Free Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend by Sarra Manning Page A

give them her Stella McCartney wedges to flog on eBay). But because she’d reached that knuckle-cracking, limb-stiffening, white-noise place where she was so angry that all she could do now was burst into tears.
    It was almost a relief to be crying – not like she’d been crying before, when she’d felt alone and betrayed and sick to the stomach at the thought of Jack and Susie together, but crying because she’d worked herself up into such a temper that all she could do was cry. Unfortunately, angry crying was loud, verging on howling, and Hope knew from bitter experience that her face was scrunched up, wet with tears and livid red, not that she even cared. Her nose started running and she wiped it on the back of her hand and carried on crying, her whole body shaking with sobs – but it didn’t make her feel better or less angry, not when she wanted to shout and scream and smash a few glasses or pieces of china.
    ‘Can you stop that racket?’ Wilson asked as he drove past University College Hospital and up Gower Street. ‘Crying isn’t going to help.’
    Hope didn’t trust herself to speak. She wasn’t even sure that any words she could manage to get out would be intelligible, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d really lost it like this. Not since she was at Leeds University and had confronted one of her housemates for letting her sister and her sister’s unwashed boyfriend have sex in Hope’s bed when she’d gone home for the weekend.
    Wilson muttered something under his breath, and then he dared to pat her knee and let his hand rest there. Anyone could have told him that when Hope was crying angry tears, then you should never, ever attempt to touch her, not unless you wanted to get slapped.
    Hope smacked his hand off her knee. ‘Don’t touch me!’ she spluttered, her voice clogged with mucus.
    ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ Wilson demanded. It was a valid question. Hope herself wanted to know what was so wrong with her that Jack and Susie had had to find solace in each other. ‘You’re meant to teach six-year-olds, not act like one.’
    Wilson wasn’t helping. He was making everything worse, and some small part of Hope that wasn’t subsumed by rage and snot understood that; and the other larger part of her that was currently making all the decisions had come to the conclusion that enough was enough. As Wilson stopped at the traffic lights at Cambridge Circus, she scrabbled for the door handle.
    ‘Now what are you doing, you silly woman?’
    Hope succeeded in wrenching the door open. ‘I can take it from here,’ she sobbed, but they were quieter sobs because she was almost,
almost
, all cried out.
    ‘I’m not letting you wander around Soho in this state,’ Wilson said, but he sounded reluctant and Hope couldn’t really blame him, which meant that her rationality and reason were beginning to return. ‘Just stay where you are.’
    But Hope already had the door open and the lights had turned green and Wilson was holding up a stream of traffic, all tooting their horns. Still faintly weeping but mostly hicupping, she scrambled out of the car and stumbled across the road. Wilson shouted something after her but it was swallowed up by the night, and Hope ducked down a side street and stayed there until she was absolutely sure that he wasn’t coming after her.

 
    HOPE SPENT WHAT was left of the night in Soho. She couldn’t face the journey to South London and Lauren’s pity and concern that would make her come undone all over again, so she stayed where she was.
    Well, first she sat on the stone steps of the Seven Dials monument in Covent Garden but she kept getting harassed by lagered-up men and one lagered-up woman who needed help getting her shoe back on, so eventually Hope hobbled to Bar Italia in Soho. She had to wait an hour for a seat and once she had one, she kept ordering coffees that she didn’t drink and paninis that she didn’t eat just so she had squatter’s