It's Not You, It's Them

by Portia MacIntosh

  ‘What time is it?’ I ask him, rubbing my tired eyes, only to cover my hands in black eye make-up.

  ‘It’s 7am,’ he tells me, his eyes shooting laser beams of judgement at me as he glares. Luckily for me I’m used to Nick looking down his nose at me, and anyway, the sheer volume of body glitter I’m wearing can easily deflect even the strongest laser.

  ‘What day is it?’ I ask.

  Nick shakes his head and sighs.

  ‘Friday. It’s Friday, Ruby.’

  ‘Oh fuck, I’m at work in an hour,’ I reply as I massage my temples, my hangover from last night now in full force.

  As Nick stands over me, eating a bowl of Weetabix like he does every morning after he gets back from the gym, about to head out to his proper serious job, I can feel him judging me. It’s not my fault he doesn’t know how to have fun, is it?

  ‘So this is your online dating weirdo, how are things going?’ he asks, nodding towards the heavily tattooed, muscular man that I’m using as a bed. I take a moment too long to answer. ‘That badly?’

  ‘All good,’ I reply, unconvincingly. I’ve been dating Ben for about three weeks now, and things aren’t exactly going that well. Last night was our third date, and despite every girly magazine I could get my hands on assuring me that date three was when the magic happened, the magic did not happen last night. Still, from the way Nick is looking at me right now, I doubt he believes that. In Nick’s head I’m his hoe-bag flatmate who seemingly ploughs through internet dates, when in reality that’s not the case – I wish I were getting even one per cent of the action Nick thought I was.

  Nick fakes a gasp.

  ‘Are you telling me that you hooked up with a guy you met via your phone and it’s not a fairy tale romance?’ he asks sarcastically.

  I cast my mind back to our date last night. As much as I don’t want to give Nick the satisfaction of being right, the need to tell someone feels greater.

  ‘Things have been going well, it’s just…I met up with him yesterday and he told me he was taking me to a family party,’ I start.

  ‘Weird,’ Nick chimes in. ‘You’ve only been on a couple of dates with him, kid.’

  ‘I know, and weirder still: what he didn’t tell me was that it was a wake.’

  ‘A wake?’ Nick echoes loudly in disbelief, and in a much higher pitch than his voice usually is.

  ‘I’m awake, I’m awake,’ Ben says, panicked as he jumps to his feet. He does so without having realised I was on top of him, causing me to fall back onto the sofa. As he glances between an angry-looking Nick, and me in my underwear, he puts two and two together – coming up with wrong answer.

  ‘Look, calm down, nothing happened, OK? I didn’t sleep with your girlfriend,’ Ben babbles, stressing it in such a way that makes it sound like this is an excuse he has to make often.

  ‘Oh, charming,’ I say, annoyed that Ben thinks I’m the kind of girl who would have a boyfriend and still date around, but he isn’t listening.

  ‘She’s not my girlfriend, she’s my roommate,’ Nick corrects him.

  I watch as Ben expresses visible relief.

  ‘Well, in that case, good to meet you, I’m Jonathan,’ he chirps, offering Nick a hand to shake. Nick doesn’t oblige.

  ‘Your name is Jonathan? I’ve spent three dates calling you Ben,’ I blurt out.

  ‘Yeah, I thought that was like a cute nickname or something,’ he laughs.

  I giggle, puzzled, but what I see as a hilarious story for my blog, Nick is unimpressed by.

  ‘I just don’t get you, Ruby Wood,’ Nick says angrily, pointlessly using my full name like a pissed-off parent. ‘What are you doing with your life?’

  ‘What are you, my fucking dad? Why can’t you just be cool?’ I ask him, sounding like a teenager whose dad just confiscated her cigarettes – incidentally, something Nick has done with me before. In the end it was just easier to quit smoking than it was to put up with his complaints and his borderline OCD smell-removal techniques.

  ‘I’ve got to get to work,’ Nick tells us. He heads to the kitchen, rinses his bowl and spoon, places them in the dishwasher and then leaves without so much as a ‘see you later’.

  Jonathan – not Ben – and I are sitting on the sofa next to each other awkwardly.

  ‘So your roommate seems fun,’ Jonathan says sarcastically.

  ‘He really is like my dad or my granddad or something,’ I reply, irritated, still sounding like a teenager.

  ‘You should move out,’ he tells me, like maybe that hadn’t crossed my mind.

  ‘There’s no way I can find a flat this central for this cheap,’ I tell him honestly. ‘Nick comes from a super-rich family, but he won’t take any money off them, so he reckons he can’t afford to move either. If either of us should move out, it should be him, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe,’ Jonathan replies, followed by an awkward silence.

  I wonder how I managed to call him by the wrong name for so long. I suppose that’s app dating for you, it’s like fishing with multiple lines. I guess as I reeled this one in, I mixed up his name with a different fish.

  ‘Listen, Ruby, we’ve had fun right?’

  I think for moment. No. No we haven’t. On our first date he suggested we go to the cinema – a rookie error, because it involves sitting in silence for two hours – and on the second we went to a bar and got drunk. Oh, and then the wake date. Jonathan is a good-looking dude, but he’s a bit weird. There’s something almost tortured about his personality, like he’s got some issues he needs to work through. Don’t we all, though? Still, he does have his good qualities too, so I’m happy to see where this goes. I’m not going to ditch the guy just because he took me to a family funeral without telling me.

