Getting Over Mr. Right

by Chrissie Manby

  “How have you been?” he asked.

  “I’ve been fine,” I said.

  “You look well,” he commented. At last he had noticed.

  “Thanks,” I said, fluffing my hair.

  “Have you got nail varnish on?”

  I looked at my nails as though I were surprised to find them so pink and pearly.

  “You never wear nail varnish,” he said.

  “These days I do,” I replied.

  “Oh.” Michael widened his eyes. I felt a small ripple of pride. I had obviously wrong-footed him with my new well-groomed self. The fact that ninety-nine days out of a hundred I still didn’t look anything like this at all was not relevant. I had wanted Michael to think that I had raised my game since he chucked me and I allowed myself to think that he believed I had.

  “Well, it looks nice,” he said. “Lady-like.”

  We were at the off-license. He held the door open for me.

  “Usual?” he said.

  “Okay.”

  Our usual was a bottle of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, the rough southern Italian red that went fantastically well with takeaway anything. That wine was cheap as chips but I took it as a good sign that he asked me if I wanted our “usual” rather than push out the boat with something flashy and more expensive. It seemed nostalgic, and that suggested to me that he had been remembering me with fondness, rather than as the mad cow he had threatened with legal action.

  “Shall we go halves?” I asked, as he placed three bottles on the counter.

  “No,” he said. “Don’t be silly. I’ll pay.”

  Sure, the wine was only £4.59 a bottle, but I took that as a good sign, too. He was treating me.

  Back at his place, we ordered takeaway from the local Indian, though he didn’t order his usual.

  “Watching my weight,” he said, patting his stomach.

  He was a little paunchier than I remembered. He had always been paranoid about getting “man-boobs.” I must have spent a good five hours of my life reassuring Michael that he didn’t have tits. Never would have. And since the breakup, I had spent a good deal more time fantasizing that when I saw him again, I would tell him that I had been lying. He had a better cleavage than Eva Herzigova. But when he gave me the opportunity to tell him what a fat, middle-aged knacker he had become, I just told him, “You don’t need to worry about your weight. You look in great shape.”

  “Well, I’m still going to the gym,” he said. “Got to keep in shape.”

  “I’ve been going, too,” I responded. “Pilates mostly.”

  “I hear that’s really good if you suffer from back pain.”

  “It is,” I confirmed.

  “I get terrible backaches sitting at my desk all day,” he muttered.

  “How’s work?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know,” said Michael. “Work’s work. Things have been busy because the government keeps changing the law to claw back some of the money they wasted bailing out the banks. It’s making the firm a small fortune as we try to prevent them from robbing our clients.”

  “Sounds exciting,” I said. Not really.

  How odd that I had spent the last eight months having arguments with this man in my head and now we were having such a bland and pleasant conversation. I had waited for so long for the opportunity to tell him what an arsehole he had been and now I was listening sympathetically as he told me about some new bloke at work who seemed determined to kill all Michael’s pet projects.

  Meanwhile the first bottle of wine slowly disappeared. And then the second. And a little bit of a third.

  By this point we were sitting side by side on the sofa. Michael had positioned himself there as we ate the Indian takeaway on his glass coffee table and came back to sit beside me again after clearing the leftovers away. Slowly we had moved closer and closer together so that from time to time our knees touched before one of us noticed and moved to preserve a physical gap. Now Michael reached out and gathered my hair in his hand, as though he were making a ponytail. He tugged at it gently, playfully. I pushed his hand away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just had the urge to touch it. Your hair looks great. It’s so silky.”

  “Thanks,” I said, managing to sit on the urge to say, I just had it done.

  “You always had great hair.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  Thank God he hadn’t seen me before my hairdresser fixed the brown mess.

  “And I’d forgotten just how pretty your eyes are. Such a lovely color. And such long eyelashes. Really beautiful.”

  He looked deep into my eyes. I began to feel hot. In that moment I was every bit as nervous as I had been the very first time Michael and I went on a date, after I had stopped worrying what my friends would think if I dated an accountant and I started simply wanting him to kiss me. He moved a little closer. Was he going to kiss me now?

  “Such a pretty mouth.”

  He was.

  The blood rushed to my face as Michael squashed his lips against mine. I didn’t resist. I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him back with gusto. This was it! This was the moment I had been waiting for! He wanted me again.

  It wasn’t long before we had moved from the sofa to the bedroom, casting off our clothes as we went. Though even in the heat of passion I managed to cast an eye around the bedroom in search of anything that had changed. There were no new pictures. No photo of Miss Well-Sprung on the bedside table! The bed linen looked familiar. Even the Diptyque candle on the dressing table seemed to have remained burned to the same level. It was as though I had been away from Michael’s bedroom for a couple of nights rather than eight long months.

  The sex, too, was exactly as it had always been. We whipped through our repertoire with the efficiency that comes of years of practice. He smelled the same. He felt the same. He said the same things at the same moments. Everything was as it had been. As it should be.

  I was elated.

