It's Not You It's Him: An absolutely hilarious and feel-good romantic comedy

by Sophie Ranald

  It's Not You It's Him

  An absolutely hilarious and feel-good romantic comedy

  Sophie Ranald

  Books by Sophie Ranald

  Sorry Not Sorry

  It’s Not You It’s Him

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Year Ten

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  The Ninth Date

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Year Ten

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Year Ten

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  The Thirteenth Date

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Year Ten

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Year Eleven

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  The Third Last Date

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Sorry Not Sorry

  A Letter from Sophie

  Books by Sophie Ranald

  Acknowledgements

  For my dearest aunt Carmel, with so much love

  One

  New Year’s Eve. If you ask me, it needs to take a long, hard look at itself. I mean, seriously. It has to be the most overrated night of the year, right? Worse even than Valentine’s Day. Actually, maybe not – I’d be lying if I said I was feeling much enthusiasm for Valentine’s Day either. But at least that was several weeks away – what felt like an eternity in the future. First of all, I had to get through a night of enforced jollity, bucketloads of prosecco and talk of new beginnings.

  I didn’t want new beginnings. I wanted my old beginning back.

  But still, I’d accepted the invitation to see the New Year in quietly, having a nice chilled-out party with my housemates Charlotte and Adam and some of Charlotte’s friends. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, because it would be only a matter of days until my boyfriend Renzo got back from spending the Christmas break with his family in Rome, and we could pick up our six-month-old relationship and move it on to the next level.

  Things had been going so well: we’d been spending most weekends together, and I’d been staying over at his flat a couple of nights every week, too. When we weren’t together, he texted and called and told me he missed me. I was quite sure that if we’d been together just a couple of months longer, he’d have invited me to spend Christmas with his family, and I’d have got to meet the sisters and nieces and nephews he talked about with so much affection. As it was, I’d felt sure that we were ready to make our relationship official – whatever that meant. He might even ask me to move in with him, I’d thought in my soppier moments, imagining myself waking up next to him every morning, cooking us dinner every evening (not that I was much of a cook) and even ironing his shirts for him (this is not as 1950s housewife as it sounds – although I know it makes me sound like a freak – I love ironing).

  * * *

  But things tend not to work out the way you plan.

  Just ten days before, I’d been the happiest I’ve ever been. Now, I was probably the most miserable.

  I kept replaying that evening in my mind, like a particularly annoying ad on the telly, except I couldn’t fast-forward past it or get up and make a cup of tea or go for a wee.

  When I closed my eyes to go to sleep at night and as soon as I opened them in the morning, and at random moments in between, there it was, playing on a loop in my brain, every detail perfect. I could see myself in my sparkling red dress, surrounded by Renzo’s colleagues at their end-of-year party, except the rest of them might as well not even have been there, because my focus was all on him, pinpoint-sharp. I could see his face, a couple of inches above my own even though I’m tall and I was wearing five-inch heels. I could see the tenderness in his hazel eyes, and smell the cologne he was wearing, clean and leathery like the inside of an expensive car. I could feel his arms around me as we danced, the whole length of his body pressed against mine, the muscles in his back and shoulders moving smoothly under my hands.

  Renzo, who made me feel like all my Christmases had come at once, all my dreams come true. Tall, dark, handsome, successful Renzo, who gave me butterflies in my stomach and made me weak at the knees. Renzo, who would’ve been every cliché of the perfect boyfriend if he hadn’t been real, and mine. Until he wasn’t…

  I could hear his voice as he said the words I’d been longing to hear, and feel the whisper of his breath on my cheek.

  ‘Tansy,’ he said. ‘I think I’m in love with you.’

  And I could remember, vividly, the second of hesitation, the make-or-break moment, the opportunity to not fuck it all up beyond repair, before I replied, ‘I love you too. But there’s something I need to tell you.’

  After that, the video stops playing. The ad break is over. Time to return to the main event. I don’t know whether it’s because it was all so horrible, so chaotic and confusing, that I just can’t properly remember what I said to him and what he said back. Or it might be that it’s so raw and brutal that I’ve locked it away in a place deep in my mind where I’ll never go.

  But I know the outcome. I told him the truth that had been gnawing at me from inside since the day we met, casting a shadow over my happiness – and then he dumped me. Hard and spectacularly, in front of everyone. Like tearing my heart out from under the scarlet sequins, chucking it across the room and stomping on it.

  And it was all my fault.

  Now, what had been both the worst and the best year of my life was almost over. I was surrounded by Charlotte’s friends and the detritus of crisps and dips, pizza boxes and prosecco bottles, and the memory played through my mind again and again, and only the first chimes of Big Ben ringing in the New Year jerked me out of it.

