The Great Ex-Scape

by Jo Watson

  “I say enjoy yourself,” Annie said. “Lie on the beach. Drink cocktails. Take some time for yourself. You deserve it.”

  “And knowing our history, you’ll probably meet the man of your dreams,” Lilly added.

  I laughed. “Not likely.”

  “There are other birds in the bush,” Stormy said.

  “Fish in the sea,” Jane corrected.

  “What do fish have to do with it?” Stormy asked, looking genuinely confused.

  “Never mind,” Jane said. “I have to go. But, Val, have some fun, seriously. Take a few days off and try and relax.”

  Annie, Lilly and Stormy nodded together.

  “Okay. I’ll try,” I said. Truthfully, I needed rest. These last three years had been so emotionally draining and chaotic that I actually felt totally depleted.

  “Matt is not it,” Lilly added. “And if he doesn’t love you he’s an idiot.” All my friends agreed loudly with this statement. And I wished more than anything that I agreed too.

  “Bye, guys.” I waved at them all and closed my laptop. And then, because I couldn’t help it, I went to Byron’s Twitter account and tortured myself some more.

  @Byron: OMG. Overheard girl confessing love to her best friend . . . at his engagement party! His fiancée can hear it too #awkward

  @Byron: Suddenly worried for his fiancée that he might say he loves her back. Fiancée looking a little worried too. Everyone is holding their breath #waitingwithanticipation

  @Byron: BAM! Crash and burn. He doesn’t love her back! #extraawkward

  @Byron: OMG. She’s just realized that everyone can hear her. And when I say everyone, I mean all 80 people at the engagement party #fiancéelookspissed

  @Byron: #crashandburn The look on her face is everything. Damn, feel so bad for her right now.

  I tried to bite back the tears, but couldn’t. I needed to get out of here, I’d been cramped in this room all day and earlier I’d seen a really nice-looking bar on the beach. I could do with a drink. Or ten! Fucking hell, I needed the whole damn bottle at this stage.

  15 Feb.

  Dear Diary,

  Sam. Sam. Sam.

  It’s been 24 hours since learning about her. And my brain is still not processing the information. Nothing makes sense anymore. 1+1 is not 2. 2+2 is not 4. Matt+Sam is NOT how this was meant to play out.

  Honestly, heartbroken doesn’t really even describe what I’m feeling right now.

  More . . . later . . . shit! I don’t know.

  P.S. Pitched new article about growing trend for woman to order male sex dolls with robotic penises. Their skin feels soft, they kiss, they cuddle you after sex and you can choose the shape, length and size of penis, as well as customize their looks. Might be a real option for me moving forward! Imagine . . . I get a Matt doll and hide it in the broom cupboard and bring it out at night. OH GOD! I’m losing my mind.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The bar was on the beach, and the sand was still warm when I took my shoes off and walked towards it. It had that typical dried palm tree roof that made you think of Pirates of the Caribbean, rum and Johnny Depp—not necessarily in that order. A few people were sitting around, mostly couples looking romantic, as if they were on their honeymoons. I hated them. But then I saw him . . . not the tortoise this time. The other him.

  Facemask man, Alex. He was sitting alone at the far end of the bar and was wearing the most bizarre ensemble I’d ever seen. I scrunched up my face involuntarily at the sight of it, it was that downright hideous.

  But it wasn’t so much what he was wearing, but more why the hell? The outfit seemed so incongruent with the man I’d met the night before. Not that I knew him, but if you’d asked me to guess what kind of clothes he’d wear, this would not be them.

  He was wearing a black leather jacket, the kind that had revolting silver studs on the collar, and were those . . .? Yes, black leather tassels hanging from his big, puffy shoulders. His jacket was open, revealing a tight black and purple T-shirt. The T-shirt had a skull on it set against a background of orange flames. He turned his head slightly and something glinted by his hair and, oh no, if I thought it couldn’t have gotten any worse, there it was, a gold stud earring in his left ear. I almost threw up in my mouth.

