Fiona Harper - The Other Us - the RONA winning perfect second chance romance to curl up with

But then something clicks inside my head and I realise this is what I want. This makes everything so much easier, because I know I’m making … that I’ve made … the right choice.

‘I know I said we weren’t breaking up last night, but maybe we should.’

Dan’s head snaps round. That got his attention. ‘What?’ he says, although I’m pretty certain he heard every syllable.

‘I want to end it.’ Even though I’m trying to steel myself against it, I flinch inwardly as my words hit home and Dan’s face falls. All the righteous, disgruntled anger he’s been wearing as a shield melts away, leaving only confusion.

He stands up. ‘What are you saying?’

‘It’s over, Dan. You and me. It’s just not working.’

He shakes his head. ‘Last week it was working … A month before that it was working … What’s changed?’

I start to answer but the way his eyes have filled up arrests me. The backs of my eyeballs start to sting too and I will them to stop. You did this, I try to tell him silently as I look at him. Not yet, maybe. But you will. You have no one but yourself to blame.

He swallows. ‘Are you sure? Can’t we work on this?’

‘No,’ I say firmly. ‘Sorry.’

I can tell, in the midst of his confusion, Dan is finding my certainty off-putting. He scowls as he tries to compute my response, looking at the patterned carpet, complete with greasy kebab stain, for help. After maybe thirty seconds, he looks at me again, and there’s something different in his eyes. Something glittering. ‘Is there someone else?’ His tone makes goosebumps break out on my arms.

I nod. ‘Sort of.’

He lunges towards me, but stops just short of making any kind of physical contact. The look in his eyes is pure fury. ‘You’re sleeping with him?’

That’s when I take the shock and twist it into rage. Hypocrite! I want to yell at him. What you think is the moral high ground is actually stinking, boggy quicksand! And if Dan has one fault it’s that he occupies a whole mountain of moral high ground, probably learned it from his dad. When he said he wanted to wait until marriage, I thought it was sweet and old-fashioned, if a bit frustrating. I thought it signalled up what an upright and honourable guy he must be. Now I start to wonder if the premature marriage proposal has more to do with the fact he’s panting for it rather than everlasting love. His sex drive clearly overrode his morals in our future life.

I pull myself up straighter. ‘No. It’s nothing like that,’ I say, and I try not to blush when I remember the night before with Jude, when it almost had been very much like that, until I’d come to my senses and remembered I hadn’t actually broken up with Dan yet. Even the fact I’d kissed him made me feel horribly disloyal this morning.

‘Then what are you flipping well talking about?’

Even now he can’t quite bring himself to say the F-word. Even when I’m prising his heart from his chest and crushing it in my fingers. A part of me despises him for it.

‘I’m saying that I have feelings for someone else. Feelings I haven’t acted upon – ’ Dan snorts but I carry on undaunted. ‘Feelings that I shouldn’t be having if I’m ready to marry you.’

‘Jude?’ he whispers and his long frame crumples into the armchair nearby.

‘Yes,’ I say, and my voice is hoarse.

Dan shakes his head. ‘I always knew that guy was trouble …’

‘It wasn’t him. It was me … or at least it was that I found myself thinking about him all the time, even when I knew I shouldn’t.’

This is the most honest thing I’ve said to my husband in about five years. I also realise that maybe if I’d told him this in the future, maybe if he’d had the guts to tell me the same when his eye had started to wander, that we wouldn’t have ended up in the horrible situation we did, lying to each other every day by omission, pretending we were happy when really we were just coasting.

We talk then. Properly. Honestly. It’s not comfortable and I’m not sure it makes either of us feel any better, but when he walks me to the front door, I feel as if we’ve reached a shaky kind of resolution. Only time will tell if it holds or not.

And then I walk out of Dan’s house, out of his life, and into my new one, full of the hope only a future full of blank pages can bring.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I spend the rest of the day with Jude. Even though he should be revising and I should be putting the finishing touches to my final art piece. We catch the Tube into central London, wander through Portobello market hand in hand and then through Kensington Gardens. It’s odd, expecting to see the Princess Diana memorial fountain there then realising it isn’t because she’s still alive somewhere, miserable in her fabulous life.

As we amble past the spot it will one day occupy, Jude stops, turns and kisses me. I have the sudden urge to write to Diana, to tell her she only has one life to live and she might as well grab happiness while she can. No one knows how many days they have left. I also consider telling her to wear a seatbelt at all times, but as quickly as the idea comes into my head, I dismiss it. Even if I sent it, the letter would be intercepted and rammed into a shredder.

‘Come back to mine …’ Jude whispers in my ear. I pull away and smile at him. I feel like a different person today, someone to whom yesterday’s rules don’t apply. For the first time in years I feel free to do what I want instead of what I should. Number one on that list is Jude. I’m tired of being the good girl.

So that’s what I do. I spent a lazy, warm summer afternoon in bed with Jude, and as the sun starts to set I kiss him at his door and leave him. I’ve promised I’ll go and see Becca’s drama performance tonight.

She’s already left the flat when I get back. I’ve forgotten exactly what time she needed to leave for the studio theatre to get ready and I must have missed her. Since we hadn’t planned to go together but meet up after the show, I potter round the flat, changing into the dress I bought in Oxford Street and grabbing a cropped denim jacket.

Becca is too busy to come out from backstage before the performance, so I find a seat with a few of her drama friends that I remember being on a nodding basis with and I watch A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Becca is playing Titania.

Afterwards, I go and wait outside the main entrance. The small studio theatre is used by both the drama and the dance department and doesn’t have anything as posh as a stage door. Most of the rest of the cast have appeared, been told in megaphone-loud voices how wonderful they were by their friends and have drifted off to the bar by the time Becca appears.

She marches out, looking a little strange in her stonewashed jeans and hot-pink T-shirt but with her green-and-silver-glittery stage make-up still streaked across her face. She nods at me then sets off at a blistering pace down the narrow path that leads back towards the main buildings of the campus.

‘What’s up?’ I ask, trotting after her. ‘You were amazing! Best I’ve ever seen you do it! Don’t worry about that fluffed line in your first scene.’

Becca stops, turns and looks at me. ‘You think I’m worried about missing a line?’ she asks, placing her hands on her hips. The stage make-up has the effect of making her look even more ticked off.

‘Aren’t you?’

She shakes her head.

‘Unbelievable … So wrapped up in yourself you just don’t ever see!’

‘What?’ I say and my volume increases to match my level of confusion. ‘What don’t I see?’

Becca pokes me in the hollow between the top of my right boob and my shoulder with an acid-green fingernail. ‘You don’t know what I’m talking about? What planet are you on?’