No, We Can't Be Friends: A totally perfect romantic comedy

by Sophie Ranald

  No, We Can't Be Friends

  A totally laugh-out-loud romantic comedy

  Sophie Ranald

  Books by Sophie Ranald

  Sorry Not Sorry

  It’s Not You It’s Him

  No, We Can’t Be Friends

  Out with the Ex, In with the New

  It Would be Wrong to Steal My Sister’s Boyfriend (Wouldn’t it?)

  A Groom with a View

  Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?

  You Can’t Fall in Love with Your Ex (Can You?)

  AVAILABLE IN AUDIO

  Out with the Ex, In with the New (available in the UK and the US)

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Sorry Not Sorry

  Hear More from Sophie

  Books by Sophie Ranald

  It’s Not You It’s Him

  A Letter from Sophie

  Acknowledgements

  One

  You know that creepy little kid in the movie who was like, ‘I see dead people’? That was me, except what I was seeing was pregnant people.

  It had happened so gradually that it kind of crept up on me without me noticing. If I thought back to maybe a year ago, I could barely recall there being any pregnant women in the world. There must have been, of course, and I must’ve noticed one occasionally and thought, ‘OMG, what happened to that poor woman’s ankles?’, or offered her my seat on the Tube.

  But in recent months, I’d started to see more and more and more of them. In the supermarket queue with their husbands, idly caressing their bellies. On public transport, wearing their little ‘Baby on Board’ badges, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot until I offered them my seat. Even when I checked out celeb gossip, I’d see Beyoncé or Helen George from Call the Midwife (ha!) or the Duchess of Cambridge all fecund and glowing.

  It was like the country was stockpiling baby bumps in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

  I mentioned it to my friend Bianca one day, when we’d stopped for coffee while shopping for a birthday gift for Bianca’s daughter.

  ‘Hey, Bianca, it might just be me, but I’ve noticed a really weird thing…’

  She looked up from her phone. ‘What’s that? We’re going to have to call it a day, I’m afraid. Michael says Charis is missing me and feeling anxious, and I don’t want her upset so close to her big day.’

  I privately thought that Charis, at almost seven years old, was both too young to suffer from anxiety and too old to have her mother rush home when her father should be perfectly capable of parenting his own child, but I didn’t say that, of course.

  I said, ‘Are there, like, loads more pregnant women around than there used to be?’

  Bianca looked at me like I’d grown another head. ‘Of course there aren’t. The birth rate in the UK has been falling more or less steadily for the past forty years.’

  ‘Oh. I suppose you’re right. But it’s really weird. It’s like they’re everywhere.’

  Her expression changed to one of dawning comprehension. ‘Oh, now I get it!’

  ‘Get what?’

  ‘You’re thirty-four, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And you and Myles, you’ve been married for, what, five years?’

  ‘Four years, eight months, two weeks and a day,’ I said. The calculation took me slightly longer than it used to, and I’d stopped counting hours and minutes, which I have to admit I did for about the first year of our relationship. Tragic? Me?

  ‘And you’ve thought about having a family, haven’t you?’

  ‘Well, yeah, of course. I mean, that was always a thing that we knew we’d do, when the time was right.’

  ‘Well, there you go then. This is it. It’s your subconscious mind, or your body clock, telling you that the time is right, right now. You’ve been whacked with the broody stick.’

  ‘But I… I mean, Megan just made me a partner at work. Myles’s practice is still growing. We’ve put the house on the market so we can move somewhere bigger. It can’t be the right time.’

  She shrugged. ‘Tell that to Mother Nature. Here, look at these and tell me what you think.’

  She pulled a package out of a Selfridges shopping bag, carefully unwrapped the tissue paper and handed it to me. She’d mentioned that, as well as looking for loot for her own daughter, she was after a baby-shower gift for a friend, but I’d said I’d leave her to browse that department while I checked out the new Urban Decay eye palette.

  Now, though, I looked intently at the garment in my hands. It was a romper suit in the softest, plushest white cotton, with a hood that had little teddy-bear ears on it. On the front, where a pocket would be on a man’s shirt, was a tiny embroidered bear. I lifted it up to my face and sniffed and, all at once, something in me turned to mush.

  ‘Oh. My. God. That’s the most adorable thing.’

  ‘It’s wildly impractical, of course. Annette’s sprog will puke or poo on it within about three seconds and it’ll never be the same again. But still. Awww.’

  ‘Awww.’ I caressed the garment again, imagining little starfish hands emerging from the sleeves, a tiny scrunched-up face surrounded by the white hood, and the heft of a new-born baby in my arms.

  ‘Well,’ Bianca said, ‘you’d best get cracking then. It’s not like you’re getting any younger.’