  And then it got even more bizarre, because around his wrist he was wearing a timeless, elegant-looking Rolex watch. It was the kind of watch that sophisticated gentlemen wore. The top half of him looked like it was trying to go to a Kiss rock concert, circa bloody 1980—except for the watch. I dreaded to see what the bottom half looked like but luckily for me it was tucked behind a big wooden bar. My vote was either crotch-squeezing black leather pants, or ripped stone-washed denims.

  I couldn’t quite figure this whole thing out; was he trying to invent some kind of a new look? Was this outfit meant to be some kind of a statement, an ironic one hopefully, or did he just simply have the worst clothing taste in the world? Well, he did put a facemask on that he found in a magazine . . .

  His hands started moving and I looked down at the bar, and that’s when I realized what he was doing. It just took this whole thing from bizarre to science fiction. He was flipping through a pile of what looked like women’s magazines while drinking a bright pink drink through a twirly yellow straw. What the hell?

  I stood there in the shadows, I didn’t want to be seen, and watched curiously as he turned the pages, as if he was really reading them. And then, out of his pocket, a green highlighter appeared. He slowly highlighted some sentences on the page and then took out a small notebook and scribbled something in it. He slurped his fancy-looking drink while he read.

  I followed the straw from the drink up to the lips that were wrapped around it, and then onto the face that the lips were attached to. I scanned the face carefully. This whole thing made no sense. It made no sense that the man with the kindest eyes I’d ever looked into, the most perfect straight, white shiny teeth set into one of the biggest smiles I’d ever seen, was wearing . . . that! As morbidly curious as I was about his outfit, I really didn’t feel like company tonight so I turned and started walking away, mentally planning how much it would cost if I drank everything in the mini bar. But a voice stopped me.

  “Val!” he called, and I was forced to turn.

  “Hi.” Alex had seen me and was standing up. I gave him a noncommittal wave. I really didn’t want company. “I was just going back to my roo—”

  “So good to see you.” He started walking towards me and my eyes immediately drifted down to his pants. Tight, black, ripped jeans. So ripped, in fact, that they looked like they’d lost a fight to a lawnmower. But on his feet, he was wearing a pair of sporty white running shoes. How could this be? Was he actually part of a conjoined twin set? His twin was fused to him, the twin who was into rock and roll and gold ear studs. The man I’d met last night was merely the wrists and feet twin. I tried to pry my eyes away from the jeans, but it was hard.

  “I’m so glad I’ve found you. I’ve been looking for you all day,” he said.

  “Huh? You have?” I asked.

  He smiled at me. Wow. There it was again. Quite possibly the friendliest smile I’d ever seen. This was the smile of a man who needed to be in a toothpaste commercial, not a commercial for Harley Davidsons.

  “I figured out how to pay you back for helping me last night.”

  “That’s really not necessary,” I said quickly.

  He walked all the way up to me and stopped. “But I insist.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Come to the bar and I’ll show you.” He turned and started walking away. I wasn’t really sure about this at all, but I followed him anyway. Alex pulled one of the barstools out for me. I couldn’t remember the last time a guy had pulled a chair out for me and for a second I didn’t know what to do. I finally lowered myself into it.

  “Would you like a drink?” he asked, waving the bartender down.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Oh come
on,” he urged. “Just one.”

  I sighed. “Sure.” I couldn’t believe I was agreeing to this. “What’s that?” I gestured to his pink beverage.

  “It’s called a rosy sunrise, I believe.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” I asked, letting my eyes sweep over him once more. This was getting more bizarre by the second. Dressed like that he should be drinking sacrificial blood from a pewter chalice, or whiskey and petrol out of a human skull.

  “I’ll have one too, I suppose,” I said to the barman, who quickly hurried off. I suddenly got a small stab of panic in my stomach. I hadn’t intended on having drinks with Alex. But somehow I now was. I needed to change that.

  “You said something about paying me back for last night?” I asked in a businesslike tone.

