I have Sundays off work and decide to spend this particular Sabbath day with Bianca, to test out whether she really has dropped the subject of any reconciliation between Dan and me.
She’s lived in a cute two bedroom semi-detached house with Jeff since they both graduated university nine years ago. The interior is very Bianca, all animal print throws, bold patterned wallpaper, and kooky display pieces.
After idly discussing Friday night’s episode of Eastenders, we somehow get onto the topic of men. Bianca’s dream man has been Adam Garcia since she first saw Coyote Ugly as a teenager. She’s always trying to convince me of Jeff’s resemblance to him and hunt out other potential Garcia look-a-likes for me.
“What about your boss?” Bianca asks. “The sexy one. What’s his name again?”
“Mark,” I say through gritted teeth.
Bianca has seen Mark only once before when she was shopping at Connect. At the time (the same time she was trying to set me up with the guy from her gym), she did take rather a liking to him and I ended up agreeing to a date with her beefcake buddy to get her to drop the subject. I thought she’d forgotten about him but I guess Bianca must have a bank of potential dates for me.
She shifts her position so that she’s sitting cross-legged on the red corduroy sofa in her cluttered living room. “Single?”
I think of him in the sports bar with Janine. “I think so.”
She claps her hands and squeals like an excited child. “He’s perfect, Clo!”
I raise my eyebrows. “Perfect for what?”
“For you, silly!”
Well at least it’s an improvement on trying to get me and Dan back together.
“Mark Edwards is not interested in me,” I tell her. “And even if he was, he’s vain and arrogant and well…he’s a man.”
“You like him.” Bianca grins.
“Who’s she trying to set you up with now?” Jeff leans in the doorway.
Before Dan, I dated a guy from Halifax on and off for a year. He was another of Bianca’s big ideas who was apparently perfect for me but who turned out to actually be a bit of a psycho who collected figurines of superheroes and had a tendency to dip into an alternate reality in which he himself saved the planet form evil villains. The fact that she’s identified Mark as ‘perfect for me’ is a bit worrying, though I can’t imagine he collects anything more interesting than pots of hair gel and navy blue suits.
“I can’t believe you haven’t asked him out before,” Bianca says, ignoring Jeff. I sometimes wonder how he’s put up with her for so long.
I chew my bottom lip. “I think he might be seeing Janine from work.”
Bianca frowns. “I thought you said he was single.”
I haven’t told her about bumping into them after going for a drink with Dan or about Kylie bursting into the store yesterday. If I bring up Dan again, Bianca is likely to assume that I’m still in love with him.
“I just heard that they’d gone on a date. I wouldn’t want to tread on anyone’s toes.”
“Oh.” Bianca waves her hands dismissively. “When was the last time you went on a date? That’s not how it works these days. Things have to be official.”
“What do you know about dating? You’ve been with Jeff since about year ten.”
“Year twelve,” Jeff corrects me, striding into the room and sitting down with his newspaper in the recliner chair that matches the ugly couch Bianca and I are sitting on.
“It was our first year in the sixth form,” Bianca elaborates, a dreamy expression on her face.
It’s hard to believe that she’s been with the same guy since she was sixteen, whereas I’ve only ever had disaster dates and even worse relationships.
“Anyway,” she continues, “the point is Mark’s not off-limits just because you heard he took Janine out once.”
“Maybe it was more than once,” I jump in quickly, hoping she’ll give up on any fantasies she might be having about me in a wedding dress standing next to a perfectly-pressed-suit-wearing Mark Edwards.
“You remember when I asked Jeff out?” she asks.
I nod, recalling that Bianca was the only sixteen-year-old girl with the guts to even speak to a guy at our school.
“Sometimes if you don’t ask, you don’t get.”
“Hang on, I never said I wanted anything to do with Mark,” I point out.
She giggles like she’s still that same teenaged girl. “You didn’t have to.”
YOU ARE READING
Pear Shaped
ChickLit~Chicklit short story contest finalist~ For Chloe Mills, her life starts to go pear-shaped when she turns thirty. Her boyfriend has just left her and soon even her job as a personal shopper at a department store is threatened by recession. Can Chloe...
