But despite her disbelief at Jack’s sudden change of heart, there was a part of Hope that liked the sound of this vaguely bucolic existence. With two children, certainly not four. And maybe, instead of chickens, they could have a couple of mini-pigs, and before all this happened, they’d have travelled, seen a bit of the world on at least two other continents, not including Europe.
Hope stuck her head out from beneath the cradle of her arms again. ‘That’s really how you see our future?’
‘Kind of. Though right now I’m still so angry with you I’m not even sure if I’ll get the bus home with you.’
Hope felt her face begin to slacken, as if the tears were all set to fall, but aware of Angela’s beady eyes fixed on her, she willed her muscles to behave. ‘OK, well, I suppose I deserve that.’
Jack had gone back to not looking at her again. ‘Yeah, I guess you do.’
But for all his talk of ten-year plans, Hope refused to let herself get sucked into Jack’s little domestic fantasy. It was just Jack smarting from the night before because he’d never had to think about Hope existing in a world without him, a world where there were men who might actually want her. Besides, Hope couldn’t see further than three months into their future, where Jack would still be pissed off at her and she’d have nothing to listen to but the disapproving voice of her own conscience and his passive-aggressive asides …
‘Hope?’
She realised that Angela was saying something. To her.
‘Sorry. What?’
‘I asked where you saw yourself in ten years’ time,’ Angela repeated. Hope’s eyes drifted to the clock. They only had another fifteen minutes left. Why, oh why, was Angela determined to make them sit through the whole hour? Because she was a sadist who got off on other people’s misery and got paid for it. ‘Well, Hope?’
This time the silence didn’t just have claws and teeth, it also had a stun-gun and a machete. Hope could hear the hand of the clock mark off every second that she sat there without answering. She couldn’t even think of some happy-families bullshit because there didn’t seem any point in pretending any more.
‘You couldn’t even be bothered to do the homework, could you?’ Jack suddenly said. ‘Shows how committed you are to making this work.’
‘But we’d already agreed, or you had, that this wasn’t working, so there was no point imagining you and me together ten years from now when I knew that wasn’t going to happen,’ Hope said. ‘But I did try to think about where I’d be in ten years’ time, but I just couldn’t get a definite picture in my head. Like, maybe I want to be living abroad, and I probably will have children or maybe I won’t, not after spending all day looking after other people’s … it’s all just a big blank, really.’ The big blank wasn’t as scary as Hope thought it might be. It actually felt a tiny bit thrilling, like she could do what she wanted, be whoever she wanted to be. Nothing was mapped out. Nothing was planned. It was all possibility.
‘Maybe you couldn’t think what ten years from now would look like, because you’ve always thought about a future that had me in it,’ Jack suggested softly.
‘Well, of course I always pictured you in my future. It’s going to take a while to adjust to the idea that we’re going to have separate lives … but the thing is …’ Hope paused, because she had a horrible suspicion that she was about to do what she’d spent the last three months trying not to do. To articulate the unspeakable truth that was actually the reason why he’d slept with Susie, and she wanted to shag Wilson, without the air-quotes. As Angela would have said, if she hadn’t been staring at them avidly with her mouth hanging open, Hope knew she was about to have her lightbulb moment. ‘The thing is, Jack, you were right all along. I thought if we went home for Christmas that I could get the parents to talk you round, but I finally see that we don’t have another ten days in us, let alone a future.’
The tears began to fall quite unexpectedly. One moment Hope had been able to deliver her epitaph on their relationship with a clear head and a clear voice, the next she was sobbing. She was crying for them, for what they’d had and what they might have been, but she was also crying because she was tired and headachy, and she felt dirty in the way she always did when she’d stayed up all night. And if she was crying, then at least she didn’t have to talk any more.
‘Oh, Hope, don’t say stuff like that,’ she heard Jack murmur throatily as if he was pretty close to tears himself, and then unbelievably she felt his arm around her so he could pull her in.