  “Yes.” He picked up a small packet from the bar counter and handed it to me. “I’ve been carrying it around all day in case I bumped into you.”

  I opened the packet tentatively. “What the . . .?”

  Alex pulled the packet away from me and tipped its contents onto the bar counter. A latex glove tumbled out, a tube of cream and some plasters.

  I stared at the things as strange images rushed through my mind.

  “Antibiotic cream and plasters for your knees,” he said, opening the cream.

  It took me a few moments to figure out what he was saying, but I finally clicked. And when I did, the implications were astounding. “Hang on, you went out and bought that especially for me?” I wasn’t sure whether I should feel grateful to him, or whether this was just weird.

  He nodded and looked down at my knees. “May I?” he asked, pointing at them.

  I pulled them away quickly. “Uh . . . no . . . uh . . . what?” That would just be weird! was what I meant to say.

  He looked up at me and smiled. “Don’t worry, I’m a doctor.”

  “Reaaallyy,” I said slowly and tentatively, not believing him for a second. Doctors didn’t dress like that, did they?

  “Ideally you shouldn’t have let the laceration scab, as it impedes the growth of new skin cells.” He said it casually, the medical terms falling off his tongue like everyday words.

  “You really are a doctor?” I said.

  He smiled at me again and nodded. “So? Can I?”

  “Uh . . . sure. I guess.” I sounded very unsure still. I was.

  He patted his knees. “Put your legs up.”

  “On you?” I asked. “No. I can’t, that’s just . . .”

  “Oh, come on.” He patted them again.

  “This is so strange,” I mumbled.

  “Not as strange as you pulling my facemask off last night.”

  “True,” I nodded, “but still.”

  “It’s already getting infected.” He pointed to my knees and I looked down. Large red swollen patches had formed around the scabs and I didn’t need my MD to see that he was right.

  “Okay, fine.” I lifted my legs carefully and guided them up onto him. He draped them across his knees and looked down at them. This was bizarre. More than bizarre. I couldn’t quite believe I had my legs up on a stranger at a bar. I looked around to see if anyone was looking at us, but no one seemed to have noticed.

  “Okay.” He snapped on the latex glove in a way that looked like he’d done this a million times before. And then slowly, gently, he started applying the cream. I watched this semi-stranger in fascination. He seemed to be concentrating so hard, as if my knees were the most important things in the world to him right now. Then he unwrapped the plasters and started placing them onto the wounds with total precision. I flinched when his fingers grazed the back of my knee and sent a shiver through me, despite the hot balmy weather. I couldn’t quite work out if this was the weirdest thing that had ever happened to me, or whether this might actually be the one of the nicest things that anyone had done for me in a while. When it was all over I pulled my knees away just as my drink had arrived.

  “Thanks,” I whispered quietly, half under my breath. There’d been something very intimate about that moment and it was leaving me feeling a little lost for words.

  “Pleasure,” he whispered back. “It’s the least I can do. Take the cream and apply it three times a day,” he said in a very doctor-y voice. I nodded and pulled the packet towards me. We sat in silence for a while, until the magazines on the counter pulled my focus. Just as I’d suspected, they were a variety of women’s mags in various stages of well-readness; Elle, Cosmo, Woman’s Weekly, Woman’s Own, Marie Claire and OK!.

  “I hope you’re not looking for more samples.” I gestured at the magazines and he laughed.

  “No. God, no. I think I learned my lesson about that,” he said with a smile. He reached up and ran his hand over his cheek. “I must say, it really is very soft today.”

  “That’s because you ripped off the top three layers of skin,” I said, taking the first sip of my drink.

  “True. And I screamed and cried like a baby.”

  “Yup. You did.” I sipped again and it was rather tasty, and strong.

  “I suppose I should be embarrassed about all that, but truthfully I’ve had so much embarrassment lately that that hardly registered.”

  “I can relate!” I took another sip. God, it really was strong.

  “Oh?” He eyed me curiously. “It can’t be as embarrassing as mine.”

