No, We Can't Be Friends

by Sophie Ranald

Genres: Contemporary Romance; Friends to lovers; Romance

Synopsis

He was perfect. Denim-blue eyes, a dazzling smile. And he hadn't sent me a picture of his junk. Which is about as rare, these days, as a Dodo.
When Sloane met Myles, everything fell into place. He loved a Martini almost as much as she did, shared her passion for four-cheese pizzas, and made her laugh harder than any episode of Friends. She'd found The One at last and she could finally delete Tinder, forgetting all those waste-of-space men she'd never have to date again.
But then she finds out that Myles has a secret. A very big one.
The fairytale is over. Her heart is blown to smithereens. Drowning her sorrows in Ben amp; Jerry's can only get Sloane so far before she has to decide… Can she learn to love herself more than she loved the love of her life? And what if, after everything, she's got Myles – and his secret – all wrong?

Release date: January 10, 2020

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 350

Sample

Chapter One

 

You know that creepy little kid in the movie who was like, ‘I see dead people’? That was me, except what I was seeing was pregnant people.

It had happened so gradually that it kind of crept up on me without me noticing. If I thought back to maybe a year ago, I could barely recall there being any pregnant women in the world. There must have been, of course, and I must’ve noticed one occasionally and thought, ‘OMG, what happened to that poor woman’s ankles?’, or offered her my seat on the Tube.

But in recent months, I’d started to see more and more and more of them. In the supermarket queue with their husbands, idly caressing their bellies. On public transport, wearing their little ‘Baby on Board’ badges, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot until I offered them my seat. Even when I checked out celeb gossip, I’d see Beyoncé or Helen George from Call the Midwife (ha!) or the Duchess of Cambridge all fecund and glowing.

It was like the country was stockpiling baby bumps in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

I mentioned it to my friend Bianca one day, when we’d stopped for coffee while shopping for a birthday gift for Bianca’s daughter.

‘Hey, Bianca, it might just be me, but I’ve noticed a really weird thing…’

She looked up from her phone. ‘What’s that? We’re going to have to call it a day, I’m afraid. Michael says Charis is missing me and feeling anxious, and I don’t want her upset so close to her big day.’

I privately thought that Charis, at almost seven years old, was both too young to suffer from anxiety and too old to have her mother rush home when her father should be perfectly capable of parenting his own child, but I didn’t say that, of course.

I said, ‘Are there, like, loads more pregnant women around than there used to be?’

Bianca looked at me like I’d grown another head. ‘Of course there aren’t. The birth rate in the UK has been falling more or less steadily for the past forty years.’

‘Oh. I suppose you’re right. But it’s really weird. It’s like they’re everywhere.’

Her expression changed to one of dawning comprehension. ‘Oh, now I get it!’

‘Get what?’

‘You’re thirty-four, right?’

‘Right.’

‘And you and Myles, you’ve been married for, what, five years?’

‘Four years, eight months, two weeks and a day,’ I said. The calculation took me slightly longer than it used to, and I’d stopped counting hours and minutes, which I have to admit I did for about the first year of our relationship. Tragic? Me?

‘And you’ve thought about having a family, haven’t you?’

‘Well, yeah, of course. I mean, that was always a thing that we knew we’d do, when the time was right.’

‘Well, there you go then. This is it. It’s your subconscious mind, or your body clock, telling you that the time is right, right now. You’ve been whacked with the broody stick.’

‘But I… I mean, Megan just made me a partner at work. Myles’s practice is still growing. We’ve put the house on the market so we can move somewhere bigger. It can’t be the right time.’

She shrugged. ‘Tell that to Mother Nature. Here, look at these and tell me what you think.’

She pulled a package out of a Selfridges shopping bag, carefully unwrapped the tissue paper and handed it to me. She’d mentioned that, as well as looking for loot for her own daughter, she was after a baby-shower gift for a friend, but I’d said I’d leave her to browse that department while I checked out the new Urban Decay eye palette.

Now, though, I looked intently at the garment in my hands. It was a romper suit in the softest, plushest white cotton, with a hood that had little teddy-bear ears on it. On the front, where a pocket would be on a man’s shirt, was a tiny embroidered bear. I lifted it up to my face and sniffed and, all at once, something in me turned to mush.

‘Oh. My. God. That’s the most adorable thing.’

‘It’s wildly impractical, of course. Annette’s sprog will puke or poo on it within about three seconds and it’ll never be the same again. But still. Awww.’

‘Awww.’ I caressed the garment again, imagining little starfish hands emerging from the sleeves, a tiny scrunched-up face surrounded by the white hood, and the heft of a new-born baby in my arms.

‘Well,’ Bianca said, ‘you’d best get cracking then. It’s not like you’re getting any younger.’

