Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend
Read Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend Online
Authors: Sarra Manning
Hope Delafield hasn’t always had an easy life.
She has red hair and a temper to match, as her mother is constantly reminding her. She can’t wear heels, is terrified of heights and being a primary school teacher isn’t exactly the job she dreamed of doing, especially when her class are stuck on the two times table.
At least Hope has Jack, and Jack is the God of boyfriends. He’s sweet, kind, funny, has a killer smile, a cool job on a fashion magazine and he’s pretty (but in a manly way). Hope knew that Jack was The One ever since their first kiss after the Youth Club Disco and thirteen years later, they’re still totally in love. Totally. And then Hope catches Jack kissing her best friend Susie …
Does true love forgive and forget?
Or does it get mad … and get even?
Dedicated to my best friend, Kate Hodges, who was gestating and then giving birth to Dusty and Arthur while I was writing this book. Your finished product totally trumps mine!
As ever, I owe huge amounts of gratitude to Gordon and Joanne Shaw, Sarah Bailey, Sophie Wilson and Lesley Lawson for not minding too much when I never returned phone calls or emails. I’d also like to thank my running buddy, Gael Oldfield, and the ladies of Twitter: Sam Baker, Anna Carey, Sarah Franklin and Lucy McCarry for all their support. I’m especially indebted to Ruthie Morgan who very kindly shared her experiences from the primary-school frontline with me and taught me several new ways of telling people off.
Finally, an entirely inadequate thank you to my amazing agent, Karolina Sutton, and Catherine Saunders, Helen Manders and all at Curtis Brown. And to my editor/cheer-leader/provider of tough love, Catherine Cobain, as well as Sarah Roscoe, Madeline Toy, Sophie Wilson (yes, I know, two Sophie Wilsons), and the rest of the team at Transworld.
http://twitter.com/sarramanning
It was obvious it wasn’t the first time that Hope’s boyfriend and her best friend had kissed. It also looked, to the casual observer, as if they usually did more than kiss when they weren’t on a clock or running the risk of being discovered.
Hope could hear the wet clash of their mouths and Jack’s groans as Susie stroked him, and she didn’t know why she was simply standing there when she should have been charging out of the back door and shrieking something along the lines of,
What the hell are you two doing? You utter, utter bastards!
Jack and Susie were illuminated beautifully in the glare of the sensor light that Jack’s dad had fitted on the outside wall to scare off the foxes that kept scavenging through their bins, and Hope had a perfect view of Jack’s hand threaded in Susie’s glossy treacly brown hair so her beautiful face was upturned, his other hand making strange, contorted shapes under her Catherine Malandrino silk top. If she squinted extra hard she was sure she could even see the tangle of tongues as they kissed as if they were starring in their own porn film.
Jack never kisses me like that any more, Hope thought to herself as she stood on the steps that led from their tiny kitchen to their tiny back garden. Hasn’t done for ages and ages. Not since they’d been teenagers snogging furiously in the no-man’s-land between their respective houses, ten minutes after Hope’s curfew had ended. But Hope would
never
have shoved her hands down the front of Jack’s jeans in those days, as Susie was doing now, and if Jack had tried to touch her breasts
under
her clothes, Hope would have screamed loud enough to wake her parents, if her parents had actually been asleep instead of staying awake until their only daughter was safely tucked up in her single bed.
And still Hope stood there as if her feet had taken root, hands lifted to her mouth to mute any noise she might make. The scent of garlic clinging to her fingers made her stomach heave and oh God … Her childhood sweetheart, the boy she’d been with for half her lifetime, her one true love, the man she was meant to be with for ever and ever and ever, amen, was passionately and furiously kissing her best friend.
How could they?
AT PRECISELY TWO
on a sunny Saturday afternoon Hope Delafield came to the sudden and shocking realisation that she should never have decided to throw a dinner party.
This epiphany came during her fifth attempt to tie up her lamb roulade without the stuffing oozing out. The same leg of lamb that had meant an hour-and-a-half round trip, up and down several hills, to get to the organic butcher’s in Kentish Town. It was only after she’d lugged the lamb and four bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc back home in the blistering early-September heat, that Hope realised she’d forgotten to ask the butcher to butterfly the joint and had been forced to retrace her steps.
At least it had been a brief respite and a dose of fresh air for Hope who’d been up since six making double pesto for the roulade filling, a marinade for her scallops starter and soaking brioche in Cointreau for a bread and butter pudding. ‘God, I never want to see another pine nut as long as I live,’ she proclaimed loudly, but it wasn’t loud enough to be heard over the racket of
Red Dead Redemption
and the new Fleet Foxes album. Hope didn’t know how Jack could play video games and listen to music at the same time, and she wanted to barge into the living room and yell at him, because the noise was giving her a tension headache.
She even took a step out of the kitchen but stopped herself. She was getting a tension headache because there was
double
pesto dribbling out of her roulade on to the worktop and even with the back door open their tiny kitchen was stuffy and hot. None of that was Jack’s fault and he’d had to work really late the night before and though he thought having a dinner party was a stupid idea, he’d been a really good sport about it, even when Hope had cooked scallops for tea every evening that week as she’d tried to find the right balance between raw and rubbery. It had taken three attempts to get them lightly seared and although there had been a lot of lip-tightening, Jack hadn’t said anything, apart from heaping lavish praise on her minted pea purée.
Jack wandered into the kitchen half an hour later as Hope was tentatively poking at the lamb with a wooden spoon as she gave it a quick sear in a frying pan.
‘Why the long face, Hopita?’ he enquired, leaning over her shoulder so he could peer at the contents of the pan. ‘Is it meant to be oozing like that?’
‘I don’t know!’ Hope turned off the gas so she could sink down on the floor, which was liberally scattered with pine nuts, and sit with her back against a cupboard and stretch out her legs. ‘I’m this close to going out and getting eight ready meals.’
‘You can’t do that. You’ve already blown our entire food budget for the month. We’re going to be living on toast and spaghetti hoops as it is,’ Jack said wearily, as he prodded the meat with his finger. ‘Smells nice though.’
Inspiration suddenly struck. ‘Maybe I could baste the joint with the gloop that’s oozed out?’ Hope mused, hauling herself up as Jack squatted down so that for a moment they were nose to nose and he kissed her forehead, so he couldn’t be that mad with her. ‘I’m sorry. You were right and I’m never, ever having a dinner party again, even if one day we can afford to live in an actual house with an actual dining room and have the whole thing catered.’