Читать книгу The Accidental Honeymoon - Portia MacIntosh - Страница 10

Chapter Two

Trust is a funny, fragile thing. You know what they say about trust? How it’s hard to gain, easy to lose and impossible to win back? There’s a lot of truth in this. We take our time getting to know potential partners, holding back from fully handing ourselves over to them until we feel as confident as we possibly can that they won’t break our hearts. And then, if they do… well good luck trying to have a healthy relationship after that because those things can never be mended – least of all by the people who broke them. Even when it comes to friends, we don’t trust them immediately. We wait until we’ve achieved expert-level BFF status before we share our deepest and darkest secrets with them.

Yes, trust is hard to earn… unless you’re a hairdresser. A hairdresser is basically a very cheap therapist who can somehow simultaneously solve your problems while telling you exactly what you want to hear to feel better, and they can give you a self-esteem boost not even the most talented, most qualified therapist could achieve.

The hotel salon is exactly like every other salon I’ve ever been in. The decor is modern, the lighting is kind, the music is whatever is in the charts – playing a little too loudly, but it’s being drowned out by the usual hairdresser chatter.

One of the girls who works here is telling the room she’s worried her boyfriend might leave her.

‘Have you tried talking to him?’ one customer with rollers in her hair asks.

‘A little, but you know what men are like,’ she replies. ‘He’s always been quiet, not really into sharing feelings.’

A heavily pregnant hairdresser chimes in: ‘You can’t just ask men questions and expect answers, everyone knows that.’

As she says this, she gesticulates a little too wildly for my liking, given she’s working with scissors so close to a lady’s eyes.

‘So, what do I do?’ the girl asks.

The pregnant lady is probably the oldest stylist here – probably only in her mid thirties, but she seems like the mother hen of the place. I scoot forwards on my seat a little, ready to listen to her advice.

‘I’ll tell you exactly what you do,’ she starts. ‘Go to the store, buy a pregnancy test, bring it here – I’ll pee on it for you – then take it to him and see what he says. If he’s a good man, he’ll stand by you. If not, you’re better off without him.’

I don’t know what I find more alarming – that this lady is willing to give her pee to anyone who wants it to manipulate their man, or that no one else seems to find this advice weird.

The girl with the problem nods thoughtfully.

‘You think you’ve got problems,’ the lady with the rollers starts, ready to one-up the girl with boy problems. ‘Eighteen years I’ve been with my lousy husband and he forgets our anniversary.’

Her strong New York accent commands the room, and suddenly her problems take precedence.

Pregnant hairdresser thinks thoughtfully, tapping her comb on her pursed lips.

‘No sex,’ she concludes. ‘It’s the only way to teach him a lesson.’

‘Honey, didn’t you hear me? I said we’d been married eighteen years. We don’t have sex!’ she replies with a cackle.

In the mirror in front of me, I see the lady behind me twirl around in her chair.

‘This is men for you,’ she shrugs, her French accent strong, but her English perfect. ‘My boyfriend, he just gambles all the time, he has no time for me. Right now he is in the casino and he thinks that he can just give me money, send me here, and it will be fine. It’s not fine.’

‘No, it’s not,’ Liv, the lady who is about to do my hair, agrees.

We all live thousands of miles apart, but we all have the same stupid man problems. That said, I think I can top all of them. In the age-old words of the internet: hold my beer – or my third glass of complimentary champagne, more accurately.

‘I caught my fiancé cheating on me,’ I say quietly. ‘Literally, like I walked in on him doing it. With his assistant.’

For the first time since I arrived, no one is saying anything. Nothing but the whirr of a hairdryer and the dulcet sound of Justin Bieber’s latest hit can be heard. Then the responses come all at once. Gasps, expletives and questions from all angles.

‘His assistant?’ Liv shrieks.

I nod.

