‘Don’t,’ I said quietly, with the hope that I could get dressed and slip out to work without Joel waking. It was a coward’s way out, but I had never pretended to be brave. ‘I already hate myself enough.’
I slipped into the room and my heart sank when I found Joel, half dressed, his red-rimmed glasses, which I’d picked out for him, perched on the bridge of his nose, and searching for his T-shirt. ‘Ah, there it is,’ he said with a wide, cheerful grin when he saw me. ‘I’ve been looking for that.’ He walked over and placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘Looks far better on you though.’ He leaned forward and tried to kiss me. I don’t know why he did this. Why he always thought that things were going to change, that this time would be different.
‘Joel, you know what I’m going to say,’ I said, quietly, feeling like the worst person in the world. When we initiated these encounters/booty calls, we would always start off on the same page. Sex, that’s all this was. A tumble in the sheets to alleviate the boredom and loneliness of our otherwise socially barren lives, but in the mornings, he would always think that things had changed, that wounds had been repaired, that I loved him again like I once had.
‘Come on, Nell. There has to be a reason why we keep coming back to each other. I know we let things slip a bit at the end, but we’re meant to be together. I know you feel it.’
I walked over to my chest of drawers, just so he’d stop looking into my eyes like Kaa from The Jungle Book, trying to hypnotise me into loving him again. I found some underwear and awkwardly put it on while keeping Joel’s shirt firmly over the parts that I didn’t want him seeing again.
‘We agreed,’ I almost snapped then tried to soften my voice a little. ‘We agreed that sex was all this was. You agreed to that too, remember?’ I hated who Joel turned me into. I hadn’t been a nice person during our last couple of years together. I could see that now in retrospect and I never wanted to be that version of me again. Bitter and depressed with a volatile anger that needed little to ignite, but the more time I spent with Joel, the more I felt her coming back.
‘I do remember – but, Nell, we’ve been doing this for half a year now. Surely that’s got to tell you something.’
My anger was building by the millisecond. He always made me feel like the villain; it was his specialty. He knew full well that he’d agreed to this. Smash and dash. Moment of weakness. Tryst. One-night stand. Ill-advised mistake. Whatever you wanted to call it, that’s what it was.
‘No, Joel.’ I pulled off his T-shirt, now that everything was hidden behind the appropriate underwear, and held it out to him as I stared firmly into his eyes.
‘Just because we have sex every so often doesn’t mean that things have changed. It doesn’t mean that we’ve fixed anything that was broken. All this does is plaster over the cracks for a while. If we got back together things would turn out the same as they did the first time.’ He took the shirt from me, his eyes wide like a child on the verge of a crying fit. ‘I think that this should be the last time this happens.’ I know that I’d said this before, that I’d meant it all the other times too. Not that I was the only one to blame for this toxic thing we had going, but I couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t see the disappointment in his eyes when his plan to reunite us failed for the umpteenth time. It wasn’t fair on him and his manipulation, making me feel bad about myself for days afterwards, wasn’t fair on me either.
He pulled the Bob Dylan shirt over his head and sniffed. I turned away and went over to the mirror to tackle the task of making myself look presentable for the day.
‘I’ll be seeing you then,’ he said, coming up to the mirror and sliding his hands around my waist. He pulled me backward, pressing his body to mine and kissed me gently on the cheek. Damn him.
I didn’t turn around and watch him leave. This was it. This was the final time.
It had to be.
Chapter Three
The big fat pigeon sitting outside the window taunted me with its freedom and cooed at me through the glass, its beady little eyes goading me into distress. I’d been watching it and it had been watching me, in some sort of wild-west-style stare-off, ever since I returned from the bathroom a few minutes ago. It strutted about on the windowsill, more compact than your regular crumb scavenger that hangs around outside Greggs awaiting a morsel of pastry from a sausage and bean melt. No one in the office probably knew that this taunting little bird was a tumbler pigeon, if they’d even noticed it at all. I only knew what it was because my uncle had been a pigeon fancier and had kept several different types over the years.
I’d always found the term pigeon fancier a little disconcerting, giving me mental images of fully-grown men looking at pigeons the way Bob Hoskins looks at Jessica Rabbit.
The pigeon turned away from me, as if its daily quota of interest in my life had run dry and I didn’t blame it. How that mistake at the café yesterday and the subsequent Joel-based mistake had haunted me like a bad odour ever since, turning everything sour. The pigeon stepped from the sill, unfurling its wings and taking off into the dusk sky, disappearing before I had chance to