  Well, perhaps not quite so elated as I had expected to be, if I was entirely honest … There were even moments when I felt as though I was outside my body, watching the action on the bed with a dispassionate and underwhelmed eye. I got nowhere near having an orgasm.

  “That was great,” Michael said, as we relaxed back on to the pillows.

  “Yes,” I said. It wouldn’t have been polite to disagree, but I was left feeling just a little unsatisfied. As I always had been, now that I thought about it.

  “I’ve just got to …” Michael nodded toward the bathroom. “… clean my teeth. Make yourself comfortable.”

  He obviously thought I was staying the night.

  Was I?

  While Michael cleaned his teeth, I took the opportunity to examine my surroundings more thoroughly. Sure, there were no new pictures, but now that I had a chance to breathe deeply, I noticed that the sheets didn’t smell the same. Had he changed his washing powder? There was a distinct floral scent to my pillow. And on the bottom shelf of the bedside stand I noticed a half-used tube of hand cream. Michael had definitely become more vain over the time that I’d known him, but had he really suddenly started taking care of his cuticles? I picked up the hand cream. Calendula-scented. Not the kind of thing a man would buy at all.

  Michael was taking a long time in the bathroom. I could hear the tap running. But over that … Was he talking to someone? I crossed over to the bathroom door on the pretense of looking for my knickers, which I’d discarded in that direction. With my cheek against the cool white wood, I tuned into Michael’s voice over the sound of running water.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I miss you, too. And of course I’ll come and pick you up at the airport. I can’t wait to see you. Of course I’m not still angry about that argument over Christmas. That’s all in the past. Everything will be different when you come back from Rio. I promise it will. I love you.”

  Rio? I love you? He was talking to Miss Well-Sprung of course.

  When Michael ended his call, I sprinted back acros
s the room and arranged myself on the bed exactly as I had been when he went to “clean his teeth.” I heard him tweak the tap so that it wasn’t flowing quite so quickly now that he didn’t need to cover the sound of his conversation anymore. And then he really did brush his teeth, with an electric toothbrush. It was another three minutes or so before he emerged from the bathroom looking fresh and perfectly innocent.

  “That’s a great view,” he said, regarding me naked against the pillows. I noticed he was still holding his BlackBerry. He waved it at me. “I’m a slave to this thing,” he said. “Can you believe someone from the office just called to ask me if I can be at a meeting at seven thirty tomorrow morning?”

  I couldn’t believe it. Did Michael say I love you to all his colleagues?

  Still, there was no further explanation. Michael got into bed beside me, placing the now silent BlackBerry on his bedside table with all due reverence. He snuggled into my side and kissed the back of my neck.

  “Right, I’ve got to get some sleep,” he said. “Early start tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  I wouldn’t be able to sleep, of course. My mind was racing. There was so much that needed to be said to the little toad who snuggled against my side and was apparently intent on sleeping the sleep of the innocent, having bedded me and then assured his girlfriend that he would still make it to the airport to meet her flight. Perhaps I should have shaken him awake and told him there and then that I knew what was going on and he was a bigger shit than I had ever imagined if he thought that was an appropriate way to behave. Perhaps I should have just left, but instead I lay there, with his arm across my stomach, berating myself for being such an idiot. How could I have been so naïve to think that Michael Parker wanted me back?

  After a while, with Michael deep in his dreams, his arm started to feel very heavy on me. I lifted it off my stomach and out of the way, carefully but not that carefully. Part of me wanted to wake him. But Michael was not disturbed at all. He remained asleep on his front. The only sign that he was alive was the occasional snore. Michael was one of very few people who snored while sleeping on his front as well as his back.

  I hated him in that moment. Sure, I had said that I hated him a thousand times since he dumped me for Miss Well-Sprung, but I had never truly felt the proper weight of the emotion before. Whatever anger I felt for him prior to that night would always have dissolved at the sight of his smile. Now I knew I was experiencing something much stronger. Something that demanded revenge.

  I had to take action. But what could I do?

  I pulled my iPhone out of my handbag and logged on to Facebook. I could send Miss Well-Sprung a message to let her know who was sharing her boyfriend’s bed, but that seemed a little tacky. Likewise, simply posting a photo of Michael’s naked buttocks was too easy, and it would have the added disadvantage of alerting my friends to the fact that I had gone against all advice and ended up in bed with the worthless swine. The last thing I wanted was a lecture from Becky to add to the intense feelings of anger I already had for myself. I had been taken in by Michael Parker. Again. No one could have been angrier with me than I was.

  It was then that my eyes drifted to Michael’s buttocks, exposed to the world as he threw off the sheets. (He always got too hot.) If only I could tattoo ARSEHOLE right above his. Well, I couldn’t. But I could do the next best thing.

  “Please let me have it with me,” I muttered to myself as I rooted through my handbag. Triumph! I had not one but two indelible marker pens, pinched from the Maximal Media office. I knew that they really were indelible because Ellie had written IDIOT on her assistant Jamie’s forehead after he forwarded a confidential and deeply unflattering email to a client. The word had not come off with simple soap and water and Jamie had threatened to sue. Until he got a pay raise.

