Introduction to Viva Voluptuous, 2014
“Ell, I have to be honest, I really don’t want to go on holiday with you. You’re a lovely girl and I would love to have met you when I was younger as I think we could of had a lot of fun. After what happened with Rachel, I just don’t think I’m ready for a proper relationship with you. I hope we can still be friends. Sorry. Mark xx”
Ellie’s breath caught in her throat as she digested what she was reading.
She, Ellie Johnstone, had been dumped.
The perpetrator of the brutal dumping had done it out of the blue while he was at work, knowing full well that Ellie couldn’t call him to make a scene. And he knew, she would have made a scene.
Feeling slightly dizzy, Ellie re-read the message that had just, quite frankly, ruined her afternoon.
“How could he?” she thought, miserably. OK, so maybe they didn’t have the most conventional of relationships, but she was so in love with him that she didn’t care that they’d been seeing each other six months and never actually slept together. They definitely got close to it once, but when he said he wanted to take it slowly, Ellie thought it was cute – when she’d got over the humiliation of being rejected, obviously. After a while it just got…tedious. To Ellie, anyway, their fledgling relationship seemed to consist of feeling let down and a bit frustrated as she created numerous opportunities to engineer getting him alone and preferably naked in her flat, and he came up with numerous excuses for not being able to stay. Of course, like any good 21st century woman, brought up on a diet of trash mags and misogyny, Ellie blamed herself.
Mark blamed Rachel, his ex.
Ellie thought that Rachel was beautiful. Too damn beautiful. She’d seen the pictures on Facebook as she cyber-stalked him when they first met, and he still kept a couple on his iPhone that Ellie wasn’t supposed to know about. Mark claimed Rachel had fallen out of love with him after they’d been married for five years, but she’d neglected to tell him. He only found out when he’d discovered the text messages she’d been sending to her lover. Who also happened to be his brother. Ellie made every excuse for his lack of interest, but deep down, had started to believe it was because she was a big girl and Rachel was obviously younger, more glamorous and much slimmer.
And she hated that he made her feel like that.
It had taken Ellie three very large glasses of wine to move things into the bedroom with Mark, and then just as things were about to get interesting, he sprung back like he’d just burned himself, shaking his head and muttering, “I can’t do this.”
He’d drunk too much to drive home, so he stayed the night, yet he couldn’t have slept further away from Ellie if he’d been in the house next door. The next morning, he was out of the door at the first chirp of the dawn chorus. Ellie had done her best to pretended she was okay, but that kind of rejection? It stung. Convinced she was about to be dumped right there and then, she had been straight on the phone to Zoë, as soon as it was sociable, bawling her eyes out.
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Sarah Clark
Sarah Clark was blessed with a hyperactive imagination from an early age. Her late father told her repeatedly that she should be a writer, and like all good teenagers, Sarah ignored him, until she eventually became a freelance writer in 2007.