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

as the last-Saturday-of-the-summer-holidays barbecues were all winding down now.
    It was terribly unfair that the inhabitants of the neighbouring gardens sounded as if their Saturday nights had been all fun and frolics, when Hope had just had the worst Saturday night of her life. Bar none. No contest. Even the time when she was sixteen and she and Lauren had sneaked off to Leeds to see the White Stripes and she’d had her purse stolen and they’d missed the last train home and had spent the night sitting on a park bench, wide-eyed and terrified that they were either going to be murdered by a beered-up bunch of random homicidal maniacs who might be passing, or murdered by their parents when they finally got home (though more likely grounded for a year). That didn’t even come close to the agonies Hope had suffered tonight, and now that she wasn’t in forward motion but just sitting there, she had no choice but to start re-living each horrible moment that had revealed all the cracks in her fairly boring but fairly happy little life.
    She knew deep in her gut that those kisses, the caresses, the easy way Jack and Susie’s bodies fitted together signalled very clearly that something had been going on for quite some time. Hope couldn’t believe she’d been oblivious to it. She’d thought that she was the glue that bound Jack and Susie together, and that they’d only tolerated each other because they both wanted Hope in their lives.
    ‘She’s kind of vacuous,’ was how Jack had described Susie the first time he’d met her. ‘She’s even more shallow than the fashion and beauty girls at work. I didn’t think that was possible.’
    Susie hadn’t exactly been about to join the Jack fanclub either. ‘I get the whole lanky artboy thing, I really do, or I did when I was a teenager,’ she’d drawled after her second encounter with Jack, when they’d bumped into her in Islington and the three of them had gone for a quick drink. ‘Now I’m into men who are strong enough to pick me up and shag me against the wall, y’know?’
    Hope hadn’t known because she liked Jack’s lankiness, even though he wasn’t strong enough to drag her off the sofa when she was hunkered down for the evening with a chick-flick, Kettle Chips and a bottle of rosé. Or maybe it wasn’t Jack’s puniness that was the issue here, but Hope’s fluctuating weight, and how right now she couldn’t do the zip up on her favourite pair of skinny jeans. It was Susie who’d decreed that a girl should never have bigger thighs than her lover. Hope stared down at her body masked by the voluminous folds of her black maxi dress and prodded her leg, which wobbled obligingly.
    Maybe it was her fault because she’d let herself go, and because she nagged Jack all the time and when she wasn’t nagging him, she was driving him to distraction with her messy ways and her blanket refusal to accept responsibility and make decisions. ‘I’m responsible for thirty six-year-olds between eight fifty-five and three thirty and I have to make decisions every five minutes,’ Hope was fond of saying when Jack tried to get her to commit to pizza toppings or scraping together another £50 a month to put in their joint savings account. ‘I’m exhausted with all the responsibility and the decision-making. Why don’t you do what you think is best and if I don’t agree I’ll be sure to let you know?’
    She’d taken Jack for granted. Hope shivered, and it might have been with shame, and it might also have been because the humidity was lifting and the night was cooling down.
    It was painful to sit on someone’s garden wall and calculate all the ways she’d been a terrible girlfriend, but the more Hope thought about it, the more she realised that in other ways she was a superb girlfriend. Jack was incapable of getting out of bed in time for work unless she told him he was going to be late at five-minute intervals as she tried to get ready for school. And because she