With or Without You

by Shari Low

  Richard called me before that happened, at the beginning of May, when I was five months into life as a singleton. In a stunning pivot of hypocrisy about the whole doctor/nurse relationship disapproval, I’d accepted his suggestion of a date. It had taken a while, but I’d eventually relaxed and realised that the best thing to get over the end of a relationship was the distraction of a cute doctor with a cheeky sense of humour. I loved that he was a charmer and took nothing, except his work, seriously. I loved that it was easy and it hadn’t strayed into deep and demanding. Most of all I loved that he was the complete opposite of Nate in every way.

  Our shifts clashed, so we didn’t see each other more than twice a week, but it was enough. It was uncomplicated. Fun. And not to be crude about it, but the sex…

  ‘Chloe, he talks the whole way through,’ I blurted, in the kitchen after the first time he spent the night.

  ‘In that case, I’m so glad I was working. I’d have had to play a bit of Vengaboys at full blast to block the sound. Did it freak you out?’ she went on.

  ‘A bit.’ Okay, so here’s the thing. I could add up the total of my sexual partners on one hand. Two of them were short-term things when I was a teenager. Another was an unfortunate one-night stand, thanks to vodka overload during Freshers Week. I spent the next four years at uni avoiding some guy called Jeremy who’d been intimate with my anatomy.

  Then there was Nate, for eight years.

  All in all, I wasn’t exactly widely experienced in such things.

  ‘But did you like it?’

  ‘More than a bit,’ I replied, as she roared with laughter.

  ‘Who’d have known you had an inner slapper?’ she’d teased, before she headed off, clutching a cream cheese bagel.

  That seemed like so long ago now. Five months, three days to be exact. Not that I was counting. Okay, I was, but only to take my mind off the fact that nerves were twisting my stomach into a knot the size of a melon.

  Tonight was the first time I was going to introduce Richard to the rest of the group. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. There would be a huge crowd at Sasha’s thirtieth birthday party, so there would be less scrutiny and interrogation. And yes, Nate would be there. That in itself wasn’t a problem. Since I’d moved out, we’d met up once a month or so. He’d definitely wobbled about the split in the early stages, but as the year had gone on, and after he’d bought out my share of our mortgage and we’d split everything we owned, I could see that he’d come to accept it was the right thing. Last week, we had agreed to file for a quickie, ‘no fault’ DIY divorce. It would be through in just a few months. Done. Over. Just like that. There was definitely still some sadness, but it was outweighed by relief that we could both move on.

  Our friends still socialised with both of us, although not so much in couples now, for obvious reasons.

  It was odd, given that we’d been a group for so long.

  We were in our second year at uni when Sasha had introduced me to Nate (studying sports science) and Chloe had fallen in love with a guy called Connor (sports management). Meanwhile, Sasha’s boyfriends had changed more times than I could count, until one night, a few months after we’d all burned our books. Chloe and I were in placements in the same hospital. Nate and Sasha were both doing their teaching post-grad. And we’d hit the town to celebrate Connor’s new job in the sports division of a marketing company. We were in a packed, city-centre trendy club when a good-looking DJ with a microphone jumped on the bar top and got the whole place hyped up by making them join in with House Of Pain’s ‘Jump Around’. The place went wild.

  ‘Urgh, he totally loves himself,’ Sasha had drawled, somewhat unfairly, as clearly the DJ was just doing his job. ‘But I’d still shag him,’ she’d added, with a wink.

  That night she did indeed get naked with him, and they’d been together ever since. He’d had an instant connection with Nate, and, straight away, they’d become gym buddies who trained together a few times a week. It turned out Justin’s gig at the club was a part-time thing to make some extra cash as he’d just left college and started work on the bottom rung of a finance company. He’d packed it in when he and Sasha got serious, preferring to spend his weekends enjoying his nightlife, rather than working it.

