True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop

by Annie Darling

  ‘It was a metaphor,’ Verity protested but it was weak because although she’d dished it in large quantities, it wasn’t much fun having it dished right back at you.

  ‘My mistake. You’re an “introvert”.’ Johnny took his hands away from her wrists so he could make air-quotes like introvert wasn’t even a real word. ‘Even though you have a huge family, friends, pets, can walk away from loneliness any time you want, apparently all that love and affection is too much effort.’

  Everything Verity had told Johnny, all the secrets she’d trusted him with, he was twisting out of shape so they didn’t even resemble the truth any more. ‘I hate you,’ she flung at him.

  ‘And I hate you,’ he snarled back at her. Verity raised her hand. Maybe it was to hit him, maybe to push him away, but instead her hand was at the back of his neck, fingers sliding into his hair, and Johnny’s hands were around Verity’s waist to haul her closer and they seemed to be … it couldn’t be … but they were …

  Kissing.

  Kissing like it was the end of the world.

  Kissing like they couldn’t get enough of each other.

  Kissing like two people who hadn’t kissed anyone in months, years.

  Mouths locked together, hands clutching, bodies straining towards each other.

  It turned out that Verity had desires that couldn’t be satisfied with a bar of chocolate and a good book. All that longing and need that she’d pointedly ignored now rose up and clamoured for release. But it wasn’t a case that any man would do; this was all for Johnny.

  Though Verity hated Johnny in this moment, it was as if Verity’s body already knew Johnny’s touch and curved obediently under his hands. The feel of his mouth on hers was shockingly new but also comfortingly familiar.

  ‘Oh, Verity,’ Johnny whispered against her skin because somehow during all the kissing and clutching, his shirt had come unbuttoned and her dress with its jaunty sailboats had been pulled over her head and tossed into a far corner of the library. ‘What you do to me.’

  ‘I’m very angry with you,’ Verity whispered back, because she didn’t want Johnny to think he could kiss her into the middle of next week and all was forgiven. ‘But I will die if you don’t kiss me again.’

  There was more kissing. Then cannoning off side tables and reading chairs until the safest thing to do was to collapse onto a red velvet sofa and that way all of Johnny was pressed against all of Verity and it was much easier to wriggle even closer and her last coherent thought before she wrapped her legs tight around him was, ‘I can’t believe we’re going to do it in front of all the books.’

  There was no time to bask in the afterglow. To whisper sweet words like lovers did because they weren’t lovers but two people who’d been fuelled by anger and betrayal and had just made the mother of almighty mistakes.

  They’d come to their senses, or so Verity had thought, backs to each other as they hunted for items of clothing that had been so hastily discarded.

  Then Verity had remembered their argument all over again. ‘Was that insipid enough for you?’ she hurled at Johnny who was hunting for his left shoe.

  ‘And was that your idea of a pity shag? Because you feel sorry for me?’

  They argued in whispers all the way back to their room. Then argued in much louder voices once they’d closed the door, until it happened all over again.

  The kissing.

  The hands.

  The frantic removal of their clothes.

  The sex.

  Then they dozed, still wrapped round each other, only stirring to begin all over again without another argument as foreplay, but just for the sheer hell of it because what they’d done twice before had felt so good.

  Now it was four in the morning and Verity was sitting up in bed, hugging her legs, chin resting on her knees as she watched Johnny sleep.

  Not in a creepy way but so she could memorise all the details; the long sweep of his spine, the freckles that dotted his shoulders, the disarray of his fair hair rumpled by her own hands. She even catalogued each gentle snore.

  Then Verity got off the bed and, bathed in the glow of the moonlight, she quietly packed her case.

  She couldn’t stay any longer, not when she hated Johnny. But also, though she could hardly say when it had come about, she loved him too. Wanted to save him from Marissa’s evil clutches not so he could love another woman more deserving of him, but because Verity had wanted him to love her. Only her.

