No Other Love Read online

  Taking a few unsteady steps to reach the printer, Sophie retrieved the paper from the tray and looked down at the blank sheets, knowing that the other side of them held her life and how she’d felt about it.

  For a moment the urge to crumple them up into a tight ball and throw them in the bin was tempting, almost unbearable, impossible to resist, but then a realisation came over her that she couldn’t do that, she couldn’t just throw away her heartfelt emotions.

  The words she had written were her truth.

  Sophie grabbed the envelope she’d already written out with Alison’s address on from the top of the printer. The instructions were to write the letter and treat it as if she was really going to post it. Then the following day she would either burn or bury it, to give what was now the past a funeral of some sorts. First, she needed to re-read what she’d written. Soak it in. Sit with the pain before finally releasing it. At least that was her intention.

  Sophie hoped letting go of the past would mark the beginning of a new chapter for her. A new year. A new start. At least that’s what she kept telling herself.

  Refilling her glass until it teetered near the rim, Sophie made her way to the sofa and lowered herself onto the soft battered leather cushion, pulling the blanket that lived across the back of the sofa around her shoulders. Taking a deep breath, she steeled herself as she turned the blank pages over and started to read her own words.

  Dear Alison.

  You’ll never get to read these words. I never intended to write them until we spoke on the phone earlier, when you only called to give me your new address.

  It’s the first time we have spoken since you left. The first time I’ve heard your voice after five years of hearing your voice every day. It should have felt weird. It didn’t. It felt like I didn’t know you, that you were some stranger who I just happened to have spent the last five years sharing my life with.

  In truth though, that was something we never did, was it?

  We never truly shared. Yes, we shared a bed and for a while after you first moved in, we did seem to be moving forward and it was great, I loved it and I loved you.

  But things changed and they changed very much for the worse.

  I’ve spent the last month trying to piece together why things went wrong for us. And, while I know I have my faults, I genuinely think, Alison, that the blame for the situation we find ourselves in is mostly yours.

  I know two things about myself for certain. Firstly, I have always been willing to share our lives. I remember suggesting that we had a joint bank account, but you came up with some reason not to do it. You didn’t want to go onto the tenancy agreement for the flat. Every time I suggested some way of binding our lives closer together, you seemed to be able to come up with some semi-convincing reason why we couldn’t or shouldn’t do it.

  And I put up with it.

  I shouldn’t have.

  I should have asked you why and found out the true reason, but I didn’t.

  That brings me to the second thing I know about myself. I don’t like conflict. It’s why I’m writing this letter but it’s also why I put up with it, not because I was desperate to cling onto something that clearly wasn’t working, but because I just didn’t have the courage to say the things I’m saying in this letter to your face.

  I hate seeing people hurt, but in the process that has hurt me.

  It might make me a coward. It might make me kind and sensitive. Somehow, I get the feeling that the two aren’t separated by very much and it is incredibly easy to slip from being kind and sensitive to becoming a coward. It’s a fault I’ve become all too familiar with while I’ve been thinking this through. It’s something I know I have to work on.

  I think I’d known for a while that your heart wasn’t entirely in the relationship, but I chose to ignore the warning signs and put them down to… oh, I don’t know, natural caution or some such, but the busy lives we both lead meant that each small incident got lost in the rush.

  I don’t suppose I’ll ever really get to find out whether that’s true or not, that your heart wasn’t in it.

  Eventually though, something had to snap. It was inevitable. For me, it was after the dinner party we had for my birthday. After a long day, we’d gone to bed, I leant over and touched you on the shoulder. I just wanted to say how nice the day had been and how well you’d coped with making an amazing three course meal in our tiny kitchen.

  Do you remember what you did? I remember it like it’s been burnt into my mind and will stay there forever.

  You said nothing, just grabbed my wrist and threw my hand away back towards me.

  I was trying to comfort you, to encourage you, and you tossed me away like the wrapper from a cheap burger without a care.

  I shouldn’t have expected any different. We hadn’t been intimate before that for months, but it wasn’t even me coming on to you. I was just trying to be nice but, as usual, you were too wrapped up in yourself to care about what I was feeling and why I was doing what I was.

  I couldn’t stay in that bed with you then. That one simple action of yours bent something out of shape. I had to think, to try to work out what it was that was bothering me so much.

  Eventually, as you no doubt remember, you came out to see where I was and we finally, honestly talked, or at least I did. When I told you I couldn’t put up with things as they were, do you remember what you did?

  You shrugged your shoulders and said, ‘You do what you like’, then you went back to bed.

  That broke me.

  Your callous disregard for me and for us broke me.

  Three days later, I came home from work and you were gone. A brief note was all I was worth.

  I should have been sad.

  I wasn’t. At least not for us.

  That died on my birthday.

  Sophie

  Blinking back tears, Sophie slowly folded the pieces of paper over and leant back, tilting her head until she was staring up at the ceiling. Only now did the hot tears roll down her cheeks.

  Facing the truth was cathartic. She felt lighter than she had for weeks but that might have been the effects of the wine. The main thing was that she’d got her thoughts out into the open. Now was the time to start healing.

