that really it’s got nothing to do with you,’ Hope said, even though it had
everything
to do with her parents and Jack’s parents and their grandparents and, when she stopped to think about it, probably the whole of Whitfield had a vested interest in their relationship.

Her mother seemed to think so. ‘It has everything to do with us and if you can’t sort out this mess, the shock is going to kill your grandma.’

‘Mum, please …’

‘You’ll have to come home so we can talk about this properly,’ her mother stated implacably. ‘Can you get a few days off if you explain that there’s a family emergency?’

‘Not a chance in hell,’ Hope said equally firmly.

‘Well, you’ll have to get the train down on Friday after school. I must say, I thought you’d be more upset than this. You sound almost flippant.’

‘I am
not
flippant, and believe me, I’ve been plenty upset about this. I’ve cried myself to sleep more nights than I can remember, and the reason I’m so bloody lardy is because I’ve been stuffing down chocolate like it’s going out of fashion,’ Hope admitted, and she was on the verge of tears now, but they were angry tears because she was so furious with her mother she’d almost lost the power of speech. ‘I am in pieces right now.’

‘Oh, Hopey, poor old thing, don’t cry. I’m sure that Jack never meant to hurt you. He loves you,’ her mother said, and at least now she sounded like Hope’s emotional wellbeing was her number-one priority. ‘Look, sweetie,
please
come down for the weekend for some proper TLC.’

Usually Mrs Delafield was more about tough love, rather than TLC. ‘I don’t know,’ ventured Hope. ‘There’s so much to do here. Like, if we’re going to sell the flat …’ She trailed off as her mother took another sharp intake of breath.

‘I think it’s far too soon to be thinking about that kind of thing,’ she said, once she’d got over the fright that Hope had given her. ‘If you get the fast train, you can be here by seven, and I’ll pick you up from the station. We can have a nice girly weekend, just you, me and Marge.’

There was absolutely no point in arguing. Hope knew her mother would drive up to London if she had to, but … ‘What about if I persuaded Jack to come home with me and we drove up on Saturday?’

‘No need for that.’ Her mother gave a shrill laugh. ‘Dad and Roger are going to drive down to London and spend some time with Jack, and we’ll get this whole horrible business squared away.’

For one brief, blissful moment, Hope dared to believe that with some heavy-handed parental intervention, the whole horrible business
could
get squared away, but there were Jack’s worldly goods encased in black bin bags in the hall and her list for the rest of her life sitting on the kitchen counter, and there was nothing to be squared away. It was all fucked up and over.

‘I don’t think that’s going to happen, Mum,’ she whispered. ‘How can he still love me if he’s doing that with
her
?’

‘Stop being so silly. Jack obviously adores you. We’ll talk about it over the weekend,’ her mother said in a slightly manic voice. ‘Now, be sure to let me know what train you’ll be getting, though you should probably be able to make the four o’clock train out of Euston if you don’t dawdle. I’ve got to go, I have some bread proving.’

‘Fine. OK. Whatever.’ Hope guessed that her mother had achieved all she wanted from their phone call. ‘I’ll email
you
the train times, though all the talking in the world isn’t going to change what’s happened.’

‘Oh, and don’t keep sounding so negative, Hopey. You need to have a can-do attitude. This will all blow over, I’m sure of it, and that reminds me, I’ll make you an appointment to have your hair done on Saturday afternoon. Jeremy said your hair was mostly tangles, so we’ll get Mandy to give you a comb-out. I’ll remind you to take a couple of ibuprofen before we leave for the salon.’

As Hope rang off, Jack emerged from the bedroom and they shared a strained smile. ‘So I hope you didn’t have any exciting plans for next weekend,’ he said sheepishly.

‘By exciting plans, did you mean being frogmarched to Hair by Mandy to have a comb-out on Saturday afternoon?’ Hope asked peevishly.

Jack winced. ‘Ouch.’

He sat back down on the stool and dipped a finger in his bowl of soup. ‘This is barely lukewarm now.’

‘I’ll heat it up again.’ Hope poured the contents back into the big pan, which was still on a low simmer, and stirred. ‘So, did you actually agree to our two dads coming up for the weekend?’

‘I tried to say no several times but Mum doesn’t understand that word.’

Hope attempted another smile. ‘You never know, it might work.’ And just like that, just from looking at Jack sitting in their kitchen with her, in their home, where he truly belonged, all Hope’s plans for the future, and her good intentions to move on with her life were gone. Out of the window. Because, really? They weren’t what she wanted from her life. Jack was what she wanted, which was why she couldn’t help herself from going over to him so she could wrap her arms around him and kiss the top of his head, and Jack was letting her, so that was a good sign, right? ‘I still love you,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘Have you really stopped loving me?’

‘I’ll always love you,’ he said, and he bent his head so he could kiss her knuckles. ‘But this thing with Susie … it’s like we can’t get enough of each other. Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in her.’ Jack stopped and looked imploringly up at her as if he didn’t have the right words to describe this supposed thrall that Susie had wrapped him in, and that maybe Hope could help him out.