  Nate and I were married that year. Sasha and Justin made the perfect, hard-core party-loving, up-all-night couple. And Connor had proposed to Chloe. We were a happy little trio of couples, until Chloe had contracted a spectacular case of frozen feet, decided they were too young to commit for the rest of their lives and called it off with Connor. About two months later, Connor met an American volleyball player at a tournament at the Kelvin Hall, and hightailed it off to Chicago where he’d begun the process of living happily ever after, right around the same time as Chloe realised she’d made a huge mistake and had said goodbye to the love of her life. She’d been miserable ever since, no matter how much she tried to move on and get over him.

  Rob, her last boyfriend, was a perfectly acceptable replacement. They’d been together for a year or so, but I knew her heart wasn’t in it. This was clearly evident in the fact that she wasn’t fussed when he’d announced a few weeks ago that he was taking off for Ibiza to sell timeshares. The truth was, she was still pining for Connor, the one she sent away.

  I could honestly say that over the last ten months, I hadn’t been pining for Nate.

  There had only been a few events that we’d both been at, mostly birthdays or Sunday brunch, and it had been fine. It really had. I hadn’t mentioned Richard, and he hadn’t spoken of having met someone new either, but around the start of the summer I’d sensed in his behaviour that he might have finally moved on and I’d guessed another woman had something to do with it. It wasn’t a surprise when I’d heard through the official communication channels of the Sasha grapevine that not only had he been seeing someone, but he was bringing her along to Sasha’s birthday party tonight. Apparently they’d met at the gym Nate and Justin had been training at three nights a week for the last seven years. According to Sasha, Justin said she was ‘nice’, which could mean anything from ‘drop-dead gorgeous’ to ‘indistinguishable in a crowd’. These guys could come up with a dozen different adjectives for a goal in a football match, but ‘nice’ just about covered everything else.

  It was fine. We were all adults. We could do this in a mature and respectful manner. Unless she was indeed drop-dead gorgeous in which case I reserved the right to bitch about it for the next fortnight.

  I’d been planning for a while to introduce Richard to the group tonight, but the fact that Nate was bringing his new girlfriend made me even more determined that yes, he was coming, and no, he wasn’t faking bloody tuberculosis to get out of it.

  After shift, I dashed home, showered and poured myself into a size14, trusty, black dress and decided to forgo my super strength, girdle-style knickers. Richard wasn’t a fan. Said that removing them took up valuable energy required for the next stage in the process. Bugger it, I would just have to breathe in all night and hope there was nothing irresistible on the buffet.

  By the time Richard arrived, I was on my second glass of Lambrusco and starting to feel a tad light-headed. I blamed Chloe. If she were here, I’d be fine, but her shift didn’t finish until eight and then she was going straight to the party. She’d been taking on loads of extra shifts since she’d split with Rob. I poured a third glass. Come on, no one met up with their ex and his new partner, or introduced their new boyfriend to their ex, on just two glasses of plonk. Maybe a bottle and a straw would be a better idea.

  ‘Right let’s go then,’ I chirped, with completely fake enthusiasm, before my last shred of confidence deserted me and I ended up staying in with a bottle of wine and watching reruns of ER.

  Okay, I could do this.

  I could.

  It would be fine.

  We were all adults.

  The mantra went over and over in my head all the way there.

  ‘Nervous about introducing me to
Nate?’ Richard asked in his usual forthright way.

  ‘No, not at all.’ It was a lie, but I didn’t want my anxiety to reignite his fake tuberculosis plan, so it was better to play it cool.

  As always, Sasha had gone full on with an elaborate celebration. Somewhere along the line, she’d transformed from a fellow student with a partiality for Pot Noodles and being both funny and offensive when fuelled by cider, to a business studies teacher, who had a real, grown up, fully functioning life. She knew things that I’d never understand, like how to get red wine stains out of carpets and how to maximise and spend the points on those supermarket loyalty cards. That kind of adult stuff was all a blur to me.

  We were greeted at the door of the restaurant with glasses of champagne, and I tried to ignore the slight lurch this caused in my stomach, courtesy of a flashback to the last time I drank expensive bubbly stuff, in a posh hotel at New Year.

