Page 93 of Mad About You

‘Oh, what convoluted crap. He’s only doing that because he’s got what we quaintly call themajor hotsfor you.’

‘You deduced that on a visit where you turned up steaming drunk and smacked him in the face?!’

‘No. I deduced that when I called him at his place of work, to apologise for said incident.’

Jon blinked and looked away and Harriet kept her face straight while thinking:what?

‘You … you called him?’ she asked, trying to remain dispassionate while unsure of her ground.

‘Well. It was only right that I apologised. It was the right thing to do.’ He looked uncomfortable and Harriet sussed that it was a ‘getting out in front of the situation’ in order to protect his employment, and his masculinity couldn’t bear for her to know he’d done some tactical grovelling. He shifted his weight. ‘We both agreed to keep the conversation between us. He said he’d not press charges if I stayed away from you. I hardly think that’s a pact you’d make if you weren’t pretty keen on the lady involved.’

‘I think Cal was trying to keep things calm around his property,’ Harriet said, uncertainly.

‘Hah. The property being a redhead. I know my enemy when I encounter him. I’ll start practising my surprised face for when news of your marriage reaches me. Despite your trenchant objections.’

He rolled his eyes. Harriet didn’t know how to respond to this lunacy.

‘The bottom line here,Hats, is I don’t care if you’ve finally experienced some agonies, or if I’ve stepped over imaginary lines you’ve drawn. If you’ve come here to ask me to feelremorseful for exercising my single-guy freedoms, you’re shit out of luck.’

Harriet’s hangover, the effective loss of a dear friend, the upheavals of Scott Dyer: her response was more of an exhausted outburst.

‘OK then! Congratulations on being a shitty person with some seriously twisted, misogynistic justifications for hate-shagging one of his ex’s best friends, weeks after our break-up. My respect for you is entirely gone,’ Harriet said.

‘It was never there in the first place,’ he shot back.

‘That’s not true. What happened to your goodbyes to me, saying you wanted to stay on good terms, be there for me if I ever wanted to talk?’

Jon looked uneasy. ‘I realised it wasn’t being reciprocated.’

‘Translation: that offer wasn’t without strings, I was supposed to start rewarding it somehow. You think you treat women as equals, but you don’t. You liked and respected me for as long as I was your girlfriend. When I didn’t want a relationship anymore, it was apparently inconceivable to you to both be sadandcarry on liking me and respecting me. You using Roxy is part of the same contempt.’

‘Roxanne is a fling. That’s all.’

God, was she supposed to be jealous, to fight to win Jon back?

‘Cool. Whatever. It makes no difference to me, though you should probably tell her.’

Harriet turned to leave, and Jon said: ‘Wait. There’s something I want to say.’

He cleared his throat. When he spoke, he was level, the cocky register had gone.

‘I always knew you weren’t in love with me.’

These words hung in the particularly velvet silence of a cavernous house full of purring appliances.

‘I knew I had you on the rebound – I know now fromwho– and I decided not to question my luck. Because I knew from our first date that I was an absolute goner. You weren’t anything like the women I’d been out with before, or what I’d have said I was looking for. Then there you were. Everything I didn’t know I wanted, and somehow that is the most addictive thing of all. With your dry humour and your modesty and that face and that laugh. That vulnerability you’re so determined not to display. I decided to be the best partner I could be, to throw my energies into that and hope either that would be enough, or that you’d fall in love along the way. But as you said, you didn’t feel what you needed to feel and I think you knew that very early on. So what I think now is … it wasn’t fair for you to carry on. You’re too emotionally intelligent not to have known how far apart our expectations were. And,’ he paused here, distress crossing his face, ‘I think with that proposal, Iwassubconsciously trying to trap you. I knew I’d not get a yes, fair and square. Which is an awful culpability to have to admit on my part. But getting to that point? I think you have to admit it’s both our faults.’

Harriet’s stomach clenched. This was deeply uncomfortable to hear, because it was mostly, if not wholly, accurate.

‘I’m told the character, your ex who posted on Facebook, is a truly nasty piece of work. I certainly didn’t recognise the person he described,’ Jon added.

Harriet folded her arms, across the pain behind her ribs.

‘In summary. I’m truly sorry for the ordeal you had before you met me, a lot makes more sense now I know about him. But my God, you made us both pay for it,’ Jon said, his voice raw.

Harriet swallowed and forced herself to meet his eyes, as they welled up. She weighed her words, before she spoke, and willed her voice to stay steady.

‘You’re right. But I didn’t fail to tell you about Scott to purposely shut you out; I shut myself out from it too. I wanted to carry on my life without it being important to me, so I acted like it wasn’t. Maybe it was the same coping mechanism I had with my parents. If you give something bad an importance, then you let it define you.You’ve given it power, that’s what I thought. But in fact, by not facing it, I was giving it power over me.’ She took a deep breath, as the next words weren’t easy to say. ‘I didn’t set out to hurt you, Jon. I felt safe with you, and in the end that wasn’t enough. I’m sorry.’

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