If You're Not the One by Jemma Forte Read Free Book Online

it’s
please may I have
some toast?’ replied Jennifer.
    â€˜Please may I have some toast?’
    â€˜Yes,’ sighed Jennifer faintly. ‘Anyone else?’
    For a second Max looked sorely tempted but soon readjusted his expression when Jennifer glowered at him on her way to the toaster.
    The rest of the meal was pretty torturous. Only Henry seemed blissfully unaware that he was eating something which resembled road-kill. Everyone else performed a sort of cutlery ballet-dance around their plate, consuming lots of potatoes and salad, and expertly leaving a pile of pinky grey mush to one side, with either their knife and fork, or a napkin, placed cunningly over the top.
    After the meal Jennifer cleared away, scraping tons ofdiscarded meat into the food recycling bin. As she did so, she wondered at what point she’d become so sad and pathetic that she couldn’t have admitted that she hadn’t made the disgusting food herself and that probably none of them should have touched it, in case they all got the chronic shits. When had she become the sort of person who cared what people like Judith and Henry thought anyway? When had she transformed into such a middle-class stereotype, desperately trying to impress? When had she turned into Max’s mother?
    Much later that night as she climbed gratefully between the sheets, head thumping with a same-day hangover, she said to Max who was already half asleep, ‘The chicken was a bit weird wasn’t it?’
    â€˜It was all right,’ he said, his eyes shut and his body turned away from her. ‘It just looked a bit like cat food. Why did you say you’d made it?’
    â€˜Don’t know,’ she replied truthfully, staring at the ceiling, hot with embarrassment just thinking about it.
    â€˜You did yourself a disservice anyway,’ he added. ‘Your cooking’s far nicer and I think Judith doesn’t cook much so it’s not like you needed to compete. She works too hard to ever get round to doing any domestic stuff.’
    â€˜Oh, so now you’re having a go at me for not making something are you?’ she retorted defensively, because in truth she was feeling gradually more and more embarrassed that she’d passed off the stupid, dodgy lookingruddy chickens as her own creations. Her tone wasn’t helped by the fact that the mere mention of Judith’s name was starting to send shivers up her spine.
    â€˜No,’ he sighed, now clearly wishing she’d shut up and go to sleep. ‘I’m giving you a compliment on your cooking really but I’m also saying I think they knew you hadn’t made it anyway.’
    â€˜Really?’ she said, despite the fact she’d figured this out on her own, having it confirmed was mortifying, to the point where
another
bad night’s sleep was probably on the cards. ‘Why?’
    â€˜Because you went weird and replied really slowly, so it was obvious.’
    â€˜Oh god I’m so strange,’ she whimpered. ‘The thing is I’m very tired you know.’
    â€˜I know,’ he said, and with that he fell fast asleep, as he had an annoying habit of doing when he was tired, leaving his wife to ponder in the darkness the fact that lying hadn’t really achieved anything. In fact, it was clear to her that the only thing she’d stuffed by doing so (and it certainly wasn’t the chickens) was herself.
    Perhaps the whole debacle was a sign that she needed to be more honest about a whole load of things.
    Two hours later, bored of her insomnia, head whirring, Jennifer slipped out of bed and crept into the spare room. Able to spread out she tried to relax, and then decided to finish what she’d started much earlier in the day in the hope that a good healthy orgasm might help her get tosleep. And so it was that she returned to that hot summer back in 1994 when, unlike now, food was of little or no consequence to her or her friends