The Spare Bedroom: A totally heartwarming, funny and feel good romantic comedy

by Elizabeth Neep

  ‘No worries.’ She smiled from Sam to me, a brief look of confusion darting across her face. I forced myself to look thankful, before watching her bound out of the kitchen.

  Sam looked over to me, eyes wide with embarrassment.

  ‘Jess, I…’ he began, making tentative steps towards me, trying to explain now that we were finally alone. What was going on? Why had he invited me here? Why had he not told me about Jamie when he’d had the chance? He came to stand before me as I felt tears of confusion threatening to rise to the surface. ‘I can explain…’ Sam’s sentences faded into nothingness as Jamie came back into the room, halting for a second on seeing Sam standing so close to his good friend from university. He took a step back.

  ‘Jess, come with me.’ Jamie looped an arm into mine, steering me away from Sam. ‘You can have the first shower.’ As if she needed one; her gym-bunny outfit didn’t look like it had seen even one drop of sweat.

  ‘Only if you’re sure?’ I asked, automated, stuck on repeat. I wasn’t sure of anything now.

  ‘Absolutely.’ She grinned, leading me further away from Sam and any more of those half-sentences he was about to try and fail to say. ‘No worries.’

  No worries, Jamie? I’ll give you no fucking worries. My heart hammered as she steered me further away from Sam. Not only was I now tan-less, jobless, homeless, I was about to spend the next week trying to solve my mess of a life in my heartbreakingly gorgeous ex-boyfriend’s spare bedroom, whilst trying to work out just what exactly Jamie was to him. I guess I could now add clueless to my less-than list.

  Chapter 4

  No one wants to like their ex-boyfriend’s new… well, whatever she was. And yet, hating Jamie was proving trickier than I’d thought.

  ‘I’ve put fresh sheets on the bed.’ She halted her blur of activity to rest a hand on the doorframe into the spare room. Inside was a double bed almost as big as the room itself, disguised with a dozen unique print-design cushions, a little like the ones that lined the living room. So, she was the design-eye. I should have known Sam hadn’t finally fallen for da Vinci; he’d thought Homes and Gardens was a renovation show. I glanced from Jamie back to the colour-pop cushions. I dreaded to think how much each of them would cost. My guess was if I sold them I’d have enough to pay the deposit and first month’s rent for a place of my own. I was pretty sure ‘thou shalt not steal thy host’s things’ was printed in bold in the House-Guest Bible. I guess Sam now belonged to her too. But if he did, why the hell wouldn’t he tell me? Why the hell was I here to begin with?

  Jamie went further down the corridor, turning into what I assumed was the master bedroom – not that my assumptions were serving me all that well since arriving in Sydney. I didn’t follow, not risking the sight of Sam’s things intermingled with hers. So it was just the two of them. And me. The spare girlfriend in the spare bedroom? Jamie reappeared, thrusting a pair of silk pyjamas into my hands and steered me in the direction of the bathroom – probably not wanting me to get whatever flea-ridden rags I had in my rucksack all over her sheets. If she knew who I really was I imagined she’d be steering me towards the door. But I guess if I knew who I really was I might not have found myself here in the first place.

  ‘Sorry we can’t offer you a bath,’ Jamie apologised. I got the sense that she did this tour a lot. But never to an ex-girlfriend. Not that she knew that’s what I was. I, for one, was planning to keep it that way.

  I padded into the exposed sandstone room and looked up at their fresh-water shower. ‘I think I’ll be okay.’ I smiled weakly, wanting desperately to believe that was true.

  ‘Help yourself to anything in there,’ I heard her shout as I closed the door, tears rising, breakdown imminent. I croaked my thanks, rushing to the shower, turning on the taps and in the shelter of the rushing water letting my tears fall. How the hell did I end up here? It was a question I had asked myself countless times before but never once in my ex-boyfriend’s apartment, never once overusing his new girlfriend’s expensive Clinique bodywash. Surely, that’s what Jamie was – the real Jamie. They lived together; they called each other baby; they kissed on the mouth. I couldn’t stay here. I just couldn’t. I had to get out.

