21

‘Are you fucking joking me?’ I probably said that phrase about a thousand times while I was on TOWIE. Pretty much as soon as I became part of that whole world, I had friendships breaking down, loads of rival cliques forming and me shouting and crying all over the place. I can honestly say, though, all the way through, me and Pete… we were as thick as thieves pretty much the whole first two series I was on there. It was only when the texting thing happened that things went downhill fast… but we’ll get to that.

Don’t forget, things were all pretty new between me and him anyway, but then we had all them challenges that every couple faces on reality TV, where people just can’t help themselves but stir the pot. It was clear back then that Pete completely had my back. By the end of the first series, we were falling for each other. Then, just in time for the final episode, we made things official.

At the beginning of the next series, we were all out in Marbella and there were rubbish stories about me – apparently the breaking news was that I’d been spotted ‘all over someone’ at a party. People were telling me, ‘We have pictures to prove it.’ I knew it was bollocks, so I just said, ‘Show me the pictures,’ and they backed off. But these rumours did cause a bit of a stir between me and Pete, and I felt a bit bad even though I’d done nothing, because he seemed a bit cut up by it all. Later, I just thought what a cheek he had to play along and act like the victim, making me feel so guilty, even though that Marbella thing was so ridiculous. But at the time I just thought it must be horrible to hear.

Then he told me on camera, ‘At the end of the day, no one is going to come between me and you as far as I’m concerned. I’m always going to have your back. I trust you one hundred per cent and we’re a team.

‘I stuck around because I believed in you, and it’s made me realise I’ve fallen in love with you, and that I’m glad that I met you, and that you’ve become part of my life.’

Well, what girl wouldn’t like to hear that? I really need to learn not to trust these Essex boys. And it makes my blood boil now to remember all that shit he came out with. He was so happy to play the victim, the understanding boyfriend. At the time, I felt sorry for him. Later, when it all came to light, I found out he wasn’t exactly being an angel himself back then.

When we first started dating, it was pretty casual, but you’d be amazed how TOWIE can speed everything up. It’s impossible to have a normal relationship. Either you’re talking about your feelings for each other, or everyone else is weighing in with their opinion of the situation. After two whole dates, it becomes, ‘Are you official now?’ You never really have the option to be ‘seeing someone’ for a while and just hanging out with each other. I wouldn’t say it forced our relationship into anything it wouldn’t have been anyway – I did like him, plus back then, he liked to party, and what girl doesn’t like to party? – but it was definitely rushed.

The whole story might get played out more gradually, but apart from that, it’s just like Ex on the Beach. Everything is heightened, and my relationship with Pete was definitely pushed forward by months. We’d have had all those months to get to know each other properly, but that wasn’t how it panned out.

I had some lovely times with Pete Wicks. We went to some really nice places – twice on holiday to Dubai, and also Miami and Vegas. These were private holidays, not a TV camera in sight, and we had loads of fun messing about, being silly and being proper boyfriend and girlfriend. What he did to me later was appalling, there’s no getting away from it, but I can’t slate him for those early months. He was a real gentleman and treated me like a princess.

In September 2016, just before we were due to start filming another series, Pete and I went on holiday to Barcelona. I thought everything was really good between us, and that was the trip where we took that picture of us in our hotel bathroom that went viral. Both of us were in our birthday suits – me completely naked, but somehow covering my naughty bits with the edge of the bath, and Pete stood behind me wearing only his tattoos. God, how cringe! The boys on TOWIE took the mick out of us for ages.

So there were still some good times, but I was also starting to get a BAD VIBE. You know that feeling, right? Pete just seemed to be off with me – all distracted, a bit snappy. And his behaviour was making me paranoid, so I probably wasn’t as much fun as I used to be. A few weeks before, my family had all got together at my parents’ house to celebrate my granddad’s birthday. Everybody liked Pete, so he’d naturally been invited, but he was very distant while he was there. Now here we were on holiday together, and the atmosphere was, well, let’s just put it this way… it was fucking shit.

The next thing I knew, there were all these stories in the press – me and Pete, both on our phones, not looking at each other, not talking, and the headlines were all about us ‘running out of conversation’. I was just really confused, although to be honest, they got it right – we weren’t really talking.

There was already loads of tension between us, and this just made things worse. I was getting more and more paranoid and I was crying every night, worrying that it was all going wrong. Then, right in the middle of the holiday, we had to fly back to London, for the TV Choice Awards. They say the camera never lies – well, that’s a lie. Them pictures of us on the red carpet showed us all tanned and smiley, looking like the perfect, happy couple – but I can remember thinking that night, ‘I’m not sure I even want to fly back to Barcelona.’ That’s how bad things were.

I still had no idea what was really going on. The penny didn’t drop for another couple of weeks, when it was a couple of days before my birthday.

We were at my flat together, and Pete fell asleep with his arm across me on the sofa. By now, I’d had a bad feeling for weeks. I promise you I’d not once been through his phone before, but it was time. Whatever was going on, I felt like I needed to know. I felt a bit sick, but it had to happen. I thought I was going mad.

Firstly, can I just say that I could be a professional private investigator? Do you know how I got his password? I remembered the code he’d told me for the safe in the hotel room, and I wondered if that was his phone code too. So I tried it, and… ping, it unlocked. I mean, come on now, how stupid can you be? I’m not as thick as people think. I went through everything, and – guess what – nothing! No texts, no WhatsApp messages, nothing at all. So then I checked his Instagram and Twitter, and there were some messages from girls, plus some replies from him. Bastard! I quickly took some screen grabs to send to my phone, so I could show him when he woke up. (Another thing a girl needs to do: KEEP THE EVIDENCE.)