  Everyone was hugging and kissing and clinking glasses. Even Adam, usually paralysed with shyness around people he didn’t know well, was smiling, and he squeezed my shoulder and asked if I was okay.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. I’d been saying that a lot, but it didn’t make it true. ‘Happy New Year! It’s going to be a good one for you, I just know it.’

  That exact moment, when the chimes are over, the toasts drunk, the old year officially seen on its way, is probably the most depressing part of a depressing evening. It’s also a tipping point: do you do the sensible thing and go to bed, quitting while you’re ahead? Or do you fill your glass and press on, wringing every last drop of fun out of a night that’s not got much to spare?

  Charlotte’s friends were a pretty sensible bunch, and they opted for something in between. We all slumped on the sofas by the telly, watching the crowds on the Embankment by the River Thames and the last blaze of the fireworks display. Someone opened another bottle of bubbly. Someone else found what was left of the pizza in the kitchen and dumped the boxes on the coffee table.

  ‘So,’ Charlotte’s friend Maddy said, ‘New Year’s resolutions. Come on, what’s everyone going to achieve this year? It’s a massive one for you, Charlotte.’

  ‘I know, right?’ Charlotte gazed up adoringly at Xander, her new boyfriend, and he gazed adoringly back at her. The two of them were so loved-up and happy, it was almost impossible not to smile when you looked at
them. They’d only got together a couple of weeks before, on the same night Renzo dumped me, in fact, in a particularly cruel twist of fate.

  ‘We need to get our travel plans nailed down,’ Xander said. ‘And then we’re going to see the world.’

  ‘And then when we get back, I suppose I’ll need to find another job,’ Charlotte replied, ever practical. She’d already made me and Adam promise to keep her room empty for two months, while she paid the rent, just in case she decided she couldn’t stand travelling and had to come back home.

  ‘I’m going to lose a stone if it kills me,’ said one of Charlotte’s other friends, and there was a chorus of, ‘Oh, no, you don’t need to, you look amazing.’

  ‘I’m hoping to put on weight,’ Maddy said. ‘A couple of stone, to be exact. And then lose it again.’

  Everyone looked blank, and then Charlotte said, ‘Oh my God, you’re going to try for a baby!’

  I took a huge swig of my drink. I know it makes me the worst person in the world, but how hard is it to be happy for other people when your whole life has crumbled and you can’t see a way to put it back together? I looked at Maddy’s husband’s arm around her shoulders, and Xander and Charlotte’s intertwined fingers, and felt like I was bleeding inside.

  ‘Well, I lost eleven stone the week before Christmas,’ said another of the women. ‘In the form of that useless, commitment-phobic waste of space William. So my New Year’s resolution is to get out there and have fun. Tinder, here I come! Tansy, we could maybe do it together? Compare notes and stuff?’

  I replied, ‘Thanks, that’s really sweet of you. But I’ve already made my New Year’s resolution. I’m going to get Renzo back.’

  There was a sudden pause in the conversation. Everyone looked at me. The expressions on their faces were all the same – a kind of pitying disbelief.

  I splashed more prosecco into my glass, watching as the bubbles whooshed up to the top and spilled over, like the time I put Fairy Liquid in the washing machine because I’d run out of Persil.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ Adam said, mopping up the mess with a wad of kitchen roll.

  I took another big gulp of fizz and passed the bottle on to Charlotte, even though it was almost empty. Maddy’s husband fetched another from the fridge and topped up everyone’s glasses.

  ‘Look, Tansy,’ Charlotte said, ‘I know this has been grim for you. Renzo treated you appallingly. I work with the guy – and I blame myself for you two getting together in the first place. I’ve known him longer than you and I know what he’s like. He’s hot, he’s generous and he can be really kind. But he can also be a bit of a shit and, to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever known him to change his mind about anything. Ever.’

  ‘He’s going to change his mind about me, though,’ I insisted. ‘I’m going to make sure of it. He’s the love of my life and I’m not going to let him be the one who got away.’

  Things got a bit blurry after that: Jools Holland’s face on the telly, Charlotte’s friends’ goodbyes and good wishes as they all got their Ubers home; even the stupid looping GIF of me and Renzo on that last, horrible night. I must have been sitting on the sofa for quite a while, in a state of suspended animation, because I remember Charlotte coming over, taking my hand, helping me up and asking if I was okay, and me noticing that the house had been restored to some kind of order and realising that she, Xander and Adam must have been clearing up while I’d just sat staring at nothing.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Got to go to bed.’

  Even I could hear my voice slurring into a kind of word porridge.

  ‘Come on, babe,’ Charlotte said, and I followed her upstairs, Xander and Adam forming a rearguard in case I toppled over.

  I didn’t take off my make-up or even clean my teeth. I got into bed, pulled the duvet up to my chin and unlocked my phone – because, obviously, however pissed I was, I couldn’t lose the one remaining potential link I had to Renzo – and started swiping through my messages.