It was typical of Bianca to segue seamlessly from being kind and perceptive to making a remark like that; one of the reasons why, although we hung out together sometimes, I’d never felt I could completely trust her. But now that this window into my own psyche had been opened, I realised she had a point, and alongside the broodiness that was suddenly washing over me was a knife-blade of cold fear: what if she’s right? What if I’ve left it too long?

We paid for our coffee and said our goodbyes, but I didn’t follow Bianca to the station. I stood on the sidewalk until I was sure she’d gone, and then rummaged in my bag for my cigarettes and lit one, feeling the blissful hit of nicotine as it met my throat.

That would have to go, of course. That would be the first thing to go.

A few weeks later, on a Sunday in early autumn, I woke up late. With Myles away, the house had felt huge, empty and a bit creepy, and I’d slept badly, every creak and rustle startling me awake or invading my dreams. Now it was almost eleven, and the looming mountain of my to-do list made further sleep impossible.

I needed to tackle the overflowing laundry basket. There were a bunch of Myles’s suits that I still hadn’t got around to picking up from the dry cleaner. The monthly supermarket order needed doing – we were almost out of toilet roll, washing-up liquid and, crucially, coffee. I needed to do an epic declutter of our spare bedroom, because an estate agent was coming to photograph the house on Wednesday. I needed to send an anniversary card to Myles’s aunt Susan and a birthday card to his mother.

But there was another, even more important task to do first. I rolled over and found my phone on the nightstand and my thermometer in its case in the drawer. I swiped through to the tracker app and entered the numbers. My temperature hadn’t risen, but that was okay – once it did, it would be too late.

I walked, naked, to the bathroom, suddenly conscious that I was desperate for a pee. But even that had to wait. I rummaged in the cupboard for the box of ovulation tests and unwrapped one, thinking how weirdly quickly I’d become accustomed to this ritual. I wondered how long it would be before I got to have a pee without there being a stick involved.

Not to mention the obsessive interest I’d developed in my cervical mucus. A couple of months before, I’d barely thought about the stuff – now, it had become the holy grail of body fluids.

Superstitiously, I forced myself to clean my teeth and cleanse and moisturise my face before checking the test. If I resisted the urge to stare at it while waiting the full five minutes, it was almost as if it would be more likely to give me the result I wanted – it would like me.

And, that time, I was rewarded with a little smiley face.

All my plans for the day were forgotten. I was ovulating. I needed to have sex before the fickle fertile window banged shut again. Only problem was, the guy I needed to have it with was a thousand miles away.

It wasn’t fair to blame Myles. He was working, after all – it wasn’t like he was off gallivanting or something. And, even if he had been, demanding that he stay home in order to attempt to get me pregnant would have been pretty unreasonable. Even so, I couldn’t help resenting the late-running project that his architecture practice was working on, which had kept him away in Lisbon for great chunks of time over the past few months.

It would be completely crazy to fly to Portugal for one night to have sex with my husband, obviously. Totally nuts to forget my plans for the day and drive to the airport, get on a plane and surprise him, stay overnight, get an early flight back and head straight into the office to be at my desk on time on Monday morning.

Nuts. But I was going to do it anyway.

Five hours later, I was in a taxi, the driver weaving his way at breakneck speed through the winding streets towards the hotel where Myles was staying. Normally, the erratic driving would have freaked me out, but now it suited me just fine. If saying to him, ‘Go faster, I need to have a fuck,’ would have made him drive even more insanely, I’d have happily done it, but there was no need.

He screeched to a halt outside a grand stone building, and I paid with the wad of euros I’d withdrawn at the airport. I retrieved my bag and made my way inside, towards the reception desk, wondering what the chances were of them letting me head straight up to Myles’s room and surprising him there. I might even whip off my clothes, stand there in front of him in my lacy underwear and go, ‘Ta-dah!’ Too much? Probably.

But there was no need. Before I got to the desk, I heard his voice behind me – that East London accent I’d fallen in love with, back when it had seemed like the most exotic thing in the world.

‘My God. Sloane.’

I spun around, my face breaking into a smile. But there was no answering pleasure on his face. He looked – for a brief second before gathering me into a hug – absolutely appalled to see me.

‘Hi, babe,’ I said. ‘Surprise visit! I’m so glad you were in – I thought I’d have to wait, or head out and try to find you.’

‘Well, here I am. I’ve just got back. I was over on site, checking things out. They don’t work on Sundays here, no chance. This is… Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting to see you.’

He wasn’t, of course. I hadn’t called him, or texted – perhaps I should have done, I thought, looking up at his face. He still didn’t look happy. There was something in his expression that was almost panic.

