‘Because it’s in the past. Because it doesn’t matter anymore.’
‘But it does, because it looks like it’s still making you feel like shit.’
‘Tell us about it, lovely.’ Daisy moves to the sofa, laying her hand over Vee’s. ‘A problem shared—’
‘Is usually a trending topic in my line of work.’
We all laugh, the cloud of disharmony melting along with the sounds.
‘Look, I haven’t told you because it’s something that happened a long time ago. He was the love of my young life, and things ended badly.’
‘Relationships hardly ever end with a hale and hearty handshake,’ Daisy offers. ‘Breakups are by their nature unpleasant.’
‘I didn’t say it was unpleasant,’ she replies with a familiar gleam in her eye. A gleam that reminds me of nights where lacklustre waiting staff are reprimanded and bothersome men put in their place. Yep, Vee is that friend. The feisty one. ‘In fact, I’d say it was almost satisfying. For me, at least. And once I’d got over the fact that he was cheating on me. Anyway, it was all a long time ago. You’re sure you want to hear this?’
‘Only if you want to tell us,’ I answer on behalf of us both.
‘Well, take this as a warning, young Padawan. He and I may not have met through a dating app, but technology played a part in his deceit. So, we’d been going out about a year, which is positively decades in teenage terms. He was my first proper boyfriend. The boy I gifted my virginity to, though I suppose I was a little less passive in the whole gifting thing. You could say I was besotted and head over heels in love. And devastated when I found out he’d been sliding into other girls dm’s.’
‘He’d been what?’ Daisy asks, perplexed. Technology and Dais are not best of friends. In fact, I’m pretty sure she’d still be using a flip phone if the ancient artefact hadn’t died a year ago.
‘He’d been messaging other girls on Facebook,’ I say, looking at Vee for confirmation. ‘Sliding into their dm’s is what it’s called these days.’
‘Do they? Sounds like a dick move, whatever you want to call it.’
‘Yes, my roommate at the time seemed to think so, too. So between us, once the crying was all over, and after I swore I would not let any man turn me into my mother, we made a fake Facebook profile, complete with sexy profile pictures, and set to sending friend requests to people in his social circle. His friends, mainly.’
‘Devious,’ I say agreeably. I get it. I really do.
‘Young men are so gullible. It was probably a little petty on my part, but I maintain it was no less than he deserved.’
‘That’s more like the Vee I know and love. What was next?’
‘We sent him a friend request and persuaded him we, she, had met him at a party a little while before. That they’d flirted, made out, but that it hadn’t gone any farther because she had a boyfriend. And now she hadn’t . . . because she couldn’t get my boyfriend out of her head.’
I notice she refuses to speak of him by name.
‘And he fell for it?’
‘Oh, he fell for it. Fell for the flattery hook, line, and sinking bloody sinker.’
I find myself wiggling to the end of the chair cushion, leaning forward almost eagerly. And not to better reach the veggie chips. ‘Then what happened?’
‘Phone calls. Phone calls where my roommate pretended to be Kirsty, the lovely Scots lass who was desperate to see him again. My roommate, Jayne, was heavily into amateur dramatics, even if I thought her Scottish accent was a bit dodgy, not that he appeared to notice.’
‘He was probably too swept up in the flattery of it all.’
‘And the dirty talk.’
‘Oh, the details.’
‘Yes, the devil is in the details. Or maybe the underwear of a cheating boyfriend. You just can’t mess around with people’s feelings. It’s wrong.’ Why does this fill like a warning directed me? ‘I’m nobody’s doormat.’
‘This we already know,’ Daisy says, ‘but I didn’t think you were the type who went in for revenge.’
‘I didn’t want revenge. Not really. He pretended to be something he wasn’t—single—while pledging his heart to me. I wanted to teach him a lesson. In exchange for the one he taught me. One I’ve been hanging onto since. And that lesson is I’m not made for relationships. I opened my heart to him, and he chucked it on the floor, then trampled on it in his haste to get into another girl’s knickers. All while stringing me along, acting like everything was normal. Pretending to still be the person I thought he was. He was the first man I ever got close to, emotionally and physically, and I hadn’t had a whole lot of positive role models up until that point. I held him up as an example of what a man could be. And I was a fool. He hurt me. I wasn’t going to let him get away with that.’
The three of us fall quiet for a moment, perhaps processing her words.