  That already seemed like a lifetime ago.

  ‘Liv, you’re here!’ Sasha said, throwing her arms out and hugging me, making balancing the champagne a feat of dexterity.

  ‘I am! Happy birthday, gorgeous!’ I said, giving her a kiss. Gorgeous was an understatement. She was the perfect, stunning vamp in a figure-hugging, red Hervé Léger dress. She always did know how to make an impact.

  If her outfit hadn’t taken my breath away, the decor in the room would have sealed the deal. Curtains of white lights were draped in every window, swing music was playing in the background, glittering chandeliers dropped from the ceiling, and the leather banquettes surrounded dark wood tables with magnificent centrepieces. It was beyond beautiful.

  Sasha’s non-too subtle cough and head tilt in Richard’s direction snapped me back to the present company.

  ‘This is Richard. Richard meet Sasha.’ They shook hands, but before Sasha could chip in with any kind of sarcastic comment or intrusive question, I jumped back in with, ‘First, I’ve to tell you again that Ida said she’s absolutely gutted that she’s not here.’

  ‘Och, we’ll miss her,’ Sasha said. Sometimes it felt like Sasha was closer to my mother than I was. Two Alpha, rebellious personalities that had clicked the moment they met. The first time I took Sasha home, Ida had insisted we venture out on a pub crawl, which culminated in them doing a duet to ‘Suspicious Minds’ in an all-night café, over cream-piled lattes surreptitiously infused with vodka. To Ida’s horror, Sasha’s party had coincided with a Mediterranean cruise she’d had booked for months. She’d consoled me with, ‘Oh, darling, I know it won’t be the same without me, but try to enjoy yourself even though I’m not there.’

  ‘I’ll try, Mum. It’ll be tough though.’ Her mournful expression told me she took every word at face value.

  Justin appeared at Sasha’s side, clutching a bottle of Bud and already swaying slightly. He was always first at the party and last to leave, but Sasha adored his hedonistic, wild ways. They’d never be voted ‘Most Likely to Appear as a Cookie-Cutter Family in a Toothpaste Advert’, but they’d be too busy whipping up fifty folk for a shindig at an hour’s notice to care.

  Justin had now climbed the ladder at one of those slick, work-hard, play-hard finance companies where they all socialised together outside of work too. If it were the eighties, they’d be called Yuppies. Now they were just called – according to Sasha – overpaid, self-indulgent, egotistical twats.

  I hugged him too, before a gentle dig in my back reminded me that I hadn’t made the second introduction.

  ‘Justin, this is Richard.’

  Richard shook Justin’s hand. There was no time for awkward silences or sizing up, as Sasha immediately slipped into tornado mode.

  ‘Right, we’re at a banquette over there. Guard it with your life. I’ve invited everyone from Justin’s work, because, you know, I’m a saint, and they’re spreading around the room like toxic waste.’

  ‘Consider it done,’ I assured her.

  She wasn’t listening, already training her interrogation techniques on Richard. ‘Excellent, but before we go over there, I need a few personal details.’ I should have intervened. I really should. But there was no point trying to halt the inevitable, and if he was going to be around Sasha there was no better way to start than with a baptism of fire. Besides, I was pretty sure he could handle it.

  ‘Shoot,’ he said, laughing.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Manchester.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Thirty-four.’

  ‘Are you now, or have you ever been, married?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Do you have a criminal record?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shame,’ she said, regretfully, before going on, ‘How are you on mind-numbing conversation and acting interested in the face of acute boredom?’

  ‘I’d say well-practised, possibly to expert level.’ Not only was he handling this brilliantly, but he looked like he was actually enjoying it. I suddenly liked him even more.

  ‘And Liv tells us you’re a doctor?’

  ‘I am.’

  I was puzzled by this. Sasha couldn’t care less what anyone did for a living, being unilaterally unimpressed by most people no matter what they did as a day job.