No one ever really stops and thinks about what they’d do if their significant other cheated on them, do they? No one has a contingency plan in place, in case of adultery. Some might say cheating is cheating, whereas others might see the difference between a drunken one-nighter and full-blown affair. Not only was my fiancé stone-cold sober, but he was at it in my bed – probably still warm from my getting out of it.

‘What happened?’ Liv enquires gently.

‘I got up for work, had my breakfast, got dressed and left the apartment with my fiancé fast asleep in bed. He doesn’t work office hours, so when I go off to work, he’s always still in bed. While I was on the way to work, not long after I left actually, I just decided I’d go home. I had loads of things I needed to do before this trip, but that wasn’t the reason. I just decided I didn’t want to go to work that day.’

The women look at me, puzzled.

‘You were suspicious?’ Liv asks.

‘I wasn’t,’ I tell her honestly – at least, I don’t think I was.

I should have known that moving to LA with dreams of becoming an actress was a long shot, but I had big dreams when I was younger. Instead of becoming an actress, I simply wound up becoming someone’s other half.

I work temp jobs, just taking whatever I can get whenever I can get it. A short-notice job came in for yesterday morning, filling in for a receptionist in a law firm. Work has been in short supply recently, so I accepted it, safe in the knowledge I could finish at lunchtime and then go home to pack our bags, ready for travelling today.

Perhaps on a subconscious level I knew something wasn’t right, but I don’t think so. I really did think we were happy.

‘I just didn’t want to go to work,’ I say softly.

‘Well, thank God you didn’t, honey,’ New York lady says. ‘You’re so lucky.’

‘Yeah,’ I reply, although I don’t feel it.

‘So you thought you’d come to Vegas to forget about him?’ she asks.

‘Not exactly,’ I reply. ‘We were supposed to be flying to England in the morning. I’ve been a bit nervous about it, so my fiancé booked us a romantic night here, to get the trip off to a good start. The plan was to fly from LA to here, spend a night having fun and then head back to the UK for a family wedding. But now it’s just me, and the hotel and flights were already booked, so here I am.’

‘So you’re on a romantic trip alone?’

‘I am on a romantic trip alone,’ I repeat. ‘And open to whatever you suggest as far as my hair goes.’

Liv teases my shoulder-length, mousy-brown hair with her fingers and pulls a face.

‘It’s not that this isn’t nice,’ she says tactfully. ‘It just doesn’t go with that smoking-hot outfit you’re wearing.’

I glance down at the gown I’m wearing to protect my clothes and cringe as I think about what’s lurking underneath.

When your heart has been broken, you don’t think straight, do you? Bad ideas seem like good ideas. Perhaps it’s a way of protecting ourselves, but we immediately snap into this ‘I have to show him what he’s missing’ mode. Whether it’s to prove a point to our exes or ourselves, I don’t know, but that’s what we do.

John is a well-known orchestral pianist (well, well known if you’re into that sort of thing). I played the role of his girlfriend perfectly, dressing and acting the part, which is probably why I’m acting out now.

I’m wearing a little red cocktail dress I’m now certain was intended for someone with fewer curves than I have, but, like I said, I was grief-stricken. I wasn’t thinking straight. And now, here I am, sitting awkwardly in my dress that is possibly too tight (and short, and low), in my heels that are probably too high, about to let Liv loose on my hair, which definitely has to be my worst idea yet. Oh, and for the first time since John gave it to me, I am out without my engagement ring.

‘So, you wanna know what I’m doing or you want me to just do it?’ she asks.

I think for a moment. When I started seeing John, the spontaneity slowly drained from my life. Everything had to revolve around his schedule, everything we did for fun was always on his terms. As a teenager I was a total wild child, but now… I don’t know what I am. I need to be spontaneous again.

‘Just do it?’ I reply. It was my intention to sound confidently decisive, but as my voice went up in pitch at the end, it just sounded like a nervous question.

‘You sure?’ she asks, giving me another chance to back out.

‘Yes,’ I reply confidently.

‘You in a rush?’ she asks, causing me to wonder what the hell she’s planning.

‘No…’

‘OK then, let’s get started.’