  Wrapping a towel around myself – all assurances that my travel towel was as good as any shot to hell with the feel of its fabric – I rushed to retrieve my mobile from on top of the toilet lid. I scrolled through my contacts in search of a saviour. Mum, Dad. It had taken all my strength not to call them when my first few days hadn’t gone to plan, when I’d got kicked out of my accommodation for rejecting Handsy, when all I could see was rain. I was a twenty-seven-year-old woman; I couldn’t keep running back to them. They’d been unconvinced about me coming anyway, nervous about what I’d find here. I’m sure Sam hadn’t even crossed their minds. I flicked to Zoe, the only person I really wanted to talk to. But I couldn’t. She’d encouraged me to come here, said a fresh start would do me good. What would she say when she found out I’d landed myself just a corridor away from the very stumbling block that had kept me stuck in a moment that everyone had managed to move past? I really didn’t have the energy to find out. I’d just stay for one night. Grin and bear it. Tomorrow I’d start again.

  Emerging into the living space twenty minutes later, I found Jamie putting the first load of my washing into the machine. I pondered afresh whether she was really that nice or if her pass-agg was simply off balance. Sam had barely moved an inch in the whole time Jamie had been sorting me out, his face still showing the same expression of apology (for me) and admiration (for her). Each time it looked like Jamie was about to leave us in the same room together, Sam’s goldfish impression had started afresh, like he was about to say something, about to explain – and then she’d come back in again. But what could he possibly say to explain this one away?

  ‘Can I help with anything, J?’ he offered.

  ‘No,’ both Jamie and I said in unison, before I remembered I was no longer his J.

  ‘Oh… I…’ Sam began, never brilliant at resolving tension.

  ‘No, I think we’re almost there, baby.’ Jamie was clearly more adept at addressing the awkwardness and chimed in, moving across to open the fridge. ‘Sam, these aren’t organic?’ She held her smile, her cheery tone, but gritted her teeth slightly at the vegetables in her hands, teetering on the edge of annoyance.

  ‘Is that a question or a statement?’ Sam asked, with a hint of apology.

  ‘Just answer the question,’ she said and forced a little laugh.

  Definitely a question then, and definitely a passive-aggressive one at that.

  ‘Does it matter?’ Sam asked.

  ‘It matters to me,’ she replied, retaining the lightness in her voice. ‘But no bother.’ She turned to me with a massive grin. ‘Jess is a good excuse to eat out anyway. I want to hear everything.’ Would she, Sam? Would she want to hear everything? Sam looked more uncomfortable by the second. I wasn’t going to rescue him.

  ‘Did you want to eat out, Jess? We know some really nice places, our treat.’ Jamie smiled in my direction. Did she really need to look like that? I looked down at my borrowed silk pyjamas, pushing my towel-dry hair from my make-up-less face. As much as I would love to be taken out to dinner with my ex-boyfriend and his nice-as-pie girlfriend, I really couldn’t stomach it – the company, not the food; I could stomach the food, I was starving. I looked down at my phone. It was half past seven. Somewhere between Woolies and our walk, a part of me had begun to hope I’d be too distracted by Sam by now to be hungry for anything but him. And yet here I was being invited to dine across from Jamie, so he could really see the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of girlfriends past and present. Swallowing my stupidity, I looked towards their eager expressions, the fridge now closed and non-organic produce and their domestic bickering safely locked away. Was it too early to call it a night?

  ‘I think, actually,’ I said, ‘as long as it’s okay with you, I might just go to bed. It’s been… quite the day.’

>   Quite the day? What twenty-seven-year-old in their right mind says, ‘Quite the day?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Sam, a little too quickly.

  ‘No worries. Now, you take this,’ she said, extending a small silver key in my direction. ‘Come and go as you please. The Wi-Fi code is stuck on the fridge and the Mac doesn’t have a password. Help yourself to anything in the cupboards. We’ll probably be up for a little longer.’ She looked at her chunky designer watch. ‘Yeah – we’ll defo be up for a bit.’ She smiled, her big display of hospitality somehow making me feel even smaller. ‘But here’s my number, just drop us a message if we’re being too loud.’ My mind instantly wandered to the many ways they could keep me up at night, none of them good – for me at least. ‘Or if you change your mind, feel free to join us.’ Cue even more outrageous images.

  ‘That’s okay,’ I replied quickly. ‘I’ll be out like a light the second my head hits the pillow.’ I yawned at the thought. ‘Thanks again for having me.’ I looked from Jamie to Sam and back again, trying not to vomit or cry. ‘I really appreciate it.’