  ‘We have,’ I lie with a warm smile.

  ‘Well, I think we should call it a day,’ he tells me. I feel my smile drop.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I just…I think we’re moving in different directions.’

  ‘Oh my God, seriously? Are you really giving me the old lines? Is it not me, is it you?’

  Jonathan grabs my hand.

  ‘It is me,’ he assures me, giving my hand a reassuring squeeze.

  ‘You’re damn fucking right it’s you,’ I reply.

  Jonathan drops my hand and jumps to his feet, wrestling his clothes on as he talks, his tone suddenly becoming significantly less friendly.

  ‘OK, cards on the table, when we got back last night I thought I might get lucky, but you didn’t even want to sleep with me,’ he explains.

  ‘Dude, we’d just got back from your dad’s wake – that you didn’t even tell me we were going to.’

  Oh, did I not mention that it was his dad’s funeral? I suppose I didn’t want to give Nick too much ammunition when he teases me about this every day until one of us moves out.

  ‘Yeah, well don’t you think I needed some comfort after that?’

  ‘So I’m supposed to bang you out of sheer sympathy?’

  ‘Well, it would’ve been nice,’ he replies, like it’s a fairly reasonable expectation.

  ‘You’re disgusting, get out,’ I demand.

  Jonathan puts on his shoes and heads for the door, slamming it behind him.

  Lying back on the sofa, I massage my temples for a moment. My head is banging, and I’ve got to be at work in an hour. Is getting dumped a good enough reason to call in sick?

  ‘Awkward,’ I say to myself. ‘So, so awkward.’ Not only what just happened with Jonathan, but my dream about Nick too. Not only do Nick and I not get on, but we’re like enemies, both driving the other crazy, but neither of us in a position to move out. The fact we’re stuck with one another only makes us hate each other even more.

  I glance around the floor for my outfit from last night, only to find that Nick has folded my dress and placed it neatly over the back of the sofa. I grab it, shaking my head at his anal neatness as I meaningfully and defiantly unfold it. All communal areas of the house must be ne
at and tidy to a military standard. Sir, yes, sir.

  Tossing my clothes through my bedroom doorway, I head straight for the shower. I know that I’m running late, but after an uncomfortable night on the sofa cuddled up to a sweaty, emotional wreck of a man, there’s no way I can go to work without washing some of yesterday’s failed date off of me. I’m literally going to wash Jonathan out of my hair – well, his sweat and tears at least.

  I turn on the shower, cranking up the hot water to make the bathroom nice and steamy while I brush my teeth. I’ve got that fuzzy mouth feeling you’re left with after too many sugary alcoholic drinks. Typically, I’m out of toothpaste, but that’s what flatmates are for, right? Borrowing things from.

  I can see from Nick’s toothpaste tube that he’s used approximately 1/8 so far, with the used 1/8 neatly folded over a few times, thus giving the appearance of a perfectly full, slightly smaller tool. Does he really have that much spare time on his hands? Really? In another act of defiance, I not only use his toothpaste, but I squeeze from the middle of the tube, leaving behind a big, fingertip-shaped dent in it.

  Finally stepping into the hot shower feels glorious, I can feel my bad date washing off me. Sure, I’m annoyed at how he behaved, but mostly I’m just annoyed to have another bad date on my romantic CV. Hardly seems worth putting Jonathan down, for a mere three weeks, but they always say it’s better to put jobs down that you didn’t have for long/got fired from, rather than have big, unaccounted-for gaps in your employment, right?

  I grab my delicious-smelling pina colada-scented shower gel and rub it all over my body. I love the smell of it because it reminds me of my two favourite things: cocktails and the beach. Which reminds me, I’m not only washing away Jonathan, I need to scrub myself clean of that sex dream about Nick. Nick Hall! I can’t believe it.

  I think to myself as I shampoo my hair. I’ll admit that the first time I met Nick right here in this very flat, the first thing I noticed about him was how sexy he was. A sexy doctor, no less – that’s like every girl’s fantasy. Sharing this small space didn’t suit us though, and it’s amazing how quickly you can go off a person when they start to grate on you. One thing I can definitely put on my CV is that I’m not shallow, because not even Nick’s chiselled good looks, bulging biceps or romance novel-worthy profession can sway how I feel about him.

  So why the hell did I dream that about him today? It can’t mean anything, can it? All that stuff about dreams meaning things has got to be a load of bollocks.

  I shut off the water, and shut my dream about Nick out of my mind.

  Once in the messy confines of my bedroom – where I am free to express my unorthodox organisational skills as I see fit – I grab a dress from the large pile of clothing on my bedroom floor – the division of my floordrobe which I have dubbed Mount Clothesmore – and search for my make-up bag because today my face is going to need everything it has to offer. If I don’t get a move on, I’m going to be late for work, but it’s better to be late than ugly, right?

  HQ

  ISBN: 9781474058995

  It’s Not You, It’s Them

  © 2016 Portia MacIntosh

  by HQ, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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