Hope didn’t feel inclined to lend her assistance, and even though Jack’s face was right in front of her, she stared pointedly at a spot over his left shoulder where they’d tried unsuccessfully to hang the kitchen clock and made a mess instead. She needed to add it to the list. ‘Is it just a sex thing, then?’ she muttered, when Jack pinched her waist.

‘I’ve never felt like this before,’ Jack said, and Hope didn’t know why he felt the need to tell her this, or why he thought she’d be interested, but when she tried to disentangle herself, he clung to her like she was the last lifebelt on the
Titanic
. ‘I keep thinking it will burn itself out. It has to.’

‘And you expect me to wait for you to get it out of your system?’ Hope asked a little bitterly, even though she suspected that if Jack asked her to, she would wait. And to think that usually people described Hope as feisty. All her feisty seemed to have upped and left. ‘Because Susie’s all fiery-hot and I’m like, tepid.’

‘It’s not like that.’ Jack glared at her as if she was deliberately not getting a clue. ‘Susie’s like a really spicy Thai meal and you, well, you’re pumpkin soup or shepherd’s pie or … or … freshly baked bread.’

Hope tore herself out of Jack’s arms so she could put some distance between them. ‘My God! Do you go out of your way to think of the most hateful things to say to me?’

‘Don’t you get it though, Hopey? Thai food is amazing and, like, if you go to Thailand you eat it every day …’

‘You’ve never fucking been to fucking Thailand!’

‘But say that I had, and when I got home I thought I’d want to go back to eating freshly baked bread and
shepherd’s
pie, but it didn’t happen.’ Jack ran long fingers through his hair but it was too short now and he gave up with a frustrated groan. ‘I know I’m behaving like a complete tosser. If it’s any consolation, I hate myself for it.’

‘Well, no, it isn’t,’ Hope said brusquely, and she turned her back on Jack, which he took as his cue to get off the stool and try and put his arms around her again. ‘Can you stop mauling me, please?’

‘I’m trying here, Hope! Could you at least meet me halfway?’

Well, try harder because it doesn’t look like you’re trying at all!
she almost said. ‘If your mum hadn’t called, you’d have eaten your bowl of soup and taken some more of your stuff and gone back to Susie’s,’ Hope pointed out, and she thought she should be given some credit for hardly raising her voice. ‘I was starting to think that maybe you were having regrets, but nothing has changed at all. You’ve just had an attack of conscience.’

‘I’m just trying to explain why I’ve acted the way I have,’ Jack said, and he sounded as if he really meant it. ‘And I’m trying to tell you that I don’t think it will do any good for the dads to come down to talk some sense into me. Otto and Marvin have already tried and failed.’

Hope felt compelled to turn round. ‘Really? I thought they hated me for daring to smash a sacred phone manufactured by Apple?’ She flushed. ‘Did you have to buy a new one or did you manage to claim it back on the insurance?’

‘I had to buy a new one, but it’s really not that big a deal,’ Jack said. ‘And of course Otto and Marvin don’t hate you. They both said that I was lucky that you only took it out on my iPhone.’

‘Oh. So much for “bros before hos”, eh?’

‘Hope, honestly, I don’t see the point of our parents staging an intervention,’ Jack said earnestly. ‘You have to admit our relationship has been broken for ages and there isn’t a way to fix this, to fix us.’

Hope would admit no such thing, and as she understood it, there were lots of ways to fix them: Jack could stop seeing Susie, forswear Thai food, exercise a bit of bloody restraint and stop being led by his dick. She didn’t say that, but was sure that the sour expression on her face said it for her. ‘Well, if you’re not even going to try, then I don’t see why I have to be the one to go back to Whitfield and you get to stay in London,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think you’ve put me through enough without a two-pronged attack from both our mums?’

‘But you’ve got to get a comb-out at Hair by Mandy.’ Jack grinned, and Hope also wanted to tell him that they weren’t in a joking place, not at all, and that the agony she was going to go through on Saturday afternoon (and actually for the entire weekend and for the foreseeable future) was no laughing matter.

‘I don’t know how you can act like this is funny,’ she said. ‘That I’m not important. That what we had doesn’t matter to you.’

‘I don’t think like that. Not at all.’

‘Because I love you. I can’t stop loving you, despite how much you’ve hurt me, and if you end this with her, I’ll take you back. No questions. No judgement. I’ll take you back. Please, Jack.’ Hope didn’t even care that all her pride was gone and she was giving Jack all her love and devotion, with absolutely no guarantee that he’d return them.

‘Please, Hopey, don’t,’ he said gently. ‘In the long run, getting rid of me will be the best thing you’ve ever done.’ He tried out a winsome grin on her, the kind of grin that even two weeks ago still had the power to make Hope’s foolish heart melt. ‘Look, if we end this now, before things get really ugly …’

‘Things already
are
really ugly,’ Hope said, because, lists aside, Jack had left misery and chaos in his wake and if this was only just the beginning …