Free The Cupid Effect by Dorothy Koomson Page A

birthday. How he’d got all our mates together for a do one Christmas after we’d all left college – and neglected to invite me. On and on my mind went. By the end of the weekend, I actually hated Drew. Every time I thought of him, I mentally growled. He was an emotional tease. He’d get me all whipped up, let me believe that some way along the line we’d be together. It wasn’t all his fault, though, I’d been led on by all those movies and books which propagated waiting it out. Which told you that if you just hung in there long enough, he’ll realise that you’re the one for him and give up going out with supermodel-types who’ll smash up his car windscreen because he didn’t call. (Yes, one of his girlfriends did that once and I’d gone with him to get it fixed.) No, he’ll discover he wants to be with the woman he comes running to emotionally and physically when he’s single.
    Suddenly, I realised he’d been a bastard to me but because I thought I loved him, I hadn’t wanted to see it. And this falling for ‘The One’ was the final act of treachery as far as I was concerned. It was all right for him to go meet his perfect woman, all right for him to fall in love, all right, even, for him to realise he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. But why the bloody hell was I the first person he called up about it? Because he had no respect for me or the feelings he’d nurtured in me, was the short answer. (I was good at short answers, but this was the first time I’d actually paid attention to one.)
    Drew, my beloved, was a bloody bastard who wasn’t worthy of my love or attention.
    By four o’clock Saturday afternoon I’d thrown back my duvet, leapt out of bed and called up a couple of friends to meet me in Soho for a late lunch. Three of us had sat in a café on Old Compton Street, London, drinking wine and eating cake. It’d mutated to going to a pub, going to a club, then staying at a friend’s house in Fulham. We’d then gone for a pub lunch and got some more drinks in. By the time I got home, Whashisface Tosspot was back – unimpressed by how legless I was at six o’clock on a Sunday evening – and I’d re-entered my place called denial.
    Except, this time, when I decided NOT TO THINK ABOUT IT, I really didn’t. I wasn’t nauseous and jumpy. I’d crossed the desert, the wide, barren landscape that was my feelings for Drew. I’d made it through the hardest times, the mirages of plentiful water supplies that were his jealousy at me seeing other people; I’d made it over the sand dunes of hurt that left me feeling worthless when he met someone else; and I’d survived those months of craving for the merest drop of affection to wet my lips on when he blanked me. Now, thanks to a weekend of negative thinking, of being surrounded by nothing except the cacti of his bad behaviour, I could see the other side of that desert and I was almost there.
    Two months later, I finally reached the other side of the desert when someone called and asked if I’d spoken to Drew recently and I realised I hadn’t needed to shove him to the back of my mind because he hadn’t even entered my mind.
    When you’re so infatuated with someone, like I was with Drew, it’s very difficult to see them for what they really are. But once I’d made that desert crossing, Drew stopped being the man who could do no wrong. He also stopped being the man who would one day wake up and find he loved me, because it was not going to happen. Once I could see him clearly, he became a good friend. A proper friend with no undercurrent of ‘What if ?’ He became a friend because, well, I can forgive my friends most things, but I couldn’t forgive the man I was supposed to love for not even liking me enough to make a pass at me. How embarrassing was that? He could cuddle me, he could flirt