Nothing New for Sophie Drew: a heart-warming romantic comedy - Katey Lovell (best english novels for beginners .txt) 📗

June

Chapter 18

Going back to work after a bank holiday weekend was never anything other than bog-awful, but having Kath, Jane and Marcie’s full attention made it marginally more bearable. They’d spent all morning grilling me for information about my weekend, and as I gave them the full story, from how Tawna’s Friday night matchmaking attempts had backfired right through to the meeting with Max at the car boot sale, they oohed and aahed in all the right places. By the time I’d told them everything, they were armed with questions which they fired at me at pace.

“Are you going to see Max again?” (Jane)

“Did you invite him back to your place?” (Kath)

“What happened to the vase? Did you buy it?” (Marcie)

“What did Eve think of Max?” (Jane)

I answered as honestly as I could. “I promised to drop some unwanted clothes into the charity shop soon so I’ll see him then. Of course I didn’t invite him back to my place. Neither of us bought the vase; it had a hairline crack along the bottom and we thought it would leak. Eve thought Max was lovely, but I think she’d say that about anyone who wasn’t Darius. Any more questions?” I’d laughed, while secretly enjoying my moment in the spotlight. The weekend debriefs usually centred on Kath’s latest conquests rather than my messed-up attempt at adulthood.

“So is Darius finally out of the picture for good?” Marcie asked, to looks of disbelief from our colleagues.

I avoided making eye contact, not wanting to think about the money he’d asked me to loan him. We were already in June, I had little more than a fortnight left to make a decision about whether or not to give him the cash. And as lovely as Max seemed, the same thought played on repeat in my mind – could someone I’d known a matter of months compare with the person I’d thought was my forever?

“Obviously. Duh.” Kath’s look was scathing.

“She loved Darius for years,” Marcie snapped back. “You can’t rub those feelings away. Our hearts aren’t whiteboards that can be wiped clean.”

Trust Marcie to go for an office-based analogy, I’d thought, wondering why people were again doing that irritating thing where they talked about me as though I couldn’t hear them.

“He doesn’t deserve our Sophie,” Jane said and, like a mother hen, passed me the tub of luxury rocky road chunks, as though they were the answer to all my problems. The decadent dark chocolate melted unveiling the springy texture of the marshmallows and a raisin burst, its tangy juices mingling with the chocolate. It was orgasmic, briefly taking my mind away from the battles of my heart and head. My junk food intake was mainly limited to whatever was going begging at work and so the good stuff tasted particularly divine.

“You don’t need to worry about me,” I said, through a mouthful of chocolate. “I know what I’m doing.”

I tightly crossed the fingers on both of my hands. Know what I’m doing? Yeah, right.

I still hadn’t made my mind up about giving Darius the money. Trying to rid my mind of Summer’s innocent face had been all but impossible. In a particularly hormonal moment, I’d considered calling the credit card company to see if they’d issue me with another card on my account seeing as I’d paid well over my minimum repayments, but every time I’d started dialling the number I’d quickly pressed the “end call” button, knowing they’d laugh me out of town. It would only ever have been a query, not an action, but like Marcie and Tawna have pointed out, Darius and I have a history. There’s a sense of loyalty and although I hated to admit it, even to myself, there had been moments recently when being near him had made my stomach clench in a not-entirely-unpleasant way.

But then there was Max, who seemed to be a decent, kind man, driving me to distraction. I didn’t know him well enough to judge his character – he could be into bondage or hurting kittens or something really perverse like eating baked beans cold from the tin – but there was a definite attraction. Would it be worth risking everything on the unknown? Everyone has flaws, but at least Darius’s were familiar. Nothing he could do would surprise me, and maybe it really was better the devil you know: since starting my challenge I’d become so used to the “make do and mend” mentality that the thought of a new anything, even a new man, seemed unnecessary and frivolous.

But Max makes you happy, said a little voice in my ear. Think of how free you feel when you’re with him.

But Summer, whispered a voice in my other ear, but Summer. But Summer. But Summer.

By the time Saturday rolled back around, I’d done enough overthinking to last me a lifetime. Tawna called with the sole purpose of letting me know Darius had been asking Johnny after me on a lads’ night out (reminding me the deadline for the loan was just over a week away, as if I could have forgotten), and Eve had been gushing about Max’s positive attributes with such gusto that it wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d announced she was going to make a play for him herself. Well, not quite, because Eve wasn’t like that, but she’d delighted in reminding me how he’d been interested in me and my well-being. “Not like Darius,” Eve had said snarkily, “where everything was always about him.” That was when I made the decision to be proactive and ask Max on a date. A real, honest-to-goodness date.

When I reached Max’s charity shop (because that’s what it’d be known as forevermore in my mind) it was much warmer, and the heat, combined with lugging the bags full of Marie Kondo-ed clothes (which seemed far heavier after carrying them for a while with the handles cutting into my