and gentle. Not annoyed. Not furious.
‘Really, Tom?’ I say out loud. ‘You’re not even a bit pissed off that she’s drunk when you’re trying for a baby?’
I think of how Luke reacted when I got drunk. He never liked it. Compounded my hangovers by telling me how embarrassing I had been. Whereas drunk Luke was popular and hilarious, according to him, according to his friends.
I throw my handbag at the wall.
When I’ve calmed slightly I sit on my sofa and write my reply to Tom.
Thanks so much for your advice.
That’s all I have. I’m wary of anything that sounds too flirty; I suspect Nice Tom would run a mile. But I need to make sure I don’t kill the conversation. I need to know him better. The sounds through the wall aren’t enough and the likeness to Luke is driving me crazy. This is the closest I can get. It’s why I played the baby noises. Just a few things to tip them over the edge, make the misery greater than the joy. And then things can reset. Lexie can move on; Tom can be with me.
Plus, ever since I heard Lexie’s voice, raised and ranting, and Tom’s, bleak and beaten in response, I’ve wondered whether things are as perfect as I thought they were anyway. Or was I hearing something unreal?
In hospital, my therapist would have said that I was projecting Luke and me onto Tom and Lexie, I’m sure. Seeing them as more perfect than they were, as I used to do with us.
But we’ll never know: I decided to stop seeing my therapist despite her repeated insistence that we have a lot more ‘work’ to do. Despite her suggesting that I had been a victim of abuse. I stopped seeing her. I didn’t like her being mean to Luke.
I hear something bang down on a table. A beer? A laptop? Is Tom checking if he’s heard from Rachel? I tell him I’ll order the book and that the work experience contact would be great. And then I add some drivel about passion.
I am making myself feel nauseous but still, I send it and get no reply, which irritates me because all he’s doing is watching some non-event 0–0 draw; I know the result because I mute my TV and then watch what he’s watching, for insight.
He updates his social media too, some football-based joke with an image from his TV, metres away from me, and I feel a surge of anger that I – Rachel – am low down on the priority list.
Then, despite the fighting the other day, I hear him and Lexie chatting normally. Fuck them and their eternally happy relationship. I throw the remote control at the wall.
I go to bed and make sure I slam my door, and I think about Tom, but when I think about Tom, it is hard not to think about Luke. I’m drifting again, the two of them merging.
Luke met me when I was at my lowest ebb. I had broken up with an ex-boyfriend, Ray, six months ago because I knew people thought he was uncool. Because I wanted them to think I was better than that.
But I missed him, that man with jeans that were too short for him, whose ability to make me laugh was obscene.
Ray had moved on, though. To someone who was proud of him; who was confident enough in herself, most probably, not to care what other people thought. Since then, I had been all over the place. Tried on some different crowds. I played at being artsy, picking up baggy patterned trousers and talking loudly about my love for the playwright Joe Orton before landing on something that was easy to pick up: party girl. This one was brilliant, because you didn’t need to learn a hobby for it, or acquire any accessories. Unless a hobby was chucking liquor down your throat most nights until 2 a.m., when you vomited in an unknown sink and your accessory was cheap vodka.
I slept with anyone, everyone. I missed Ray and I disliked myself, and I was trying, even back then, to dilute me.
Then one night I was drinking sherry at the home of a pretentious mutual friend who had just got back from a gap year in Europe and become obsessed with everything Spanish.
‘No one actually likes this stuff though, right?’ a guy at the party had asked bluntly with a grin. ‘It tastes like mushrooms.’
I was horrified. I wouldn’t have ventured anything other than polite agreement and awe at her sophisticated drink choices. The friend was new, someone from work, and I was trying to impress. Or rather, not to offend. Are they the same thing?
Either way, I thought this man was fearless and impressive with his honest sherry feedback. Everyone laughed and slapped him on the back; he was popular and down-to-earth. And handsome, I thought with a jolt as I looked up at him, so handsome.
Luke’s confidence soared even more as he drank and I listened to him take on somebody’s views on bullfighting and somebody else’s thoughts on Rioja. He put arms around people’s shoulders, nudged them playfully in the ribs.
Then he turned his attention to me.
‘Have you ever tried any English wines?’ he said out of nowhere, focused in my direction. ‘They’re making some really good stuff down in Sussex.’
He placed his hand on my waist, steered me to a sofa in the corner next to the back door. I hadn’t even thought he had seen me. I was shaking.
I muttered an intimidated no, sneaked a glance up at his messy curls.
The idea of dating someone like this man, Luke, with his wine knowledge and confident views? This was a world away. This was what I had been looking for. But I knew there was no way he would be interested in me.
Except then when our friend turned off the music and started to read aloud from Hemingway like a primary school teacher introducing the class to Roald Dahl, Luke whispered ‘Shots?’ in my ear and took my hand.
The crowd big enough for our friend not to notice, he led me out of the back door and down the street to the British pub in town, making me cry with laughter at his impressions of the Hemingway reading as we walked. I had drunk enough now to stop being quite so mute.
‘I wish all American bars were like this,’ he said, two notes too loudly, as I looked around, confused, at the snooker table. I had never been in a British pub before. I could see why.
He ordered us some drinks and it was only as we sat down that I realised just how drunk he was. Conversation became hazy and nonsensical and we got up to dance, though it wasn’t a dancing vibe and, really, I felt too self-conscious to move my limbs.
‘Come on!’ he said, twirling me around in a different beat to the music. ‘You’re too beautiful not to dance! Dance, dance, dance.’
It was almost a chant. My protests were ignored and half an hour later, my mouth was full of yeast and hops as he kissed me, forcibly and deep. I was sober enough to be aware that like it wasn’t a dancing kind of bar, it wasn’t a kissing kind of bar either, but I tried to block that out. His Roman nose knocked against mine. I had my hands at the nape of his neck, just at the start of his dishevelled curls.
‘Shall we go back to mine?’ he slurred.
I wanted to go home to sleep and he was barely coherent enough to be company. But I went home with him because he was beautiful and he wanted me and he had fixed his eyes on mine, and we had brief sex that felt like a one-night stand.
Until two days later when he sent
