Free The Cupid Effect by Dorothy Koomson

Tonight could be the night.’ I stroked my fingers across the plastic covering the photo, as I got another pang of pastsickness. Awww, young Drew, young Ceri. So bloody stupid. We didn’t even get less stupid the older we got. Well, I didn’t.
    After the initial shock of Drew meeting ‘The One’, which resulted in me moving in with Whashisface Tosspot, I’d gone into denial. I’d hung up the phone, sat staring into space for ages until I reached a very important decision: I’m not going to think about it. At all. Drew, my love, my long-term plan for happiness had met his dream woman, so the best course of action was to enter denial, quietly and calmly, without any fuss, and not think about it.
    Since I’d decided not to think about it, I could think about nothing else. It was always there at the back of my mind. Kicking away, dancing up and down, waving a red flag, demanding attention. When I woke up in the morning, when I got ready for work, when I sat at work, when I came home from work. When I made dinner, when I ate it, when I watched telly, when I was having sex, I thought about it. My stomach churned; dipping and rising, spinning and twisting. I found it hard to eat without feeling sick afterwards. I’d be sat at my desk, editing copy and find my right leg perched on the ball of my foot, bouncing nervously up and down. And all because I’d decided not to think about it.
    Three months later, exhausted by the effort and nausea involved in not thinking about it, I decided to think about it. I decided to let myself off the hook, stop being such a brave little martyr and go into the pain. Go into it, embrace it, accept it. I was, at least, allowed to cry about it. I picked a weekend when Whashisface Tosspot went away to his parents’ (of course, they had a huge house in the country but he was always pleading poverty). As he drove off very late Friday night, I got myself all the tools for grieving I’d previously denied myself – a couple of bottles of wine, a multipack of tissues and some appropriate CDs – and took to my bed.
    Except, my mind, twisted as it was, refused to collapse. Refused to let me cry and wallow and give in to how much pain Drew’s news had caused me.
    As I lay under my duvet, Can’t Live If Living Is Without You playing on loop in the background, there was no emotional retching. No physical heartbreak. No tears. No open-mouthed ugly cry. Not even when I squeezed really hard. All that came to me were all the negative things about him. About this Drew, this man who I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with.
    My brain kept dredging up examples of his caddishness any time ‘but I love him’ thought of rearing its pathetic head. How he’d cuddle up with me, but never made a proper move on me. How he’d go out with other people and flaunt it in my face (how many times had I heard how great his latest woman was, how sexy, how good in bed? Too many, that’s how many). How he’d disappear from my life if he met someone else and only call me to ask for advice when they were going through a hard time. How he’d give me the cold shoulder for days if I snogged someone and would refuse to listen to anything about them, at all.’ (When I’d admitted I’d been seeing Whashisface Tosspot for three months, Drew had blanked me for a whole month. Didn’t return my calls, didn’t text or email me, ended calls after a minute if I caught him in. Nada , for a whole month.)
    It wasn’t just that, though. I started remembering how most of his girlfriends hated me, would be blatantly rude to me, probably because he told them that I had a thing about him. How he didn’t come to visit me when I was in hospital for a week with pneumonia – even though the hospital was only a twenty-minute bus ride away. How he’d once forgotten my birthday. Me, his best mate, he’d forgotten my