I loved him back. I wasn’t sure any more whether he did, but to be totally honest, when it came to me, all I felt was sadness and annoyance. I’d thought we had so much in common, because we liked the same things and believed the same things and cared about the same things. But, I realised, there was one important exception to that: Jude didn’t care about me.
I was going to end it. I was going to have to, if I was to retain even a shred of self-respect. The only question was when, and how. And then I said to myself, Come on, Zoë! Grow a pair! You know this thing’s dead in the water. Do it now.
In my mind, I heard Mike urging me on when I was ready to quit a workout. I remembered myself telling Alice that we’d fight to keep the Ginger Cat alive and open, when it had been under threat of closure by Fabian. I even summoned the picture of Frazzle’s cross, disappointed face whenever he jumped up on the bed and found Jude there.
I could do it. I would do it. I opened my mouth to speak – but Jude got there first.
‘Good!’ he said triumphantly. ‘You can’t dump me. Want to know why?’
‘Why?’ I asked stupidly.
‘Because I’m ending it first.’ His gleeful smile faded away, replaced again with the tragic, hangdog look. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t be with a woman who doesn’t support me one hundred per cent, doesn’t have my back when I need her, doesn’t get me as a person. I thought you were that woman, but hey, we all make mistakes. Indigo says…’
I listened, half outraged and half amused. I knew, now, what he expected me to do. I was supposed to grovel and apologise. I was supposed to insist that he had it wrong, I was the special one, his soulmate. I was the one who was going to try harder, be better, kinder, more accommodating and admiring of this unique and wonderful person who had deigned to allow me to wash his socks, put a roof over his head and be a receptacle for his spunk for three months.
But I wasn’t following the script. Somehow, I’d found my anger – but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing how furious he had made me. That would mean I still cared and, I found, I didn’t any more. Not one bit. Not even about what Indigo said.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m glad we’re on the same page, and we can end this without any acrimony. Why don’t we head back to the flat and you can pack up your stuff?’
Jude looked at me, then at the half-finished bottle of wine and the unopened pack of crisps. They’d cost me three pounds, even though Archie had given me a discount. This wasn’t the script either, clearly – I was meant to let him stay for one last night, which would turn into two, then three, then the thin end of the wedge.
‘You mean, like, now?’ he asked, his eyes widening in dismay.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think I do.’
And I stood up, waited for him to do the same, then picked up the blanket and shook it vigorously. It felt like I was getting rid of a whole lot more than just grass clippings.
Twenty-Six
If you get your head out of the sand, Aquarius, you might be able to see things as they are, not as you want them to be.
‘So I guess neither of us have boyfriends any more,’ I said to Dani as we left the gym a couple of weeks later, sweaty and out of breath. Summer was truly over now; although evening wasn’t yet falling, the sky was a threatening leaden grey and a thin drizzle misted our skin, making me shiver with cold and the prospect of what it would do to my hair.
Dani sighed. ‘Not for want of trying, on Fabian’s part.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. He’s sent flowers to my flat and to work, and he keeps calling and texting.’
‘Why don’t you block his number?’
‘I should, I know. It just seems too kind of final. I think about it sometimes and I’m… not tempted to take him back, exactly, but I just wonder whether if I’d done things differently, it could all have worked out.’
‘Differently how? He hurt you, remember? What are you meant to have done differently?’
‘I don’t know. Been more assertive, maybe? Set boundaries? All the shit you’re meant to do