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And, as I sat there and stared at myself in the mirror, I could hardly believe that I was actually looking back at myself. My make-up was crisp and nicely-applied – a casual, soft neutral eye, along with a subtle contour and even a little highlighter – and the shirt I was wearing drew this line from my chest to my waist that made me look way curvier than anything else I had in my wardrobe. My hair was feathered around my chin, hugging the loveheart shape of my face and trimmed to just below my shoulders. I was right; it wasn’t me. But that was the whole point.
And suddenly, I found that I was looking back at the woman I had promised to find in amongst all of this. The woman who had confidence and wasn’t afraid to strike out there into the world, to let everyone know that she was in charge and that nothing was going to change that. I had been pushing that woman down for a long time, but now she was here, and damn, I wasgladfor it. Because she looked good. And she had a smile on her face about half a mile wide as she took in the way she looked right now in the mirror.
"You like it?" Natalia asked proudly, as she saw the grin on my face. I nodded.
"I love it," I agreed. I paid her for her time and left a generous tip to thank her for her efforts, and I walked home along the River Ness feeling like my feet weren’t quite touching the ground. It had been a long time since I had allowed myself to feel this way – to feel so bright and light and airy. I could feel the wind in my brand-new hair, and maybe it was just because I had had a few inches lopped off, but I was sure that I was carrying a little less weight right about now.
By the time I got back to my place, I was ready to enjoy some shameless enjoyment of my own reflection in the mirror in my bedroom. I pulled out the new clothes that I had purchased, held them up against myself, checked out how I could style this one, or this one, or this one, and I knew that I would be set for the next fifty dates that I went on.
If I got a single offer, of course.
No, I wasn’t going to let myself think like that! I had spent long enough sitting on my rear end and feeling sorry for myself when it came to my romantic life, and I was totally done with it. It hadn’t brought me any good – all it had brought me, in fact, was the need to completely revamp my entire life just to get back to anywhere that made sense.
But there was a reason for that. And, no matter how much Mallory might have wanted me to keep him out of my head, my ex was still very much present there right about now.
Lewis. I tried not to think about his name if I could avoid it. It wasn’t that I missed him, exactly. No, in the time that we had spent apart, I had been able to see that he wasn’t the nicest guy in the world – he could be impatient with me, and there was no doubt that he took his work as an accountant with more seriousness than he did anything else in his life. But we met at the right time, when the both of us were looking for the same thing at the same time, and it just made sense for me to be with him.
We had always been headed towards a family, the two of us, and I was sure that I was going to make one with him. He made good money, he was smart, and he was dedicated – he would make a good father, or at least, a good enough one. This had been five years ago, and even then, I had found myself worrying about the clock ticking down, about running out of time. Looking back now, I seemed so naïve - how could I think that it was even remotely a problem, given what I was dealing with right about now?
He had made me happy. Happy enough.
There was nothing wrong with him, and that was all I had needed at that point in my life, and so I committed to him. We had talked about marriage, and we had even started trying for kids – I was so excited, so excited at the thought of what was to come for us. Right up until the moment that I had been sitting in the doctor’s office, of course, and she had told me that the tests had come back and that the chances of me having a baby through natural means was...
"Basically impossible," she had told me gently. And even though she had tried to be sweet about it, the memory of her voice in my head had come back to haunt me over and over and over again.
He hadn’t been there with me at the appointment – he had seen no reason to be, and that had been that. But when I had come home and told him the truth about what the two of us were facing up to, I had known that it was the beginning of the end already.
He didn’t say that was a reason why he had left me, but I knew for damn sure that it was. He didn’t want to be with a woman who couldn’t bear his children. He thought I was broken in some unfixable way – even though I had talked adoption and other options with him, he didn’t seem to give a damn about any of them. His mind was made up, and he wanted someone who could give him what he truly wanted. And that person wasn’t me.
I had moved out of the beautiful flat we had shared together, unable to afford anything close to the rent, and I supposed that I was in something like shock; when your whole life was ripped away from you like that, it was hard to feel anything other than total surprise. You build a future in your head, a life that you want to live out, and then it’s snatched from you in an instant, and everything feels like it has come tumbling down around you in pieces. It was enough to put a girl off dating for life. Well, at least half a decade, in my case.
It was hard to believe that it had been five years since this had all started. I had taken all that time to try and get myself right again, all that space to convince myself that it was worth getting out there once more. It was hard to believe that there would be anyone out there for me, not after how he had treated me, not after he had dumped me because he knew I wouldn’t be able to give him what he wanted. It felt like it had left a scar on me.
And it wasn’t like other break-ups, where you could work on what had gone wrong and improve yourself from there on out. This would always plague me. Whoever I started dating next, I would have to sit there, at some point, and tell them the truth; that I couldn’t have children, and if they wanted that from me, I couldn’t do it the way they might want to.
That hurt. Even in the midst of all this change, I knew that I couldn’t undo that. I couldn’t find some way to fix it. I had to face up to it, one way or another. No matter how much I would have liked to pretend that none of it was happening, that none of it had happened.
I lay there on my bed and stared at the ceiling, and tried not to let the weight of what had crossed my mind weigh on me too much. There were a lot of men out there. A lot of men who might be more open to a different kind of lifestyle, a different kind of family. Now, I just had to focus my attention and energy on finding one who could handle everything that was going to come with dating me.
No matter how difficult it might have gotten.
Chapter four
Fingers up your skirt
"I’msurprisedInevercame across you before," Announced Martin, the man sitting opposite me at this cramped table in this restaurant that looked as though it had recently been converted from a bomb shelter. I looked down at the glass of wine I had been sipping on, and sighed. I felt like I’d had this conversation a million times over already, and frankly, I was starting to get pretty sick of it.
Martin was the fifth man I had been on a date with this month, and I was starting to learn their scripts by heart. He was about my age, like the rest of them, and seemed to enjoy thinking of himself as the eternal bachelor type – or at least, he would have, if he could actually find women who were willing to date him.
And yet, here I was, sitting opposite him and listening to him talk and wondering how I had ended up on the same fucking date for what felt like the millionth time already. How could I be already getting tired of this? I was meant to be new to this scene, and yet it was starting to feel like I had been doing this for years.
On paper, Martin had looked pretty nice – handsome enough, bald and with a large beard, and he came from a rich family and seemed keen for me to know it. He had a good job – worked for the council – and he was smart enough to think that he could get away with being condescending to me. I should have taken that as the first warning sign that there was something off with him, but I had breezed forward anyway, convincing myself that I was just overthinking things and that I would have been better off just going along with it and not causing too much of a fuss. I had to meet people, didn’t I, if I was going to date again, even if it meant people I wasn’t totally certain about.
He had suggested a new Indian place for dinner, and I tried not to think about kissing someone with curry breath at the end of the night and got myself all dolled up and headed out to meet him. He looked a good ten years older than he had in the pictures on his profile, and he was even more condescending in person – he explained to me the meaning of the translations behind some of the dishes, and I just sat there and smiled along, knowing that rolling my eyes at him was just going to cause a bigger argument.
"Well, I only just started dating again," I offered him, hoping that everything I had seen of him so far was just bluster and that he actually had a good heart under all of that. It was something that came from years of teaching teenagers. A lot of them put on these big fronts only to cover up something deep and lonely underneath it all. But maybe I was being a little too kind, since this guy was hardly a teenager and he hardly had any excuse for the nonsense that he seemed insistent on pulling out here.
"I’m glad I found you so soon," he murmured, his voice dropping to what I supposed he believed was a sexy, sensual whisper. I had to press my lips together to keep from laughing out loud.