‘I’m quite surprised you haven’t bumped into Bianca, too,’ I joked, trying to lighten the mood. ‘She’s out here this weekend for a hen do. But I was missing you, and you’re not due back until Wednesday, right? So I thought… you know. Shall we go up to your room and drop off my bag? Then maybe head out for something to eat?’

‘They haven’t made up the room yet. I don’t know why. Guess there was some mix-up with housekeeping. Let’s leave your stuff down here. I’ll talk to reception now and ask them to sort it while we’re out.’

He looked tired, I thought. Tired and stressed. Which wasn’t surprising, given he’d been working long hours, in a strange city, on a massive project with workers whose first language wasn’t English. But it wasn’t like I’d been goofing off at home, watching box sets with my feet up. I was stressed too, and busy, and dealing with all the stuff life threw at us – from the estate agent who was marketing our house to the man who’d tried and failed to fix the strange noise the boiler was making, to getting the car serviced – on top of my own job.

We just needed to reconnect, that was all. Just be together and chill for a bit, and then everything would be okay.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘We can go to that place you were telling me about, near the site where you’re working. I remember you raving about the pork alentejana they do there. Or we could just order room service, if you’re too whacked to go out. I don’t care if the bed’s not made.’

If I had my way, the bed would be in a state of disarray before too long, anyway.

‘Yeah, I think that was Alma’s.’ Again, there was that brief flash of alarm in his face. ‘They’re not open on Sunday nights. There’s a place down the road that does great prego rolls. Come on, let’s head out.’

After he’d had a word with the concierge about the room and left my bags with them to take upstairs, and I’d been to the bathroom, wishing that I could have a shower and change out of the jeans and sneakers I’d worn on the plane into something more alluring and more suitable for the warm night, we did just that.

Sitting opposite me in the restaurant, our cold beers leaking rivulets of condensation down onto the bare wood table and a bowl of olives between us – I was starving; I’d only had time to grab a slice of toast at home, and the chickpea and avocado wrap I’d been served on the flight had been about as appetising as the cardboard sleeve it came in – Myles seemed to relax. His phone was on the table between us, but his glances at its screen were becoming less frequent. After asking me the same question about the price the estate agency had suggested listing the house for three times, he finally seemed to have taken in my answer. He’d stopped compulsively smoothing back the wing of silver hair that flopped down over his forehead.

It had been almost six months, and I was just starting to get used to Myles’s new do – his ‘barnet’, as he called it, using the Cockney rhyming slang I could never get my head around. When I met him six years ago, his hair had been jet black, glossy as a raven’s wing. Then, gradually, grey hairs began to appear and, later, full-on streaks of pure white. It never bothered me – as far as I was concerned, my husband was the sexiest man on two legs, grey or no grey.

But it freaked him right out.

‘I’m too young for this,’ he’d lamented, scrutinising his parting in the mirror. ‘I’m thirty-three. I can’t have grey hair. What do women do?’

‘They dye it, obviously,’ I said. I was lucky; my own hair was still an even, rich dark brown, my best feature, and although I spent a small fortune on oils and serums and conditioning treatments, I’d never coloured it.

‘But people will notice,’ Myles said. ‘They’ll be like, “Look at that tragic fucker, who can’t deal with going grey.”’

‘You look great, honey,’ I replied. ‘It suits you. It’s distinguished.’

And I took him to bed and proved just how much I fancied him, and assumed that was the end of it. But then, six months ago, Myles had come home one day with the dye job to end all dye jobs. What had been slightly greying dark hair was now a blend of charcoal, ash and deepest midnight violet. I was gobsmacked, but also delighted – my gorgeous husband looked like a younger and more metrosexual George Clooney.

Which reminded me, as our food arrived – slices of spicy, just-cooked, chewy steak in floury white buns, with fries and an oily lettuce and tomato salad on the side – what I’d come here for.

‘So,’ I said, ‘I have something for you. A surprise, to go with my surprise visit.’

Again, that brief flash of alarm crossed his face. ‘What’s that?’

‘You know how we’ve been talking for a while now about maybe trying for a baby sometime soon?’

‘Yeah, and you said you weren’t ready, and there’s plenty of time.’

I rummaged in my bag and pulled out the parcel I’d carefully wrapped for him at home, using the white paper printed with silver rattles I’d used for his cousin’s daughter’s christening present a few months before, and passed it over to him.

‘What the…?’

He turned the package over in his hands a few times, then peeled aside the tape and opened it. Inside, I’d put an unopened pack of contraceptive pills, my cigarette lighter and a copy of Pregnancy for Men.

‘Pregnancy for Men?’ he read out incredulously. ‘What, has there been some major medical breakthrough I don’t know about?’

I couldn’t help laughing. ‘That’s not what it means, doofus.’