  She’d thought that Johnny was being unbelievably arrogant when he kept telling her not to fall in love with him. She hadn’t realised that he was giving her fair warning and now it was too late.

  Loving Johnny was an exercise in futility. It could lead to nothing, no happy ever after, just heartache and despair.

  Johnny hated her. He’d said so. And even if he didn’t, he was in love with Marissa. Had been for the last seventeen years and having sex three times with Verity wasn’t going to be the magic cure to that. Not even close!

  To stay and have to suffer through the awkward morning after then come face to face with Marissa and Harry at some point before they left – it didn’t even bear thinking about.

  So, it was better not to think at all but simply leave.

  Verity tiptoed her way through the silent house, hoping that there weren’t any motion sensor alarms or locked doors to impede her progress. But they were on an island; someone would have to be really determined to want to break in … or break out.

  As she tripped down the stone steps that led to the beach, Verity realised that there was something stopping her speedy getaway; two hundred and fifty metres of sea.

  Short of either waking up Jeremy, the owner, or the housekeeper’s husband who was the island’s general factotum, there was no way back to the mainland unless Verity hotwired the sea tractor. And there was no way that Verity could do that; she couldn’t even get enough of a phone signal to google the instructions.

  She gazed out on the water, the moon reflected back at her on each ripple of each wave. Then she sank to her knees. Verity had quite a cordial relationship with God, both of them free to do their own thing, but now she wondered if praying, really praying, might help, even though she’d just had sex three times out of wedlock. And it wasn’t even as if she were a virgin before that.

  Also she lied. It had been her pretend boyfriend that she’d just had sex three times with after all. And she coveted that pretend boyfriend though his heart belonged to another and she’d pretty much broken every commandment there was, although she hadn’t murdered anyone as yet. Though that could all change if she was forced to spend any more time in close proximity with Marissa.

  Oh God …

  The ripples of the sea seemed especially ripply, given the stillness of the early morning. The sky was yet to lighten from a deep navy blue, hardly a breeze to stir the water and yet it was stirring; the waves small but insistent. Verity watched for long agonising minutes, hardly able to believe her eyes until the water parted to reveal the sandy seabed beneath.

  Just like God had parted the Red Sea for the Israelites, so he was parting a much smaller expanse of water for Verity so she could grab her case and run across the causeway back to the mainland like she was Usain Bolt determined to smash his own world record.

  26

  ‘She was humbled, she was grieved; she repented, though she hardly knew of what.’

  When Verity had broken up with Adam and they’d flown back from Amsterdam in their allocated seats, side by side, every time Verity had caught his eye, he’d looked at her like she was a monster who’d killed his entire family, pets, friends.

  They’d formally parted company at Customs. ‘Have a nice life,’ Adam had tried to say with icy dignity but it had come out as a choked cry and, as Verity travelled back into London on the tube, her mind was made up. It was very clear what she needed to do to make sure that she’d never have to feel this horrible shaming combination of guilt and relief, to never again be responsible for makin
g a man cry. In future, she would shun all romantic attachments.

  Although she was sure that she had loved Adam, had declared that love to him and her sceptical sisters repeatedly, Verity had hardly mourned the end of it. There hadn’t been any need to drink too much wine, eat a lot of ice cream and have her friends say, ‘He was a bastard and I never liked him anyway!’ Those were the rituals, which her sisters all observed when they were dumped, but Verity managed without them. Compared to how much she’d missed the quiet pleasure of her own company in the three years that she and Adam had been dating, she hardly missed him at all.

  But this time? It felt as if Johnny had taken out her heart, kicked it about, rubbed salt into its many open wounds then stuffed it back into her chest cavity. Because carelessly, without even realising it, Verity had given him that heart, even though she’d known Johnny would never return the favour. But then, his heart wasn’t his to give – Marissa had it under lock and key.

  ‘Along with his balls,’ Merry had said savagely, when she arrived at Exeter St Davids station to pick Verity up the Sunday morning of her escape from Wimsey House.