She was happy to be pulled so she could awkwardly wrap both arms around him and get tears and snot on the shoulder of his Lazy Days hoodie. Jack’s hand tried to smooth back her hair, but he was fighting a losing battle. ‘Don’t you want to be with me, then?’ he asked.
She’d said it once already, but now that Jack was holding her and he was real and solid and not a sneering facsimile of himself at the other end of the sofa, Hope didn’t have the guts to say it again. ‘But you don’t want to be with me! You’re angry with me and you hate me and you want Susie. And maybe you can’t see her in your future yet, but that’s because you and her are still so new and when …’
‘I don’t hate you, Hopey.’
‘Yes, you do, because you think I did a hateful thing.’ The end of the sentence was swallowed up in an anguished wail, and then Hope was crying again and Jack was soothing her again and she didn’t have to talk.
‘Well, this is very exciting. I never thought you’d have such a breakthrough, Hope,’ Angela said. Then she had the audacity to rustle a tissue box enticingly in Hope’s face, but Hope was damned if she was going to give Angela the satisfaction of taking one of her tissues.
Instead she sat up, wiped her wet face with the sleeve of her jumper and took a couple of deep, centring breaths. ‘I am sorry, Jack,’ she breathed. ‘But you’re going to have to get used to the idea that I’m probably not going to spend the rest of my life being celibate.’
‘What if I can’t?’ Jack asked. ‘What if I don’t want to?’
Hope smiled through the tears. ‘Well, I’m hardly going to take a vow of chastity, am I?’
‘No, of course you’re not, but what I’m trying to say is that I love you,’ Jack said, leaning forward so he could give Hope a sideways look from under his lashes. ‘I really love you, Hopey.’
She nodded. ‘Yeah, I love you too,’ she muttered quietly, because Angela had seen and heard quite enough and surely their hour was up by now. ‘Doesn’t change anything though, does it?’
‘But it’s a pretty good basis to start again, if we both agree that we still love each other,’ Jack said, and this time he was the one to turn and glare at Angela when she gasped. Then he turned the full weight of his big blue stare back to Hope. ‘I don’t think I love Susie, not the way I love you. It’s not love, it’s infatuation, and what we have is deeper, it’s in my blood.’
It was exactly what Hope had wanted Jack to realise. These were the words that her heart and her head, and all the other bits of her, had longed to hear. So, why wasn’t she roused from her lethargy and hangover, she wondered. Why wasn’t she jumping up to do a victory lap of the room and punch the air in triumph a few times, instead of staying on the sofa and frowning? ‘But you’re still mad at me, aren’t you?’
‘I’d rather be mad at you, Hopey, than be without you,’ Jack said earnestly. ‘We could do this, we could start again. I love you.’
‘You’ve told me that so many times these last few weeks that it’s stopped meaning anything,’ Hope confessed, her voice thickening with the threat of more tears. ‘You can’t keep doing this. You make promises and then in a few days, or a few weeks from now, you’ll have changed your mind and I’ll have to deal with all the hurt and pain again. It never gets any easier.’
‘But, Hopey …’
‘I can’t. I’m exhausted. I’m done. I’m not doing this any more,’ she insisted. ‘You say you love me, you say you want to try again, but what’s going to be different this t
ime?’
Hope could see the surprise on Jack’s face, as if he hadn’t expected to meet any resistance, but how could he blame her, given his track record? She didn’t trust him any more, and she didn’t trust his epiphany that they were meant to be together. He was jealous that she’d done things with Wilson that she’d only ever done with him, but he’d just have to get over it.
‘Everything will be different,’ Jack said fiercely, suddenly clamping his fingers around Hope’s thigh. ‘I’ll be different, I swear.’
‘I know you think you mean it, and right now you probably do, but it’s not enough.’ Hope patted his hand to take the sting out of her words, and she thought that if her heart wasn’t already broken, then it was broken now, because hadn’t this been her goal all along, ever since they started counselling? For Jack to see the wrong he’d done and vow to put it right? But when it really came down to it, they were just empty words coming from a man that she used to love, that she’d always love, but who wasn’t worthy of her love any more. ‘You won’t feel like this in a few days, not after you’ve spoken to Susie.’
