Getting Over Mr. Right (6 page)

Anyway, as Michael fell asleep, his breath falling into the familiar pattern that told me he was about to start snoring, I felt, at last and for the first time since I saw that awful update on Facebook, some proper relief. I was still in Michael’s bed, so I was still his girlfriend, right? Sure, he hadn’t whipped out a diamond engagement ring, as Becky’s Henry had done, but we were sleeping together. His head was next to mine on the pillow. His arm lay across my stomach. It all seemed so perfectly natural. It had to mean I was still in the game.

When Michael let out his first snore, I gently wriggled my way out from beneath his heavy arm and searched on the floor beside the bed for my handbag. I pulled out my iPhone and texted Becky. She would want to know how the evening had gone.

“Everything is okay,” I texted. Because it was okay. Wasn’t it?

The next morning began as had a thousand mornings of our relationship. Michael’s radio alarm broke the early silence with the dulcet tones of Chris Moyles’s morning show. Michael groaned and rolled over to press the snooze button. Three minutes later Moyles was back with the tail end of the story he had been telling before.

Without really opening his eyes, Michael got out of bed and walked like a zombie to the en suite bathroom. I heard him turn on the shower. He gasped as the water hit him. It was either colder or hotter than he expected. Shock over, he began to sing tunelessly as he went about his ablutions. I took that to be a good sign. People only sing when they’re happy, right?

I sat up in bed and surveyed my reflection in the mirror on his wardrobe. Surprisingly, I looked okay. Although I hadn’t taken my makeup off the night before, the damage wasn’t so bad. I didn’t look as though I had been sobbing my heart out the previous evening. Instead I looked as though I’d just had a slightly heavy night on the champers and, if I said so myself, almost foxy.

Poufing up my artfully disheveled hair, I got out of bed and skipped, naked, to the bathroom.

Michael was out of the shower and drying himself off. As I pushed open the bathroom door, he snatched his towel closely to himself as though I had surprised him.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s okay,” said Michael, working a corner of his towel into his ear.

I leaned against the door frame and arranged my body to best effect.

“Can I get in the shower?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said. He stepped to one side so I could pass him.

“Have you finished in here? I mean, are you sure you’re properly clean?” I asked. He didn’t take the playful hint that he should jump back into the shower with me.

“I’m clean,” he said.

For the next five minutes or so I practically performed the Dance of the Seven Veils behind that shower curtain in the hope that he might change his mind and join me for a quick rubdown, but he didn’t. He didn’t even glance up to see my sexy silhouette. He brushed and flossed his teeth. He shaved. Then he went back to working on his ears. This time with a Q-tip.

Eventually I had to get out of the shower. It was only then that I noticed there was no towel for me.

“Oh, have this,” he said, handing me the one he had used to clean his ears. “All the others are in the wash.”

“Okay.” I tried to make the best of it. I wiggled it across my shoulders in a little shimmy. It wasn’t very big and I was starting to feel cold. Meanwhile Michael combed his hair flat across his head.

“So,” I said, preparing to seal the deal. “I was wondering what you want to do this weekend.”

“What?”

“This weekend?”

Michael stopped combing his hair and just stood there, with the comb still poised over his head. He looked at me via the mirror.

I pressed on. “I don’t have anything planned at all, though I
would like to go have a look for Becky and Henry’s wedding present. You can come if you like.”

“I have other plans,” said Michael.

“Like what?” I asked. “Anything I can go along with?”

Michael paused. He cleared his throat. “I mean I wasn’t intending to spend my weekend with you.”

“But …”

“Ashleigh.” Michael put down his comb and gave me that sorrowful smile. Still via the mirror. He wasn’t going to turn around and give me that smile in person. “We went through this all last night. You and me. We’re finished. You know we are. We can’t carry on pretending. This just isn’t working out.”

I suddenly felt far colder than I should have, even if I was wet and dripping in an unheated bathroom.

“But you just slept with me!” I said eventually. “You took me to bed!”

“I know,” said Michael. “I shouldn’t have done that. But what can I say? I’m a man … I’m weak.” He shrugged and pulled a
Tchuh! Boys!
kind of face, as though to cue a laugh.

Weak? If I hadn’t felt so bloody weak right then, I might have socked him in the jaw.

“You came over and you looked so great and you got so drunk …”

“That you decided to take advantage of me! Michael! I thought it meant something.”

“It did,” Michael told me.

“What?” I spat. “What did it mean to you?”

“I suppose that part of me thought it was a good way of saying good-bye.”

“First shag, last shag?”

“If you want to put it like that.” He winced. “It does sort of complete the circle. Is that such a bad thing?”

“Yes! Yes!” I shouted. “Yes, it bloody well is a bad thing. How could you?”

“You were the one who got into my bed naked,” Michael pointed out.

“As you said, I’d had quite a bit to drink. You could have refused to get in there with me. You could have slept in your spare room.”

“That bed’s uncomfortable,” he said. “The mattress is all lumpy.”

“You mean a lumpy mattress made it seem better for you to use me like some kind of unpaid prostitute?”

“Now, come on, Ashleigh. You know it’s not like that. You know that I always had the very finest feelings for you …”

“And I
still
have the very finest feelings for you. And you knew that because I told you and yet, knowing that you weren’t going to get back with me, you still took me to bed? You must have realized I’d get the wrong idea.”