  There was nothing there to give me hope. Everything from my friends and family was already a couple of hours old. The group selfie I’d posted on Instagram earlier in the evening had a couple of new likes, but there was no like from Renzo. Obviously.

  But I sent him a text. Obviously. It took me a few goes, and I know there were still typos and autocorrect errors all through it, because I spotted them when I read it over the next day, sick with hangover and mortification. I told him how much I loved him and was missing him. I promised that if he let us try again I would make everything all right. I begged him to forgive me.

  I did every single thing you shouldn’t ever do when you’ve been dumped. The only thing that makes that particular text less toe-curlingly humiliating was that it had company. Twelve almost identical debasing, begging messages in as many days.

  Renzo was building up quite the collection.

  Two

  It was still dark when my alarm went off. I felt as if I’d only fallen asleep five minutes before, which, while probably not strictly true, was close enough. It was the second Tuesday in January and eighteen days since Renzo dumped me. Which meant we’d been split up for twelve per cent as long as we’d been together. On the plus side, I’d reduced my rate of text messages to him significantly: only five so far this year, if you didn’t count the one I sent in the small hours of the first of January, which I didn’t, because technically I hadn’t been to sleep so it was still the previous year.

  On the minus side, he still hadn’t replied to any of them. Also, it was raining. And furthermore, it being Tuesday, I needed to be in the office at eight o’clock for the weekly meeting of the buying team at the online fashion boutique where I worked and, having missed three days’ work the previous week, I was hopelessly underprepared.

  When I say ‘missed’ three days, I mean I chucked sickies. There, I said it. I’m not proud. But I’d been feeling so wretched, so hollowed-out with misery and hollow-eyed from crying, that when I caught sight of myself in the window of the Daily Grind café on my way to the Tube station and imagined my colleagues asking how my Christmas had been and how Renzo was, and their faces melting into expressions of concern and pity when they actually looked at me, I couldn’t face it. So I turned around, went home and got into bed and called my line manager, saying I had flu, and I sounded so grim she totally believed me.

  But flu doesn’t last forever and broken hearts are not, according to the NHS, a thing. And the small remaining rational part of me knew that however hard it was to get up and face the world, if I focused hard enough, I could lose myself in the challenge of my job and forget about Renzo for a bit. Also, of course, if I didn’t turn up to work I’d be sacked and, given that I’d spent three hundred pounds online in the sales, clicking numbly on garment after garment in the hope that one of them would have the magic power to make Renzo love me again, the last thing I needed was to lose my job.

  My job. I remembered with a sick thud that work hadn’t been going all that brilliantly for me towards the end of last year anyway. Being a fashion buyer sounds like all the fun – ‘What, you get paid to shop?’ people often ask me in wonder – but actually, while it is fun and I do love it, it’s not like that at all. It’s incredibly target-driven: I spend an awful lot of time looking at spreadsheets and sending strongly worded emails to my suppliers. Months before, I’d had a line of dresses designed in collaboration with an up-and-coming contact of my boss’s called Guillermo Hernandez, and commissioned one of my suppliers in China to manufacture them. They were bang on trend, sparkly mini-dresses, perfect for the ‘Oh fuck, what am I going to wear to the Christmas party?’ market, and the centre of my You’re the Star Tonight Christmas marketing campaign.

  Except the dresses hadn’t turned up when they were supposed to, last October, and were still missing in action. Although it was the supplier’s fault, not mine, they’d left a hole in my sales figures that I didn’t know how to fix. At the time, I’d been too loved-up and happy to do much more than bolloc
k the supplier and cancel the order, but I knew the fallout was going to happen sooner rather than later.

  And I knew one thing for sure: when it did happen, I needed to be there in the office to deal with it, not hiding under my duvet at home. That morning, it was the thought of a jumper that got me out of bed. I know exactly how daft and shallow this sounds, believe me I do. But it was one of the more out-there of my recent sale purchases: a super-chunky, outsize knit in an on-trend shade of mauve. If I wore it with black leather trousers and wedge-heeled suede ankle boots, I’d look like a badass but feel like I was wrapped in a duvet – the best of both worlds.

  And if I didn’t nail the badass thing, at least the jumper would match the dark circles under my eyes.

  I pushed my actual duvet aside and got up.

  An hour and a half later, I was sitting with my colleagues around the meeting room table. No one had asked about Renzo, although Kris had complimented me on my outfit and Lisa and Sally asked if I was feeling better. Mostly, though, we were all staring apprehensively at the huge platter of pastries in the centre of the table, then at the door, then back at the pastries again.

  We all knew what that platter meant: that Barri van der Merwe, founder, owner and Managing Director of luxeforless.com, would be in attendance.