‘We’ll have more counselling,’ Jack said. ‘And we’ll both take it seriously and really work on it, and well, we’ll get properly engaged. Like, I’ll go out and buy you a ring tomorrow.’
It was the shock that made her giggle. The shock and the intent look on Jack’s face, the same look he got when he was making a list, or working on a layout, or debating which of his vast collection of T-shirts he was going to wear. ‘Now you’re just being silly.’
‘I’m serious. Serious like a heart attack. Serious like a fucking nuclear strike.’ Jack was smiling too, nudging her with his arm, because he was still convinced that Hope was about to cave. ‘Serious like Celine Dion singing a power ballad.’
‘Oh God, don’t start doing one of your joke raps. I’m not getting back with you, and I’m not getting properly engaged to you,’ Hope said between giggles. ‘You’re just upset about last night. You’ll feel differently tomorrow.’
‘No, I won’t, and you’re the one who wanted to be properly engaged!’
‘I think I was obsessed with getting engaged because, on some level, I could tell you were pulling away from me, but now I know that an engagement ring isn’t going to bring us back together again,’ Hope explained, giggles quietening down. ‘I’m not saying that I’m agreeing to this, to any of this, because you’re not right in the head at the moment, but I think we need a major break from each other and if, if you still felt the same six months from now, then we could start again by taking things very slowly.’
She sounded so rational, Hope thought to herself, proudly, and if the last few months had done any good, then at least they’d made her grow up a bit and lose the Pollyanna attitude.
‘But we still love each other,’ Jack said again, as if those words were a mantra that would wipe out the past and bring HopeandJack back. ‘You do still love me, don’t you?’
Hope sighed. ‘I do, but there have been times lately when I haven’t liked you at all, and I don’t trust you any more. I don’t suppose you trust me, either.’
‘But you promise you didn’t actually fuck him?’ Jack had turned his face away from Hope again, and seeing the way the tips of his ears were now carmine, she prayed that it was out of embarrassment, rather than any residual anger.
‘I didn’t, but I suppose we did stuff that constitutes cheating, though as far as I knew I was single when I did this stuff,’ Hope said, and she would never tell Jack, even if (and it was the biggest if in the world) they did reconcile and live happily ever after, that she was glad that she’d been single, even if it was only for a few days. Single enough that she’d spent an hour in Wilson’s arms and, though there was plenty that she did regret, she didn’t regret that. Still, it seemed politic to ask Jack, ‘Do you think you can ever forgive me?’
‘I can as long as you agree to forgive me,’ Jack said tentatively, and Hope nodded, even though she knew it would take months, maybe even years, before she’d consider Jack exonerated of all his crimes. ‘So, are you in, Hopey?’
‘I wouldn’t say I was in, not exactly. I think we should maybe start dating again, not living together, and see how it goes,’ she clarified. ‘But it’s not going to be easy, Jack. We’re not the people we used to be and we can’t slip back into old hab—’
‘I know. I know. But we’ll have more counselling and I swear, Hopey, when I put a proper engagement ring on the proper finger, you’ll feel more secure. Everything will fall into place.’
Hope was just about to remind Jack about the dangers of quick-fix solutions when Angela coughed and raised her hand timidly, as if she was requesting permission to speak, even though it was her consulting room and their session had already run twenty minutes over. ‘I hate to interrupt, when it’s all going so well, but I think we need to start wrapping things up.’ She smiled awkwardly, showing two neat rows of beige teeth. ‘It really was a useful exercise,’ she added in a surprised voice.
‘I’m sorry that we’ve been banging on for so long,’ Hope said, because she was starting to wonder if there had actually been solid scientific reasoning behind all the homework and exercises Angela had made them do. Certainly, a miracle had occurred in the last hour, though Hope wasn’t entirely sure who was responsible for it. ‘But, well, thank you.’
‘Do you really want us to live apart, Hopey?’ Jack asked. ‘Because I don’t see why we can’t take things slowly but still live together. I’ll even take the sofa bed every night. But don’t you think it’d be nice to be close again? Even if we only cuddled to start off with.’