  So, with that kind of permanence in mind, I uncapped the black pen and got to work on Michael’s bottom. I didn’t have to press hard, though I doubted that Michael would have stirred if I had been using a tattoo gun. He was sleeping so soundly that after I had written my little message once, I went back over it a second and third time to make sure the letters were nice and thick. It looked great.

  I was here was what it said. Simple but effective.

  The following morning I excelled myself. Despite having lain awake all night, I jumped out of bed looking eager to greet the day. It was clear that Michael still had no clue whatsoever that I had heard his late-night conversation with Miss Well-Sprung. When he stood up, I saw that my message to her was still perfectly intact and unsmudged on his buttocks. Magnificent. He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead.

  “I’d have breakfast with you,” he said, “but I’ve got that meeting at seven thirty.”

  “I remember. Where is it?” I asked. “Maybe you could give me a lift home on your way.”

  I had a feeling he wouldn’t want to.

  “Actually,” he said, “a client from Hamburg is flying into Heathrow and I said I would meet him there. We’re going to have a quick cup of coffee before he catches a flight on to the States. I would drop you off, but I’m cutting it fine as it is and obviously he won’t have a lot of time before he needs to check in again.”

  I nodded understandingly. “Do you have time for a shower?” I asked, all coy.

  Michael was already putting on a shirt and spraying his unwashed body with aftershave.

  “No time at all,” he said.

  “Pity.” As I watched him pull on a pair of boxer shorts, which covered up my well-placed words, it was hard to keep the smile off my face. Michael had no idea, and by the time he did realize it would be much too late. I imagined Michael scooping Miss Well-Sprung into his arms and rushing back to his place for a quick one. I imagined her ripping off his trousers and finding my welcome-home message. If only I could have been a fly on the wall. Though I could already imagine Michael’s excuses. Perhaps he would tell her that he had spent the previous night out with the lads. An impromptu stag do. Or that one of the wags in the office had done it while he was dozing facedown on his desk after a busy day. At the same time, though, I knew that even if Miss Well-Sprung said she believed his lies, the seeds of doubt would have been sown. That was good enough for me.

  “So, when will I see you again?” I asked. “Are you around later this week?”

  “Actually,” said Michael, “I’ve got a busy few days coming up. I think it’s best if we leave things a bit … er … fluid for now.” It was exactly the sort of thing I had expected him to say.

  “That’s fine by me,” I replied, knowing that even if we had arranged a date, by lunchtime that day he would definitely want to break it. “In that case, I suppose I had better get dressed, too. You’ll want me to leave when you do, I’m sure.”

  “That would be easiest.” Michael nodded, but he looked a little disconcerted, I thought. Perhaps he hadn’t expected me to be quite so easy to get rid of. Perhaps somewhere deep inside he worried that I was only so chilled out because I had something up my sleeve. Well, it was too late for him to find out that actually I had something down the back of his boxers.

  “I’ll shower at home,” I said, pulling on my dress. Suddenly I just wanted to be out of there.

  Michael didn’t argue. He kissed me good-bye at the door. I walked out of the complex by myself, an entirely different woman from the one who had skulked around outside River Heights in the middle of the night, before dropping an old sock full of voodoo rubbish into the sewage system. If the doorman recognized me as that weirdo, he didn’t show it. He put his fingers to his cap in a mock salute as he opened the door for me.

  “Nice boots,” he said.

  Those boots were turning out to be a great investment.

  I strode off in the direction of the Embankment and enjoyed a short walk in the freezing January sunshine to clear my head before I jumped on a bus and headed home.

  It’s said that the aftermath of the average breakup has five stages. Denial comes first. I certain
ly went through that one, turning up at Michael’s office with flowers and an offer of marriage. Then there’s bargaining. Some people promise God they’ll reform their lives for a second chance with a loved one. I paid a thousand pounds for a ridiculous voodoo curse. After that comes anger. It’s a shame I turned the power of that particular stage on Becky. Then there’s depression. Who wouldn’t be depressed about having to move back in with their parents at the age of thirty-two? Now I had come to the final stage: acceptance.

  Michael Parker was not my Mr. Right. That was all there was to it. It wasn’t my fault. And even if he had cheated on me, the fact that we weren’t actually destined to be with each other wasn’t really his fault, either. It was just the way things had worked out. I’d been sad, I’d been angry, I’d been mad as a box of frogs, and now I was ready to be happy again.

  Later that day I received a text message. It was from Jack.

  “Hope u don’t mind. Yr brother gave me yr number. I really would like to take u out.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. Jack was persistent. You had to say that for him. And maybe his luck was about to change.

  I texted back, “Okay. Why not? Give me a call and let’s sort something out.”

  Jack phoned back at once, full of ideas for my entertainment. I told him I’d see him that evening. I’d wear my boots. Perhaps my luck was beginning to change as well.

  TO MARK CARROLL

  CHRISSIE MANBY is the author of several romantic comedy novels. She lives in London with her Mr. Right.

  www.chrismanby.co.uk