  ‘Oh, stop.’ Jamie raised a manicured hand in my direction. ‘Like I said. Any friend of Sam’s is a friend of mine.’ Sam tried to catch my eye, but I looked away.

  If only she knew, I thought, heading into the spare bedroom. If only she knew.

  The room was every bit as gorgeous as the rest of the apartment. White, light and bright – just like the living room, with a large surf-blue bedspread and shabby-chic wooden tables on either side of the bed, piled high with Sam’s magazines. A used surfboard hung on the wall, a single crack running from end to end. I reached up to run my fingers from one side to the other, letting my nails move into the etched ‘S’ on the board’s tail. Sam looked great on a surfboard. A bolt of longing shot across my chest. This was ridiculous. I rallied all the perspective I could muster. Sam wasn’t mine. He hadn’t been mine for years. And I’d had relationships since ours, some more serious than others (tequila-housemate nights falling very much under ‘others’) but I had always kind of thought – always kind of hoped – that our paths would somehow forge back together. It had never felt like the end. And here I was. In their home. Sam was not mine. He would never be again. Sitting on the edge of the bed, looking up at the surfboard, I bit back the tears. I wouldn’t cry again, not here, not with the two of them on the other side of the door doing God knows what – shut up, brain, shut up.

  Flinging my body back to lie on the bed, I let Jamie’s Egyptian cotton sheets please and patronise me in equal measure. My stomach groaned, and I longed for more than Sam. My head now sinking into a foot of goose feathers, I rolled onto one side to be confronted with a picture of the two of them that Jamie hadn’t thought to take down – why would she? She thought we were just friends. We were just friends – the kind who had seen each other naked and yet hadn’t seen each other for years. The kind who had planned a future that only one of us had managed to make. Together they stared out of the frame, Sam’s hand extended to the back of the camera while his other clutched Jamie around her tiny waist. If only this one had been in the living room, I might have known not to stay, but then Sam had insisted; why on earth would he want me here? Unless he really did just think of me as a friend now. I looked at the photo again. Just like in the one of Sam and Joshua, they were both wearing wetsuits, pulled down to their middles, the sand and sea caught in the background. That was Sydney. It just wasn’t my Sydney, I thought, switching the light to black, my mind sifting through all the next moves I could make to rectify my second start all over again. As I turned onto the cold side of the bed I berated the tiny bit of my heart hoping that second start could still be ours.

  18 September 2012 – Nottingham, England ]

  ‘Can you paint me like one of DiCaprio’s French girls?’ Sam lay on his side across the length of my bed, his slim-cut jeans straining to bend, his strong legs visible within them.

  ‘I guess, but my French girls stay still.’ My eyes, like my tone, told him to stop moving for the umpteenth time. I looked down at the sketchpad in my hands, not sure how me teaching him to draw had turned into me studying his profile, but not entirely unhappy about it. I used the length of my pencil to measure the gap between his eyes, the length of his light laughter lines down to his lips, the symmetry of his mouth – a mouth that for all of our drunken moments was yet to be on mine. I pushed my pencil into the page lightly, then harder, darker, building depth with every sketch, trying to capture something of him.

  ‘So, I’m not allowed to talk at all?’ Sam mumbled out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Not even to ask you what the hell happened with Zoe and Austin the other night?’

  I narrowed my eyes, trying to be quiet, zen, but powerless not to take the bait.

  ‘I think everyone in the bar knew what happened that night.’ I laughed, recalling images of the two of them, bound together, as I’d looked at Sam and hoped for the same. Maybe we are in the friend zone? I wondered for a moment, but the look caught by my pencil told me that wasn’t the case.

  ‘So, what now?’ Sam mumbled again, a cute ventriloquist – for my entertainment only.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, lifting my head intermittently to capture the contours of his face, forcing my eyes to remain above his neck. ‘Zoe doesn’t do relationships.’ I looked at him, as Sam rolled his eyes: why does that not surprise me? ‘Not like that, she just doesn’t want to settle down, she has her… reasons.’ My look dared him to challenge me. We’d only known each other for a few days, but Zoe’s secrets were safe with me. People had told me so much about university, exactly what to expect. But they’d never told me of bonds born so quickly and yet built to last, of the intensity of spending every waking moment together: sharing your breakfast with the people who shared your night.