Then I sat there for a while. Those messages I’d found were pretty rude, but they weren’t enough to explain his bad mood with me, his lack of interest, all that shit between us. I thought, ‘There has to be something else.’ I thought, ‘There’s more.’ I just had a feeling in my belly.

Pete stayed asleep and his arm was still round me, so I picked up his phone again and looked for the archived messages folder. I clicked on it, and there they all were – at least ten different girls.

I felt paralysed. I had that sinking feeling – I’m sure everyone can relate to that feeling. I knew then that nothing between us was going to be the same again.

I tried to click through all the messages quickly. I was screen grabbing some of them and sending them to my phone. I noticed he was messaging one of the girls more than the others. She looked nothing like me. WTF? I wrote her name in my phone and sent myself more and more screen grabs. Honestly, I reckon I could have worked for MI5, I was that quick! Then I started calculating the dates, and I realised loads of the messages were six months old, but they went all the way up to this exact night.

The thing that really got to me? I realised one of the dates when he’d been chatting to that particular girl was the same day he’d been with my family for my late granddad’s celebration. There’s my family all together, crying and laughing. And there’s Pete, supposedly one of my family, asking this girl about her holiday. She was telling him she had freckles and was wearing a bikini, and he was answering, ‘I love freckles.’ With a heart-eye emoji. I was literally thinking, ‘WTF – he’s speaking to her exactly the way he speaks to me.’ The messages to this girl went back over the last six months. I was GUTTED!

After a while, I’d had enough, so I shut his phone down, waited for a while and then woke him up. I don’t know how I sat there but I did, and Pete woke up to the sound of me reading aloud all these little conversations. At first, he was confused, and asked, ‘What are you doing?’ Then, when he realised what was going on, he shouted, ‘Why are you going down my phone?’ The sound of a guilty man. Well, that set me off.

I was screaming at him – like you would – but for some reason I kept bringing up the past as well.

‘I’ve had this done to me before, and now you’ve done it. How dare you?’

A lot of this hurt was about Pete, but a lot of it was definitely about The Dip and how he’d treated me all those years before. This just showed I’d never really got over that. For me, it all felt like fresh salt on the wound again.

Pete finally left, and I went through all the messages again. There was plenty of X-rated stuff, but the one that hurt me the most wasn’t even that rude. One girl sent him a picture of herself – I could see her legs in a pair of knickers in front of the telly with a big close-up face on the screen. And it was my face! Really! Now, I’m sorry, but that’s pretty dark. That’s what she’d been sending him, and although he hadn’t entertained that picture, he’d still continued to message her. That’s what made me lose it. I was fuming. I don’t even know if they ever met up – he always said they didn’t and that he never physically cheated, but for me that picture was bad enough, and it made me lose my shit all over again.

I followed Pete to his car, pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and grabbed him. I was holding him by the arm, saying, ‘You have fucking ruined me.’ It was four o’clock in the morning and I was completely sober – this wasn’t like a Nu Bar tantrum – but I went completely fucking mental. He kept telling me to calm down, but he knew he’d done this to me, so he took it. I was screaming at him, ‘You have fucking broken my heart again.’ I kept saying, ‘Again and again.’

It wasn’t a good look. Pete stayed in his car; I went back inside my flat and eventually began to calm down a bit. My mum turned up really early in the morning and we had a cup of tea together. She couldn’t believe it either. Like I said, everyone in my family liked Pete a lot. They were all as stunned as me by this other side of him. When he was with us, he always held himself like this old-fashioned gentleman. He’d made me feel like a princess the whole time I was with him, and now it turned out there was this other side that I didn’t know anything about. It was genuinely like he was two different people. How could he lie next to me, tell me he loved me, say that I was the best girl he ever had, while doing all this? I just couldn’t make any sense of it; it felt like I didn’t know him at all.

Eventually, I went out to the car to talk to him. I made him ring one of the girls and tell her he couldn’t speak to her any more. I think this was me trying to get some control over a situation where it felt like I’d had it all taken away from me. At one point, I saw red again. I grabbed the phone from him while he was talking to her and shouted at her myself, warning her, ‘Don’t you ever come near me.’ She couldn’t believe it was me on the phone. Then I deleted all the numbers in his phone. I think he thought that was a step towards me forgiving him, but straight after, I told him we were done.

The timing could not have been worse. We were all due to fly to Marbella to film the next series of TOWIE. I told Pete, ‘You’ve made life so difficult for me now.’

I left him there in the car, and I didn’t speak to him for a few days. That was when he started to seriously grovel. When I say begging, I mean BEGGING! He sent me flowers, he turned up at my door, he turned up at my parents’ door, but none of us could handle seeing him. Meanwhile, no one had any idea what was going on, and, all of a sudden, it was time to fly off to Marbella. Happy families, everyone.

I had no idea what to do, if I’m honest. I was absolutely gutted about the whole thing, but Pete sat me down and said enough good stuff to make me think he’d learnt his lesson and wouldn’t be doing any of it again.

He told me he would never do this again, that he was going to change, and that it had made him realise how much he did love me. Like I said, he fed me some good lines, and with TOWIE waiting for us to confirm our flights to Spain to film together, I had a decision to make.

By this point, a big part of what I felt was actually relief – turned out all that paranoia I’d been feeling for so many weeks was justified, and I wasn’t actually going mad – so that was a positive. I also thought he deserved a second chance, because there were loads of genuinely good things between us.

So, yeah, I did decide to forgive him and take him back. Plus, I promised I wouldn’t tell anybody about these texts I’d found – which I thought was a pretty massive gesture, considering all the shit he’d put me through. But he’d been one of the only people looking out for me on the show, and it felt only right to give him a chance to make it up to me.

So I faked my best smile and it was off to Marbella.