I sat outside Adam’s house in my car, faffing with my hair in the rear-view mirror. It was too big, too curly. I’d told them to blow dry it straight but they couldn’t help themselves, they just had to do the big, silly curls on the bottom. I looked like veterinary Barbie: all I was missing was my stethoscope. Actually, I really wished I had it. My heart was pounding and I would’ve loved to get a proper listen to my pulse.
‘It’s going to be fine,’ I assured myself in the rear-view mirror. ‘We’re just going to have a nice casual chat.’
A nice casual chat where I told him everything: how Cassie had spilled the beans about the engagement, how I’d been so stressed out waiting for him to propose, how I was freaking out about taking over the surgery, how I felt completely out of control of my own life and was afraid I was going to wake up to find out I was eighty, alone and incontinent with no idea how to use the latest smartphone. And how I’d missed him every day since we’d got back from holiday and needed his support more than anything else right now. A good shag, too, but mostly him having my back with everything else going to shit. Then maybe we could start fresh and I could resolve at least half the nonsense going on in my tiny mind.
I opened the door and stepped outside, my legs more wobbly than I would have liked. There was a car in Adam’s driveway, a dark green Mini Cooper that I didn’t recognize. Before I could spy through the windows, Adam and a tall brunette walked out of the house and I dashed back to the car, pressing myself up against next-door’s hedge. If this was a client, I didn’t want to bother him. We had serious things to discuss and then serious make-up sex to get down to, and both of those things were going to need a clear mind and some concentration.
Hmm. He looked awfully happy for a man taking a client meeting. I squinted, trying to get my three-day-old daily contact lenses to focus. Funny, he hadn’t mentioned anything about scoring a job for a Victoria’s Secret model. I looked back to Adam and scowled at the goofy grin on his face.
‘It’s just a meeting,’ I reassured myself. ‘He has meetings all the time.’
They carried on chatting in front of the green Mini while I picked at the carefully coiffed ends of my hair. No matter how many tutorials I watched, I’d never been able to pull off that sexy, messy hair look. If I tried to do curls with my straighteners, it looked like Sweeney Todd had been at me with a crimper. When I tried it with tongs, I just looked like a knob. Her hair was perfect. Her arse was perfect. Her legs were perfect. I couldn’t see her boobs or her face properly but even if they were slightly below average, she was still the best-looking woman I’d ever seen with my own eyes. I had squeezed myself into my skinniest skinny jeans because I knew Adam liked them, but her jeans were so tight they were practically a second skin. They must have been riding right up her chuff, and then, as she raised her arms to wave goodbye, I saw a thong peeking up over the waistband.
The complete and utter slag.
I breathed out slowly as she walked towards her car door, beep-beeping the lock.
‘Yeah, it’s time for you to leave,’ I muttered. Getting a better look at her from the front did not make me feel any better. Combing my hair behind my ears, I shook my handbag as quietly as possible, searching for a lip gloss. I was holding the wand up to my face as she stopped, turned back to Adam, curled her arms around his neck and kissed him.
‘Fuck off,’ I whispered as my hair wrapped itself around my sticky lip gloss. ‘Fuck right royally off.’
After what felt like forever, Adam’s mystery woman pulled away and got in the car while he stood there, swiping at his eyebrows and waving goodbye. And then she was gone. For a moment he stayed where he was. Stuck to the spot and holding the front of his trousers as though he was about to have an accident. Or perhaps he already had.
It wasn’t like they said it was in films. My knees didn’t buckle and my legs didn’t turn to jelly, they just stopped working. One minute I was standing upright, the next I was folding in on myself and sitting on the cold, dirty ground. His neighbour’s well-trimmed hedge poked me sharply in the back of my curly head as I dug my phone out of my bag.
What was that? Who was that? It was only two days since he’d stood on my doorstep and begged me to call off the break. Two days.
‘Hello, what’s up?’
Abi answered on the first ring.
‘I just saw Adam kissing another woman outside his house and now I’m hiding behind a hedge and I don’t know what to do.’
‘No, really,’ she replied. ‘What’s up?’
‘I’m at Adam’s house,’ I said, replaying the scene over and over in my head. ‘And I just watched him walk some eight-foot-tall Angelina Jolie lookalike underwear model out to her car with his hands all over her – and before she left, she kissed him.’
‘OK, before I start, what are you looking for here?’ Abi asked. ‘Do you want me to be outraged, threaten to tear off his knob and sew it to his forehead like a unicock, or would you rather I question the accuracy of what you saw?’
‘I saw it!’ I rocked back and forth, catching my hair in the scratchy twigs. ‘With my actual eyes! Also, ten points for unicock.’
‘Liv, whoever it was, she wasn’t eight feet tall for a start and I very much doubt there was an underwear model randomly knocking around his house at three in the afternoon,’ she replied. ‘Taking that into account, do you want to calm down and tell me exactly what you saw?’
‘I hate you sometimes,’ I told her, wiggling my toes and rapping my knuckles against my useless knees.