  Yawning, Sophie slid the letter into the envelope, dropping it on the coffee table before pushing herself to her feet and heading for bed.

  Happy with the great strides she’d made that day, Sophie hoped with all her heart tomorrow would be even better.

  Chapter Two

  ‘Can I offer you a drink, madam? Tea? Coffee?’

  Amber flicked a stray hair out of her face and smiled up at the cabin assistant. ‘Tea would be great, thanks.’

  She kept the smile going until a pale, insipid, plastic cup full of something that aspired to be a proper cup of tea had been deposited on her fold down table and the cheerful, impossibly white-teethed, beautifully made up cabin assistant had moved on to her next victim.

  Smiling was the last thing Amber felt like doing. It would have been a different story had her destination been an exotic location for a two-week break to soak up the sun. But it wasn’t. She was returning to her hometown where seeing a glimpse of sun was a rarity.

  The cool air from the air-conditioning outlet above blew straight down onto her face.

  She reached up and turned the breeze off then flicked the flyaway hairs back into their rightful position, hanging loosely onto her shoulders. No need for the tight bun she wore ordinarily as today wasn’t a workday.

  It was about as far from a workday as it could possibly be.

  The panicked phone call she’d received, interrupting a meeting with JazzQ, a prospective new client for her New York PR business—specialising in major music industry acts—had not been one she’d been expecting, and it had, in truth, taken the wind out of her sails for a few hours. Nadine, her business partner, had picked up the slack during the meeting, and they had managed to sign up one of the allegedly hottest new talent
s around to make use of all of the services their firm could offer.

  Potentially, it was a huge deal.

  Compared to the content of the phone call, it paled into insignificance.

  When Amber moved to New York seven years previously, she had been seen off at the airport by her parents. Her mum, emotional, hugging and holding her until the very last moment before she had to go through into the departure lounge at Heathrow. Her dad, stoic to the end, cracking jokes, wondering if she would manage, but then with one long hug at the end, his eyes misted with a layer of moisture on his bottom eyelids that threatened to overflow as tears before he took off his glasses and wiped the fluid away with the sleeve of his shirt.

  He was always the active one of the family, delighting in hiking for miles in the countryside while Hector, his faithful brown Labrador companion, sniffed and bumbled along beside him.

  She had a picture of him in her head. Standing in the utility room, taking off his wellington boots while rainwater dripped from his cap and waterproof coat onto the floor. Her mother tutted and fretted about the gathering pools of water and muddy dog paw prints. Then, once he’d divested himself of his wet outer clothing, and having winked at a younger Amber who was trying to dry Hector with an old towel, he grabbed her mother and lifted her up, planting kisses on her lips as he twirled her around, singing their favourite song to her while she squealed and giggled at the same time.

  It was him. It was them. They were so different and yet, they worked as a pair, one complementing the other.

  Now, according to that phone call, and a couple of brief subsequent ones while she waited for a flight to be available, her father lay pale and wired up to all manner of machines that were monitoring his condition after suffering a heart attack just after returning from his daily trek.

  And now here Amber was just a few hours later, halfway across the Atlantic, heading back home for the first time since she had left.

  She couldn’t help but wonder if Great Addington, the small village she’d once called home, had changed in those intervening years. Before she’d left, she’d found the place to be oppressive.

  She closed her eyes, trying to remember what the teenage Amber was like.

  She couldn’t help but simultaneously smile and cringe when she thought back.

  That Amber was the cliché going by the name of the ugly duckling. Her preferred clothing option, correction, her only clothing option was jeans and a T-shirt, as loose and baggy as she could possibly get away with. Her choice of footwear, wellington boots or some other kind of sturdy country boots.

  And then there was the breaking of her heart over one kiss from a girl that had treated her like she never existed. It was funny that even though she had only thought of Sophie now and again over the years, she still remembered their kiss as if it were yesterday. For some reason, no matter how many women had passed through her life, and there hadn’t been that many, none had even come close to evoking that deep-rooted connection she had felt with Sophie.

  Even though Sophie hadn’t felt the same way, which she evidently hadn’t, Amber’s feelings had still remained the same.

  Despite this, she had never looked Sophie up on social media. She hadn’t wanted to open a can of worms. Didn’t want to see the woman she had lost her heart to living a fulfilled life without her. Not that Amber’s life had been bad. It hadn’t. She had achieved more than she had ever imagined possible. In her professional life that was. Her personal one? Not so good. No one could ever reach her the way Sophie had. Maybe she’d spent the last ten years being delusional about her and that if they ever crossed paths again, she’d wake up to the reality that she had done nothing more than concoct a fantasy about a woman who didn’t exist anywhere but inside her own head.

  Even Em, her not so long-ago girlfriend, had known something was amiss in their two-year relationship. No matter how hard Amber tried to put her heart and soul into the relationship, it just wasn’t enough. She knew it. Em knew it. And that’s why Amber had decided to call it a day. There was no point in trying to flog a dead horse. Even though she tried desperately. Maybe she was destined to remain alone. Who knew? After all, it wasn’t likely that she was ever going to cross paths with Sophie again.