  “Trust me. Mine’s worse,” I said quite confidently, as I bit into the floating piece of pineapple which tasted more like a delivery method for rum than an actual piece of fruit.

  “Never. It cannot, cannot, be worse than what just happened to me.”

  I shook my head at him. “No, I win. I’m telling you. You’ve got nothing on me.”

  We fell into a silence and eyeballed each other. “Okay,” he started slowly, “so picture this.” He threw his entire drink back, as if he needed the liquid courage just to tell the story. I understood. I would probably need to be borderline paralytic before I ever repeated my story to anyone. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him. “Right,” he continued, “she’s my perfect girlfriend of seven years. We’ve lived together for five of them. I bought that apartment just for her, because she liked the view, even though it added an extra half an hour to my morning commute. She’s the woman that I spoke about having kids with.” He paused for a moment and looked at me as if he wanted me to acknowledge that I was following the story so far.

  “Okay. Got it,” I said.

  “Now picture this; me on a rooftop garden in the middle of London, at sunset, looking out over the city, on one knee, surrounded by the rose petals of a thousand pink roses and over two hundred candles and then holding this in my hands . . .” He stopped talking, reached into his jacket pocket and pulled it out. I gasped.

  18 Feb.

  Okay. Good news. Researched what the likelihood of couples who meet online staying together is. It is very low! Crossing my fingers and waiting. I’ll be here for Matt when things fall apart. Maybe it will even bring us closer? (Am I a bad person for hoping that his relationship falls apart? Of course I am!)

  On a different note, I watched a video of a woman sleeping with a male sex doll yesterday. No, I will not be getting one anytime soon. But it was good research for the article. Also, want to write an article about the perils of online dating and how to know whether you’re being “Catfished.” (Maybe I’ll even show it to Matt—out of “concern.” Shit, I really am a terrible friend.)

  18 Feb. (later that day)

  Oh no! Been researching new article and found contradictory messaging.

  “Why online love is more likely to last.” Internet couples tend to be a better fit than those who meet by traditional means, according to new research

  An actual psychologist wrote this. Not me doing research and making things up!

  Shit. What to believe? More later . . . (Hopefully research to contradict that last part.)

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Wow,” I said breathily, looking down at the ring in the box he’
d just opened.

  “I mean . . . Wow.” That was really all I could say, because it glinted up at me like the northern lights. A gorgeous round lavender-colored stone, surrounded by pink stones set in a rose-gold band.

  “Wow. Yes, that’s what she said too.” He put the box down on the bar counter. “Only, as you can see, she’s not wearing it.”

  “What happened?” I asked, tempted to reach out and touch the thing of beauty. My fingertips felt drawn to it, like a magpie to pretty pennies.

  “Well,” he let out a loud, long sigh, “she said no, obviously.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “Oh, no worries really. It’s okay. I mean, she only ripped my still-beating heart out, violently shredded it and then tossed it off the side of the building. No big deal.”

  “Shit. That’s hectic,” I said, not really knowing what to say to him.

  “But that’s not the worst part, though. She then went on to explain that actually she was in love with someone else. And actually, she’d been seeing him for the past six months, and actually she was about to tell me that she was leaving me for him and moving in with him and actually—God, that’s a lot of actuallys—apparently she’s never felt this way about anyone before. And get this, they met in our apartment block, the one we live in, because the guy lives there too.”

  “Ouch.” I physically cringed for him. The image was just so awful. He seemed like a nice guy, somewhat misguided in his fashion sense and beauty regime, but I hadn’t had a man pull out a chair for me in ages, let alone attend to my injuries.

  “Tell me about it,” he said, waving the bartender over and calling for another round of pink drinks. “I bet you can’t beat that story.” He looked at me challengingly.

  “Um . . . actually,” I emphasized the word and he smiled immediately, “I think I can.”

  “Really?” He raised his eyebrow in query. “I doubt that.”

  “No, I’m pretty sure my story is on a par with yours, potentially worse because of one very unfortunate factor.”