  It was typical of Bianca to segue seamlessly from being kind and perceptive to making a remark like that; one of the reasons why, although we hung out together sometimes, I’d never felt I could completely trust her. But now that this window into my own psyche had been opened, I realised she had a point, and alongside the broodiness that was suddenly washing over me was a knife-blade of cold fear: what if she’s right? What if I’ve left it too long?

  We paid for our coffee and said our goodbyes, but I didn’t follow Bianca to the station. I stood on the sidewalk until I was sure she’d gone, and then rummaged in my bag for my cigarettes and lit one, feeling the blissful hit of nicotine as it met my throat.

  That would have to go, of course. That would be the first thing to go.

  A few weeks later, on a Sunday in early autumn, I woke up late. With Myles away, the house had felt huge, empty and a bit creepy, and I’d slept badly, every creak and rustle startling me awake or invading my dreams. Now it was almost eleven, and the looming mountain of my to-do list made further sleep impossible.

  I needed to tackle the overflowing laundry basket. There were a bunch of Myles’s suits that I still hadn’t got around to picking up from the dry cleaner. The monthly supermarket order needed doing – we were almost out of toilet roll, washing-up liquid and, crucially, coffee. I needed to do an epic declutter of our spare bedroom, because an estate agent was coming to photograph the house on Wednesday. I needed to send an anniversary card to Myle
s’s aunt Susan and a birthday card to his mother.

  But there was another, even more important task to do first. I rolled over and found my phone on the nightstand and my thermometer in its case in the drawer. I swiped through to the tracker app and entered the numbers. My temperature hadn’t risen, but that was okay – once it did, it would be too late.

  I walked, naked, to the bathroom, suddenly conscious that I was desperate for a pee. But even that had to wait. I rummaged in the cupboard for the box of ovulation tests and unwrapped one, thinking how weirdly quickly I’d become accustomed to this ritual. I wondered how long it would be before I got to have a pee without there being a stick involved.

  Not to mention the obsessive interest I’d developed in my cervical mucus. A couple of months before, I’d barely thought about the stuff – now, it had become the holy grail of body fluids.

  Superstitiously, I forced myself to clean my teeth and cleanse and moisturise my face before checking the test. If I resisted the urge to stare at it while waiting the full five minutes, it was almost as if it would be more likely to give me the result I wanted – it would like me.

  And, that time, I was rewarded with a little smiley face.

  All my plans for the day were forgotten. I was ovulating. I needed to have sex before the fickle fertile window banged shut again. Only problem was, the guy I needed to have it with was a thousand miles away.

  It wasn’t fair to blame Myles. He was working, after all – it wasn’t like he was off gallivanting or something. And, even if he had been, demanding that he stay home in order to attempt to get me pregnant would have been pretty unreasonable. Even so, I couldn’t help resenting the late-running project that his architecture practice was working on, which had kept him away in Lisbon for great chunks of time over the past few months.

  It would be completely crazy to fly to Portugal for one night to have sex with my husband, obviously. Totally nuts to forget my plans for the day and drive to the airport, get on a plane and surprise him, stay overnight, get an early flight back and head straight into the office to be at my desk on time on Monday morning.

  Nuts. But I was going to do it anyway.

  Five hours later, I was in a taxi, the driver weaving his way at breakneck speed through the winding streets towards the hotel where Myles was staying. Normally, the erratic driving would have freaked me out, but now it suited me just fine. If saying to him, ‘Go faster, I need to have a fuck,’ would have made him drive even more insanely, I’d have happily done it, but there was no need.

  He screeched to a halt outside a grand stone building, and I paid with the wad of euros I’d withdrawn at the airport. I retrieved my bag and made my way inside, towards the reception desk, wondering what the chances were of them letting me head straight up to Myles’s room and surprising him there. I might even whip off my clothes, stand there in front of him in my lacy underwear and go, ‘Ta-dah!’ Too much? Probably.

  But there was no need. Before I got to the desk, I heard his voice behind me – that East London accent I’d fallen in love with, back when it had seemed like the most exotic thing in the world.

  ‘My God. Sloane.’

  I spun around, my face breaking into a smile. But there was no answering pleasure on his face. He looked – for a brief second before gathering me into a hug – absolutely appalled to see me.

  ‘Hi, babe,’ I said. ‘Surprise visit! I’m so glad you were in – I thought I’d have to wait, or head out and try to find you.’

  ‘Well, here I am. I’ve just got back. I was over on site, checking things out. They don’t work on Sundays here, no chance. This is… Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting to see you.’

  He wasn’t, of course. I hadn’t called him, or texted – perhaps I should have done, I thought, looking up at his face. He still didn’t look happy. There was something in his expression that was almost panic.

  ‘I’m quite surprised you haven’t bumped into Bianca, too,’ I joked, trying to lighten the mood. ‘She’s out here this weekend for a hen do. But I was missing you, and you’re not due back until Wednesday, right? So I thought… you know. Shall we go up to your room and drop off my bag? Then maybe head out for something to eat?’