  After crossing the miraculously parted sea, Verity had walked through Lower Meryton, until she’d arrived at Upper Meryton just as the local vicar and his wife, early risers, were doing a spot of t’ai chi on the vicarage lawn. Verity had begged for their assistance and it turned out that the Reverend Michaels had met her father several times. He also knew of a parishioner who was driving to Exeter that morning to pick up their in-laws for Sunday lunch because most of the South West rail network was down that weekend, necessitating a seven a.m. phone call to Merry while the vicar and his wife made Verity breakfast.

  Merry hadn’t even changed out of her pyjamas. She’d borrowed Dougie’s mother’s car and had leadfooted it all the way to Exeter so she was there to pick up Verity by eleven.

  Verity had sworn to be economical with the truth, not go into too much detail, no oversharing, but as soon as she’d opened the passenger door of Dougie’s mum’s Nissan Micra and seen Merry’s familiar face and its put-upon expression, she had burst into tears.

  Then it had all come spilling out. Everything. Merry had managed to keep silent, only gasping in indignation as Verity had given her a play-by-play of Marissa’s evil words and deeds. Then she yelled, ‘Three times? Three times? Three times! Oh my God!’ and missed the turn-off for the motorway.

  It seemed to Verity that she spent the whole journey back to London crying, hiccupping or blowing her nose. That had been three weeks ago and she was still crying, hiccupping and dealing with a permanently runny nose.

  There had even been instances of crying at work, which went against Verity’s whole brand ethos. All it took to get her tear ducts going into a frantic production drive was for Posy to relay the plot of a particularly angst-ridden romance she was reading or Mattie to run out of clotted cream scones before the afternoon tea break or Nina to state firmly that Verity needed to go out on the pull because ‘there were plenty more fish in the sea’. And that ‘The only way to get over someone is to get under someone else,’ or ‘You have to get back on the horse as soon as possible after it’s thrown you to the ground, even if you feel like you’ve broken every bone in your body.’

  Nina had a frightening amount of advice for the newly dumped, though Verity couldn’t say if she was the dumped or the dumpee. Or if she had any right to have turned into a sniffing, snivelling shadow of her former self, when it hadn’t even been a proper relationship.

  She’d thought, at least, that it had been a proper friendship until those horrible moments in the library having to listen to what Johnny really thought about her. He hadn’t leapt to Verity’s defence when Marissa had said that she was insipid, boring and basic, so he must have agreed with his spiteful inamorata. Worse! He’d described Verity as a means to an end, which meant that all the weeks they’d spent together, every secret Verity had shared with Johnny, even taking him home to meet her family, had been a lie. Simply a way to make the relationship look convincing enough that Marissa would become jealous, realise what she was missing, leave Harry and declare her undying love for Johnny.

  Well, it had all been for nothing, because Marissa would never leave Harry and Johnny was a lost cause.

  Verity even offered up a prayer to St Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, that perhaps Johnny wasn’t as far gone as she’d thought. She’d settle simply for being friends again if he got in touch and was suitably contrite. Except Verity really had no interest in being friends with Johnny; she wanted all of him, even though she’d sworn off that sort of thing. And no wonder; even in her wildest imaginings, she’d never have dreamed that this sort of thing could hurt so much.

  As it was, Verity hardly recognised the teary, snotty girl she’d become who now answered the phone on the first ring, just in case it was Johnny. Who got the flutters every time she heard the ping alerting her to a new email or text, though they were never from Johnny but usually from one of her sisters phoning to commiserate and tell her again that Johnny was a bastard. Much to Posy’s consternation, because she said Verity looked like she worked for a company called Unhappy Ever After, Verity even found herself haunting the shop floor, ever hopeful that each customer that set foot through the door might be him, but Johnny remained a no-show.