“I didn’t tell you I’d changed my mind.”

“But you acted as though you had! What was I supposed to think?”

“I’m sorry,” said Michael. He still hadn’t turned around.

“Turn around and look at me when you say that!” I demanded.

He turned around, but he didn’t look contrite anymore. Instead he looked frankly irritated to find me still standing there, as though there had been a chance that my reflection in the mirror was some kind of mirage. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “But, Ashleigh, you need to put your clothes on. I’ve got to go to work. And so have you, I’m sure.”

“You can’t go to work right now. Not while we’re in the middle of talking about the most important thing in our lives!”

“I’ve got a breakfast meeting,” he told me.

“And you’re actually going to go to it?”

“I can’t miss it.”

He left me standing alone in the bathroom while he went to get dressed and make himself a coffee. Though he had looked
fairly rattled as he walked out, less than two minutes later I could hear him singing again. The pig! It was no time for bloody singing. I pulled on my dress and followed him into the kitchen. I continued to tell him what I thought of him while he swallowed his vitamin tablets.

“You’re an absolute c—,” I said, using a word I ordinarily considered unthinkable.

Michael had the decency to choke on his cod-liver oil.

“I can’t believe you called me that!”

“I can’t believe you turned out to be one!”

I was still arguing as Michael shuffled me out of his front door, with my hair dripping and the buttons on my dress done up wrong. A car was already waiting to take him to his big, important meeting. The meeting that was so much more important than our relationship!

“Take a taxi home,” he said, pressing a twenty into my hand. “I’ll call you later.”

He didn’t kiss me—not even on the cheek—and there was no disguising the relief on his face as the car pulled away from the curb with him safely in the backseat.

What was I supposed to do?

“You … you utter, utter twat!” I called after him.

A woman walking her dog past the main gate gave me a very disapproving look. Michael lived in the kind of complex where the residents would call the police if they saw someone wearing high-street clothes passing by, let alone shouting obscenities. In my walk-of-shame outfit, clutching the twenty-pound note that Michael had just pressed upon me, I must have looked very dodgy indeed. The woman crossed the road away from me, as though I might be a bad influence on her pedigree Chihuahua.

So, I was down, but was I out? No way. Michael may have thought he had broken up with me for real now but I had a very different idea. Was I going to accept my dismissal? Was I hell!

I was determined that I would not let Michael’s decision stand. Even before I got home, I tried to call him fifteen times to tell him so, but, surprise, surprise, he let me go to voicemail. Breathing deeply in the back of the cab, I replayed the previous evening and our horrible fight in the bathroom. It was ridiculous that Michael thought he could throw away two and a half years with just one conversation. There had to be further negotiations and there would be. I consoled myself with the fact that he obviously still found me attractive—the sex had proved that—and that he had said he would call. When he did, I needed to be ready to take full advantage of that window. As I realized that, I felt an odd calm come over me. All was not yet lost.

I called my office and told Ellie I would not be coming in again before the weekend. I claimed that the food poisoning had left me too weak and listless to do anything but lie in bed.

“People normally get over food poisoning in twenty-four hours,” said Ellie.

“I’ve got it really bad.”

“And it sounds like you’re sitting in a taxi,” said Ellie, tuning in to the diesel engine.

“I’m leaning my head out of my bedroom window,” I told her. “To get some air.”

Bloody Ellie. Her job title may have been assistant, but I frequently felt as though she was the boss in our relationship.

“All right,” she said. “Get better soon. We’re all thinking of you.”

I accepted her platitudes, though I knew that if her dreams came true, I would not get better at all. Ellie had been after my job since the day she started at Maximal Media. Any disappointment she expressed at my absence was entirely perfunctory. I imagined she was already standing in my office, deciding where she would put her degree certificate and photos from her gap year. It was a risk, giving her the opportunity to step into my shoes for however short a period, but something bigger than my job was at stake here.

By the time I got back home, I had decided I needed a new strategy. The Internet was my first resort. I didn’t even bother to change out of my little black dress before I fired up my laptop. Changing, washing, eating, drinking meant nothing to me now. I could only focus on what I could do to make Michael change his mind. I typed the words “get boyfriend back” into the Google window. They were three little words that were the key to a world I could not have imagined.

The good news was that plenty of other people had put their minds to the problem of rescuing a relationship. The bad news was that the first twenty sites I looked at came up with twenty different methods. They didn’t agree on a single strategy that made any sense.
Call him. Don’t call him. Cry. Don’t cry. Learn a new sexual position and try it out on his best friend …

There were literally thousands of pages and chatroom threads devoted to the subject of winning back an ex-lover and no way of knowing what really worked. Still, taking up a pencil and using all the research skills I had honed over my career,
I started to make notes and gradually saw a pattern emerge. The advice wasn’t so diverse after all. It actually fell broadly into two camps: Ignore the lover who spurned you to reignite his interest, or, more controversially, stalk him relentlessly until he decides it would be easier to take you back than put up with you shadowing him at work. I read through sites for the brokenhearted until my eyes started crossing, not even stopping to make a cup of tea. I hadn’t worked so hard since I retook my finals. All the while I had one eye on my iPhone for a call or a text from Michael. Nothing came.