  ‘They haven’t made up the room yet. I don’t know why. Guess there was some mix-up with housekeeping. Let’s leave your stuff down here. I’ll talk to reception now and ask them to sort it while we’re out.’

  He looked tired, I thought. Tired and stressed. Which wasn’t surprising, given he’d been working long hours, in a strange city, on a massive project with workers whose first language wasn’t English. But it wasn’t like I’d been goofing off at home, watching box sets with my feet up. I was stressed too, and busy, and dealing with all the stuff life threw at us – from the estate agent who was marketing our house to the man who’d tried and failed to fix the strange noise the boiler was making, to getting the car serviced – on top of my own job.

  We just needed to reconnect, that was all. Just be together and chill for a bit, and then everything would be okay.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘We can go to that place you were telling me about, near the site where you’re working. I remember you raving about the pork alentejana they do there. Or we could just order room service, if you’re too whacked to go out. I don’t care if the bed’s not made.’

  If I had my way, the bed would be in a state of disarray before too long, anyway.

  ‘Yeah, I think that was Alma’s.’ Again, there was that brief flash of alarm in his face. ‘They’re not open on Sunday nights. There’s a place down the road that does great prego rolls. Come on, let’s head out.’

  After he’d had a word with the concierge about the room and left my bags with them to take upstairs, and I’d been to the bathroom, wishing that I could have a shower and change out of the jeans and sneakers I’d worn on the plane into something more alluring and more suitable for the warm night, we did just that.

  Sitting opposite me in the restaurant, our cold beers leaking rivulets of condensation down onto the bare wood table and a bowl of olives between us – I was starving; I’d only had time to grab a slice of toast at home, and the chickpea and avocado wrap I’d been served on the flight had been about as appetising as the cardboard sleeve it came in – Myles seemed to relax. His phone was on the table between us, but his glances at its screen were becoming less frequent. After asking me the same question about the price the estate agency had suggested listing the house for three times, he finally seemed to have taken in my answer. He’d stopped compulsively smoothing back the wing of silver hair that flopped down over his forehead.

  It had been almost six months, and I was just starting to get used to Myles’s new do – his ‘barnet’, as he called it, using the Cockney rhyming slang I could never get my head around. When I met him six years ago, his hair had been jet black, glossy as a raven’s wing. Then, gradually, grey hairs began to appear and, later, full-on streaks of pure white. It never bothered me – as far as I was concerned, my husband was the sexiest man on two legs, grey or no grey.

  But it freaked him right out.

  ‘I’m too young for this,’ he’d lamented, scrutinising his parting in the mirror. ‘I’m thirty-three. I can’t have grey hair. What do women do?’

  ‘They dye it, obviously,’ I said. I was lucky; my own hair was still an even, rich dark brown, my best feature, and although I spent a small fortune on oils and serums and conditioning treatments, I’d never coloured it.

  ‘But people will notice,’ Myles said. ‘They’ll be like, “Look at that tragic fucker, who can’t deal with going grey.”’

  ‘You look great, honey,’ I replied. ‘It suits you. It’s distinguished.’

  And I took him to bed and proved just how much I fancied him, and assumed that was the end of it. But then, six months ago, Myles had come home one day with the dye job to end all dye jobs. What had been slightly greying dark hair was now a blend of charcoal, ash and deepest midnight violet. I was gobsmacked,
but also delighted – my gorgeous husband looked like a younger and more metrosexual George Clooney.

  Which reminded me, as our food arrived – slices of spicy, just-cooked, chewy steak in floury white buns, with fries and an oily lettuce and tomato salad on the side – what I’d come here for.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘I have something for you. A surprise, to go with my surprise visit.’

  Again, that brief flash of alarm crossed his face. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You know how we’ve been talking for a while now about maybe trying for a baby sometime soon?’

  ‘Yeah, and you said you weren’t ready, and there’s plenty of time.’

  I rummaged in my bag and pulled out the parcel I’d carefully wrapped for him at home, using the white paper printed with silver rattles I’d used for his cousin’s daughter’s christening present a few months before, and passed it over to him.

  ‘What the…?’

  He turned the package over in his hands a few times, then peeled aside the tape and opened it. Inside, I’d put an unopened pack of contraceptive pills, my cigarette lighter and a copy of Pregnancy for Men.

  ‘Pregnancy for Men?’ he read out incredulously. ‘What, has there been some major medical breakthrough I don’t know about?’

  I couldn’t help laughing. ‘That’s not what it means, doofus.’

  ‘But seriously, sweetheart. You’re not…?’

  ‘Not yet. But I’m ready to try, if you are. I came off the Pill. And I haven’t had a cigarette in two weeks. And I…’