  ‘Thank God. Come on then,’ she said, grabbing his hand and heading in the direction of aforementioned booth. ‘I’ve been making small talk with this woman who has been rambling on about jogging for the last half-hour and I’m ready to press the fire alarms to escape her. You can take over. And if you run out of things to say, you can always offer to stitch up her gob.’

  Richard found this hilarious – we all did – and I felt a pang of gratitude. As far as ice-breakers went, it was perfect… until the moment that we reached the table and I realised that the jogger in question was Nate’s new companion.

  Oh. Bollocks.

  I hadn’t thought this through, but I’d more or less assumed that we’d sit at a different table. Nope. The banquettes sat 8-10, and apparently all the members of our group were congregated at the same one.

  A flush of red heat began to crawl from my chest, to my neck, then carried on upwards, and the rise in my body temperature made me wish I’d brought an extra can of deodorant.

  Oh and Nate? Rabbit. Headlights. By now I was standing right next to him, so I leaned down to give him a kiss on the cheek, just as he tried to get up to do the same. The result was a skull/teeth collision that made me yelp. It was like a bad sitcom moment.

  ‘Sorry! Sorry! Are you okay?’

  ‘Absolutely, I’m fine. It was my fault.’ I wasn’t and it wasn’t, but this was mortifying enough without making it into a bigger drama.

  We managed a mutual cheek kiss without further injury, then decided to just go for it and rip the Band-Aid off.

  ‘Nate, this is Richard. Richard, Nate.’ It was like two silverback gorillas sizing each other up in a room with a buffet, chandeliers and decorative soft furnishings.

  My turn next.

  I turned to the woman sitting next to Nate. If she wasn’t Nate’s new girlfriend, I’d say she was pretty, with blonde hair pulled up in a ponytail, and yes, she looked great in a tiny silky halter neck hanky top thing that I’d only get away with if I wore it on my head.

  But she was Nate’s new girlfriend, so I settled for immature judgement and internal conclusions that her eyes were too far apart so she was obviously a complete cow who loved herself and was as irritating as a suspicious rash.

  Just because we were in the midst of divorcing, didn’t mean that I wasn’t going to have the occasional wobble.

  ‘Hi, I’m Liv.’

  ‘Janet,’ she replied. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  Janet the Jogger. Brilliant.

  There was a pause as we all internally debated who should sit where, then realised we were taking too long and it was turning into a moment of extreme discomfort. Sheer panic made me crack first and I plumped down in the space next to Nate. The poor guy now had his new girlfriend on one side of him and his soon-to
-be-ex-wife on the other.

  Richard sat down next to me, leaving a space on the other side of him and an excruciating silence that was filled a few minutes later when Chloe arrived.

  I was always happy to see her, but never more so than now. She gave Sasha a huge hug and wished her a happy birthday, then handed over a gorgeous gift bag, before kissing her way along the table. She finally slid in next to Richard and they immediately started chatting about some staffing issue on the ward.

  I zoned out, grateful that at least Richard was occupied.

  ‘On a scale of one to ten, how awkward is this?’ Nate whispered in my right ear.

  ‘I’m off that scale and in treble figures,’ I replied, checking in my peripheral vision to see whether Janet the Jogger was listening. She wasn’t. Justin had apparently engaged her in an in-depth conversation about Lycra, whilst – out of Janet’s eye line – Sasha was pretending to shoot herself in the head.

  ‘She seems nice,’ I said, still whispering so only Nate could hear.

  ‘So does he,’ Nate fired back. I wasn’t imagining the gritted teeth, or the fact that he was knocking back his bottle of beer like he had a raging thirst. Maybe he’d jogged here with Janet.

  This was such a bad idea. Why had I ever thought we could pull this off?

  ‘This is such a bad idea,’ Nate said, echoing my thoughts. That had always happened to us. One of us would be thinking something just as the other one said it out loud.

  ‘There had to be a first time though. Maybe it’s good that we’ve done this, got it out of the way and it won’t be as awkward from now on.’ I said, not meaning a word of it.

  He took another slug of his beer, then met my gaze. ‘Do you really believe that?’