  ‘And how about you, Leo?’ Sam fixed his eyes on mine, trying to hold my stare, which was torn between his real face and my imitation of him. ‘Are free-spirited artists the relationship type?’

  ‘Maybe.’ I shot him a look as he craned to see my sketch. I wanted to keep him guessing.

  ‘Right, your turn.’ I jumped to my feet and pulled Sam up to stand, enjoying our contact.

  ‘Okay, okay.’ He surrendered, holding my hands in his for just a second too long before picking the sketchpad up from the chair. ‘Jess, this is insane.’ He beamed across at me.

  ‘Well, it’s your face,’ I quipped.

  ‘Yes, I know my face isn’t normal,’ he laughed, ‘but nor is this.’ He gestured to my drawing as I felt a warm glow fill my stomach. It was all I was good at, all I wanted to do. ‘I can see why they shortlisted you.’ I had just got the email this morning, the excitement feeling like it might never wear off. Winning was such a long shot but one of the judges had said I was ‘going places’, and even recommended me to a personal contact who ran an evening class in London that would help ‘develop my skills’.

  ‘I’m not following that.’ Sam got to his feet, coming to sit on the bed beside me.

  ‘You have no choice.’ I laughed, pointing back to the chair. ‘You got yours.’ I framed my face with my hands, beaming broadly.

  ‘There’s no point,’ he said, a hint of seriousness laced in his voice. ‘It’ll be shit.’

  ‘Define “shit”?’ I probed, knowing that when it came to art he’d not know how to.

  ‘Not this.’ He gestured around the room, his hand finding its way to mine as he rested them back down.

  ‘Well, beauty is in the eye and all that…’ I laughed again, squeezing his hand tighter.

  ‘That’s what scares me.’ Sam grinned, turning to look at me. ‘It’s so subjective. I’m a medic. We like science, solutions, security…’

  ‘Alliteration?’

  ‘I’m sssssssserious…’ Sam joked, pulling me a little closer still.

  ‘Come on.’ I poked his side, playful, flirtatious. ‘Not everything in life needs to be perfect, Doctor,’ I mocked, as he grabbed hold of my hands, pinning me to t
he bed, pressing his weight on top of me, and then his lips on top of mine, kissing me lightly at first, then with more pressure. He pulled away, my breath caught, my mind nowhere but him.

  ‘Well’ – he grinned down at me – ‘can’t blame a man for trying.’

  Chapter 5

  2 August 2020 – Sydney, Australia

  I woke with a start. Where was I? I reached for the light, the faces of Sam and Jamie staring back at me from the photo frame. Shit, that’s where I was. Sam’s sodding apartment. But not just Sam’s – Sam and Jamie’s apartment. Their apartment. That they shared together. Because they were together. I felt sick. I checked my phone and a notification from Zoe flashed up. My stomach flipped. I couldn’t tell her where I was, not when she’d sent me off to get my shit together. Not when she had it all sorted. I swiped away the notifications before clocking the time; it was only quarter to three. Now my stomach groaned; I hadn’t eaten since breakfast yesterday. And a liquid dinner didn’t count. I needed food. ‘Help yourself to anything in the cupboard,’ Jamie had said. ‘Come and go as you please,’ she had said. Well, if she insisted.

  Savouring the touch of the sheets, I slunk out of bed and towards the door. Pulling it open, I braced myself to hear moans of pleasure rising from the master bedroom, or worse – the L-shaped sofa where I had left them hours before. I remembered the way Sam used to touch, used to taste. When would my brain just learn to shut up?! Greeted with silence, I proceeded to push the door open, tiptoeing across the corridor and out to the kitchen-living room. Made it. Now, food. I just needed something quick and easy. Opening a cupboard, I prayed for Pringles. Instead, I was greeted with an array of ingredients. Damn. I remembered Sam’s basket from the day before and Jamie’s horror that he’d not bought organic, when the Sam I knew literally didn’t look at the price before purchasing something, never mind the origin of the products. I bet she could cook. I mean, who has a sculpted body like hers from eating Pringles? Moving like a mime, hands searching my way around the unfamiliar space, I found my way to the fridge. As I opened the door, light cascaded into the darkened room.