  After work was even harder, because for the first time since records began, Verity was sick of her own company. Nina had given Gervaise, the sexually fluid performance artist, another chance so she was out every evening. Posy, unreasonably, wanted to spend time with her new husband. Tom was very close to finishing his mysterious PhD dissertation so couldn’t be persuaded to The Midnight Bell much, which left only Merry, who to her credit was a frequent visitor to the flat above the shop.

  Not just because it was part of the sister job description but because Con had charged them with making industrial quantities of wedding bunting. ‘It’s more personal if you make it,’ she’d said, when they’d begged her to just buy bunting off the internet like any normal person. Verity was glad not to be alone though she had to ban Merry from listing the many tortures she’d inflict on Johnny if their paths ever crossed, because even Johnny didn’t deserve to have his toenails slowly detached from his nail beds. So Verity and Merry would sit on Verity’s sofa, and sometimes in the pub, cutting, pinning, sewing and bitching about Con until, inevitably, Verity would look up to see Merry staring at her in disbelief. Then Merry would shake her head, ‘Three times? Three times! And since then no emails, no phone calls, no texts to make sure that you didn’t actually drown making your escape. What a bastard. Oooh! I’d love to get my hands on him. Shall I tell you what I’m going to do to him?’

  ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘First I’ll flay him alive with a blunt potato peeler from the pound shop …’

  Still, it was better than evenings spent with a box of tissues and her own maudlin thoughts for company. Even Pride and Prejudice was no longer the comfort that it usually was, for when Verity asked herself what would Elizabeth Bennet do, the answer wasn’t at all helpful.

  ‘She was humbled, she was grieved; she repented, though she hardly knew of what. She became jealous of his esteem, when she could no longer hope to be benefited by it. She wanted to hear of him, when there seemed the least chance of gaining intelligence. She was convinced that she could have been happy with him, when it was no longer likely they should meet.’

  No, there was no solace to be found among the pages of her favourite book and Verity took little pleasure in knowing that she wasn’t alone in feeling just like the soggy, wadded-up tissues piled around her. That despair and heartache transcended space and time. Were universal. Far from being a special suffering snowflake, Verity was just like any other sucker who had been bruised by a love affair gone wrong.

  Why hadn’t it hurt like this after Adam? Verity was beginning to suspect that, despite all the times she’d read Pride and Prejudice, she hadn’t really known what love was like. Hadn’t ex
perienced it until now. And it was only now that Verity could truly appreciate how much she’d hurt Adam. If she’d made him feel even half as wretched as she had felt ever since her moonlit flit from Cornwall, then she owed him one hell of an apology. So, one evening when she was sick of thinking about Johnny and crying and particularly sick of making bunting, she logged on to FaceUpp, Sebastian Thorndyke’s social media network that the whole world and his wife was signed up to.

  It was easy enough to find Adam through mutual university friends. He was still living in London and working at Goldsmiths College though he didn’t have any relationship information listed. Probably because Verity and her standoffish, emotionally stunted ways had scarred Adam for life. Still, there was only one way to find out for sure.

  Verity hoped her message would read as a heartfelt apology, something she’d agonised over for months, and not something she’d written while under the influence of a bottle of Chenin Blanc.

  Hey Adam

  It’s been a long time. I hope life is treating you kindly.

  I’m good. Still working at that bookshop, still in possession of four sisters, still a bit odd.

  Talking of being a bit odd, I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching of late and I really must apologise for how I behaved towards you when we were dating. If I ever came across as being quite detached … Actually, I was very detached. I needed so much space that I constantly pushed you away. The more I think about it, the more I realise that I was a terrible girlfriend. I still go clammy when I think about how vile I was when you took me to Amsterdam for my birthday because you never deserved that. You didn’t deserve any of it.

  I have thought about you and that morning in Amsterdam quite a lot over the years and I’d hate to think that what you said came true. That I’d ruined you and that you were never going to be able to love another woman. That hasn’t happened, has it? Oh God, please say it hasn’t.