‘Don’t be mad at me because I’m logical,’ Abi said. ‘If you wanted histrionics, you would have called Cass.’
‘You’re so helpful.’ I snapped tiny twigs off the hedge and broke them up into a dozen little pieces. ‘But she really was gorgeous and she really did kiss him. Maybe not tongue down his throat – but, god, Abs, you should have seen his face after she left.’
And that was what hurt. It wasn’t really the hot girl or the kiss or the handsy nature of their goodbye, it was the look on Adam’s face, as though he’d won the lottery on his birthday and James Bond was coming round to deliver the money in the car from Knight Rider. He looked at her in a way he had never looked at me.
‘Liv, I’m going to suggest something really controversial now,’ she said. ‘Go and talk to him.’
‘Yeah, OK,’ I scoffed. ‘I’ll just go and talk to him, we’ll have a grown-up conversation that will make everything better.’
‘Why do I get the feeling you’re taking the piss?’ she asked with a ready tut. ‘Go and bloody well talk to him.’
‘“Excuse me Adam, I know I said I needed a couple of weeks to sort my head out but you said it first so you can’t be mad at me and just out of interest, who was that absolute stunner you were necking at the end of the drive a minute ago? I’d love to ask her where she gets her hair done?”’
‘Did she have nice hair?’ Abi asked. ‘What was she wearing?’
‘Yes of course she did!’ I yelled. ‘She was perfect. Even I fancied her. And jeans. Really, really tight jeans.’
She sighed into her phone, the gentle sound blowing up in my ear.
‘Liv, go and talk to him,’ she said again. ‘You’re still there, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said, glancing down either end of the street. ‘But I don’t know if I can. I’m freaking out.’
‘Stop freaking out; go and talk to him and then call me back. I’m in the lab but I’ve got my phone and I’ll call you back as soon as I can if I don’t answer.’
Carrie Bradshaw never had this problem, I thought to myself. Her friends always answered on the first ring. Which was a bit odd when you thought about it; they all had pretty intense jobs, so why were they always picking up the phone? Yep, another tick in the plus column for ditching Long Harrington and starting over as a sex columnist in New York.
‘OK,’ I said, bouncing my palm up and down on the pavement. I could do this. It was going to be fine. It was Adam, for god’s sake, there was clearly an explanation. ‘I’m going now. I’ll call you back in a bit. What are you working on now?’
‘The effects of melamine on humoral immunity with or without cyanuric acid,’ she replied. ‘Go get ’em, tiger.’
All I had to do was stand up, walk to Adam’s door, and have a conversation with him. We’d been having conversations almost every day for three years, why was this one so much harder than any of the others? Two weeks ago I would have marched up to his door, made non-specific threats on her life and already made myself a cup of tea.
Checking myself for stray dog shit, I straightened my shoulders and set off up Adam’s driveway. There were tyre tracks on the muddy grass from her Mini. I’d always fancied a Mini. Cow. I fancied a Mini and she fancied my boyfriend, we had so much in common – apart from she had dark hair and mine was blonde, she was nearly six foot and I was only five foot four and I didn’t generally wear black lace thongs on your average Tuesday. But then, maybe she didn’t either; maybe she only wore them when she knew she was going to get lucky.
I stood in front of the door, one hand ready to knock, my keys in the other. Did I knock or did I let myself in? Did I ask him about her or did I pretend I hadn’t seen it? I blinked, my lenses drying out again. I had spares upstairs. I could get my spares after we’d had our talk. I wondered what her eyesight was like. She probably had perfect vision and had flushed all my contacts down the loo, cackling maniacally while smothering my Advanced Night Repair all over her body.
What was worse? Being jealous or crazy? There was no way I could sit down and talk to him until I’d calmed down. As I had already established earlier in this mess, I was not Beyoncé. I could not lose my shit at him then apologize and write an amazing album about it. I turned around, ran back to my car and sat there, shaking. Breathing out slowly, I rested my forehead on the steering wheel and closed my eyes but all I could see was the kiss. Adam kissing another woman. He wasn’t supposed to be kissing anyone but me. We had specifically said, ‘no seeing other people’, and kissing was even worse than seeing.
Go for a drive, a little voice said, pushing the image of the two of them out of my head and replacing it with a vision of open country roads and clearish blue skies. Driving calmed me down, it always had. Nodding to myself, I turned the key in the ignition and flipped on the stereo. A Ford Fiesta honked its horn behind me as I pulled out and I swerved around a parked Mondeo, barely missing its wing mirror, but I really couldn’t have cared less. Adele blared out of my speakers as I turned onto the main road, flying past the post office, assuring me that she alone in the universe understood what I was going through.
And then I remembered she was a millionaire who had a kid and a man who loved her and everything she was singing was complete and utter bollocks. I tore at my iPod cable and tossed the whole thing out my open window, watching as it disappeared into a bank of tall grass.
‘Fucking Adele,’ I muttered, speeding down the road and out into the middle of nowhere.