Once again, Jack wasn’t listening to a single word Hope was saying. ‘Yeah, well, let’s get Christmas out of the way and then talk about our living arrangements. And at the moment, all I’m up for is cuddling. Fully clothed cuddling.’
‘Oh!’ Angela gasped. ‘Do you mean …? Well, that’s quite unexpected.’
‘What is?’ they asked in unison.
Angela tugged unhappily at the neck of her blouse. ‘At our first session, I asked you not to um, have, err, intimate relations,’ she actually whispered the last two words as if they were far too shocking to say out loud. ‘The subject of physical lovemaking did come up in our previous session, but I didn’t want to interrupt your flow by asking how abstinence had worked out for you.’
Hope and Jack shared a look of utter bemusement, then Jack shrugged. ‘Well, it worked out fine. We took turns to sleep on the sofa; besides, we were both working late every night, then going for a run together after we got home, and we were too tired to even think about intimate relations.’
‘Yeah, especially when I kept pulling that muscle in my thigh,’ Hope added, relieved that the conversation was on safer ground.
Now it was Angela’s turn to look bemused. ‘Oh,’ she said again, her pointed chin wobbling. ‘Oh. That’s rather unusual.’
‘Is it?’
‘Well, yes, yes it is.’ Angela glared at Hope as if it was all her fault. ‘Whenever I do couples counselling, I always advise them to desist from relations, and they always report back that they didn’t desist and that actually by not desisting, they’d rediscovered their spark and felt much closer. It’s reverse psychology!’
Well, we didn’t know that, Hope wanted to say, but she just tried to look concerned instead.
‘So, we should have been having relations, then?’ Jack’s concern sounded genuine. ‘What does it mean that we haven’t? Should we have? Is it really bad that we haven’t?’
Angela cast her eyes downwards and shook her head. Hope could have sworn she heard her faintly tut. ‘I think we have a lot of ground to cover and now that you’ve made a commitment to continuing with your couples therapy, I strongly advise that you book at least another six sessions with me for the New Year. You’ve made good progress, don’t get me wrong, but there’s still a huge amount of work we need to do.’
‘Yeah, couldn’t agree more,’ Jack said to Hope’s
horror, because although she’d committed provisionally to more counselling, she’d been planning to tell Jack that she wanted the counselling to come from someone who wasn’t Angela. She and Angela just hadn’t bonded. ‘We’ve barely scratched the surface.’
‘Or maybe we should see where we are in the New Year,’ Hope prevaricated.
‘What’s the problem?’ Jack asked Hope. ‘I’m sure the folks will pay for it, or we could probably scrape the money together.’
‘Why don’t we talk about this over Christmas?’ Hope suggested, imperceptibly nodding her head in the direction of Angela who was flicking through her diary.
‘Ah, I hate to bring pressure to bear, but it’s best to book now,’ Angela said, then gave them an almost playful, conspiratorial look. ‘January is my busiest time. You wouldn’t believe how many relationships break down over the Christmas holidays when families are forced into prolonged contact with each other.’
Hope could believe it only too easily.
‘We’re definitely coming back in the New Year,’ Jack said, turning to glare at Hope, so she decided to forbear. She could even put up with, say, six more sessions with Angela if she had to. ‘We really need this, Hopey.’
‘OK, fine,’ she agreed. ‘If you think it’s for the best.’
‘I’m so pleased.’ Angela beamed. ‘I’d really like to work with you as you rebuild your relationship. You’ve both made such a good start that it would be a great shame to let all that hard work go to waste.’
Jack was nodding again. ‘That’s what we think.’
‘You’re really learning to open up and communicate your needs and desires, Jack,’ Angela said warmly. ‘And, well, Hope, let’s make a commitment to really tackle those anger-management issues in the New Year.’
Hope could feel her hackles and her blood pressure start to rise, even though Jack now had his hand on her knee. ‘Easy, tiger,’ he whispered. ‘Easy …’
Nine Uses for an Ex-Boyfriend Page 42