  Amber jumped when a voice from above her head spoke, jarring her out of her thoughts.

  ‘This is your captain speaking. We are currently on our approach to Heathrow. The temperature at ground level is five degrees Celsius. Conditions are dry with very little wind, so we should have a smooth landing in approximately twenty minutes. Thank you for flying with Virgin Atlantic.’

  As soon as he stopped talking, the seatbelt signs came on with an accompanying ping and twenty minutes later, with a gentle bump and the sound of the engines engaging reverse thrust, Amber landed in England for the first time in seven years.

  After an interminable wait to get out of the airport, she made her way to the train station and before long she was on her way home.

  The weather predicted by the pilot turned out to be wrong, as a light drizzle fell from a silver-grey cloudy sky.

  Two hours later, Amber was seated in the back of a taxi en-route to the hospital where her mother was waiting for her. Everything seemed to be the same – the shops, houses, churches. It was as if the village had been caught in a time warp.

  When they reached the hospital drop-off point, Amber leant over with a note and told the driver to keep the change. When the car pulled away, she grasped the handle of the small, wheeled suitcase which was all she’d had time to pack and headed towards the hospital doors.

  As she saw her reflection approaching herself, she looked at her stylish jeans, her designer cashmere sweater, and the three-inch heels she wore as a matter of course now. She lifted her head a little more, ran a hand over her breeze disturbed, stylishly cut hair, and wondered what her parents would make of the new Amber that had arrived back in their lives. The old, unsure baggy T-shirt and jeans Amber wondered that too.

  No, nothing in the village had seemed to have changed much in the last seven years, but she certainly had.

  Chapter Three

  Sophie woke up and wished she hadn’t. At least not for a few more hours anyway. Somewhere inside her head, an army drum band was beating a march to the tune of her heartbeat, pounding away rapidly even if she so much as moved an inch. With great care, she raised her hand to shield the light filtering through the wooden slated blinds and slowly, unsurely, she allowed gaps to form between her fingers.

  ‘Why?’ she asked herself out loud.

  She should have known better than to consume so much alcohol on an empty stomach. Especially on a weekday. She dreaded to know what the time was. Maybe she would call in sick. Why not? It was her business after all. She’d put in the hard work. Eighteen-hour days, five days a week, dealing with high-end clients looking to purchase properties in London. The end result had been to experience phenomenal success, but it also meant that she had barely had any time for herself. In fact, Sophie realised, she could count the number of days she had taken off on one hand.

  She opened her fingers a little wider, wincing as the dull light sliced painfully into her senses, prompting her to close her fingers again. She remained motionless for what seemed like an age and it worked. The banging in her head subsided.

  Somewhere in the distance she could make out, through the slamming of cupboard doors, the sound of what she thought was a kettle whistling. The frown that then appeared on her face was because she didn’t own a whistling kettle. Her kettle was sleek, chrome, and matched her silver and grey stylish kitchen perfectly, but the one thing it didn’t do was whistle.

  It was only when she realised that the whistling wasn’t one single rising tone towards boiling point but a series of tuneless outbursts akin to the wailings of a cat in pain, that she understood what, or indeed who, was the source.

  Lee.

  She’d mentioned his whistling before. Several times.

  About how irritating the high-pitch
ed sound was. And his response? To whistle to Snow White’s ‘whistle as we work’ tune.

  Thankfully, his irritations were only minor ones which meant living with him was tolerable.

  She had known Lee for eight years now. They had met at a bar, struck up a friendship almost immediately, and had been inseparable ever since. So when he split from Gary, it was only natural to offer him her spare room.

  As it was, apart from his mournfully bad whistling technique, and a tendency to be bright and breezy in the morning, something Sophie wasn’t and would never be, he was actually a surprisingly good flatmate.

  He was verging on OCD around tidiness. He cooked well but that was no surprise given he ran a small but highly regarded restaurant. He was good around the flat and most importantly, when Sophie needed a listener, he was there, patiently taking it all in and coming up with one or two non-hysterical suggestions that had actually helped.

  It was, all in all, of the many snap decisions she had made in her life so far, probably the most successful. Apart from the goddamned whistling which was currently driving her auditory system to distraction, and left her blood pressure soaring as one drummer became three.

  ‘Lee!’ she tried to say, but what came out was something between a croak and a gurgle.

  She leant over and took a sip of the glass of lukewarm water on her bedside table.

  Then she tried again.

  ‘Leeee!’ This time it sounded like a frenzied scream, much too loud, and way too hysterical.

  A knock sounded on the bedroom door.

  ‘Are you decent in there?’ Lee asked, sounding like he was terrified at the idea of seeing Sophie naked.

  So was Sophie, and as she was, she discovered with a peek under the covers, naked as the day she was born, she yelled, ‘Hang on,’ while she pulled the covers up the bed and wedged them in under her chin and over her shoulders.

  ‘You can come in.’