‘But seriously, sweetheart. You’re not…?’

‘Not yet. But I’m ready to try, if you are. I came off the Pill. And I haven’t had a cigarette in two weeks. And I…’

I paused. Just thinking about her egg-white cervical mucus gives me the horn, said no man ever.

‘I’m ready.’

‘Sloane, that’s great. I mean, I’m dead excited. You know I want kids. But there’s no rush, is there? Sometimes these things take time, anyway.’

‘Of course,’ I lied. ‘There’s no rush at all. We’ve all the time in the world.’

He paid the bill and we walked hand in hand through the balmy darkness back to his hotel. We climbed a narrow stone staircase to the room, which, finally, had been spruced up for the night, the sheets turned down and chocolate truffles placed carefully in the centre of the pillows.

I delved into my suitcase and found my washbag, then ducked into the bathroom and showered at warp speed. But when I was done, Myles was already in bed, the duvet pulled up to his chin, gently snoring. I slid in next to him and wrapped my arm round his waist, pressing my body against the familiar curve of his back, hoping to rouse him as my hand caressed the familiar hard planes and dips of his ribcage and thigh.

But he didn’t respond. Not a twitch, not a moan, not a sigh. Nothing. It was like getting into bed with a man-sized stuffed toy, only not as cuddly.

Maybe that should have given me a clue. Maybe dozens of other tiny things – little dropped stitches and snags in the fabric of our marriage – should have done. Everyone says, Trust your gut. When something’s up, you know. Don’t ignore those spidey senses.

But I had nothing to ignore. I had no inkling that anything was wrong. No idea at all.

 

 

Chapter Two

‘It’s just the most amazing space,’ Bianca said, looking around the dust-filled, scaffolding-ribbed shell of our house. ‘You totally made the right decision to stay and extend, rather than selling.’

‘To be fair, selling just wasn’t an option right now.’ Myles raked his hand through his hair. ‘We were on the market for months, and we only got four low-ball offers. The market’s just dead right now.’

‘And so we decided to make the most of what we had.’ I tried my hardest not to sound bitter, but I couldn’t help feeling that way – our house had been amazing, a comfortable home filled with all the things we’d built up over our life together. The antique armoire I’d found in a thrift store in Queens and lovingly restored over several weekends at a cabinet-making workshop (which, admittedly, I’d only signed up for because it had seemed like a great way to meet single men). The squashy dove-grey couch we’d chosen when we moved in and immediately christened by making love on it. The round pine table that just about fitted into our tiny kitchen, where we’d had so many candlelit dinners.

The kitchen wasn’t going to be tiny any more, that was for sure. Walls had been bashed down and replaced with steel girders. The roof had been ripped off to make way for a loft extension. What had been our garden was now a builders’ yard. Boards blocked the windows, and it was stifling in the summer heat.

It would be a ‘showpiece’, Myles said. A bricks-and-mortar advertisement for the fact that Taylor + Associates, his architecture firm, could create domestic spaces as well as commercial ones. It would feature in interiors magazines, he’d promised – and to that end, he’d enlisted Bianca’s help.

She’d do the interior design on mates’ rates, she’d promised, because we were among her closest friends.

Which was news to me, because sometimes Bianca didn’t feel like much of a friend. She’d been Myles’s acquaintance first, a contact he’d made through work, and then she’d befriended me too, first inviting us round for dinner – so, of course, we’d had to reciprocate – and later persuading me to join her for Pilates classes and shopping trips.

And now it looked like I was going to find myself living in her dream home.

‘This front area can become an intimate snug,’ she said. ‘With Farrow & Ball Vardo on the walls – so on trend right now, that deep teal shade – and touches of pale rose in the soft furnishings. Mixed metals are so in right now – I’m thinking glowing brass with accents of copper and iron. And a reclaimed parquet floor.’

‘And steel interior windows opening through to the main entertaining space,’ Myles went on. ‘The roof light will really open this up, so we could opt for a dark shade on the walls here too.’

‘Absolutely,’ gushed Bianca. ‘Brinjal, perhaps, and a statement artwork on the chimney breast. I’ll add some suggestions to the mood board.’

‘We’re so lucky to have your support on this,’ Myles said. ‘A real unifying vision. And of course taking care of the practicalities, while Sloane’s so tied up with work.’

It was true, of course – I was tied up with work. Two weeks before, Megan, my business partner at Ripple Effect, the talent agency she founded and I’d joined when I moved to London, had gone off on maternity leave. I was delighted for her, even though I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of envy that she’d found herself effortlessly pregnant when she and her husband Matt had only been trying for about five minutes.

‘It’s crazy, right?’ she’d said. ‘I mean, one minute you’re just a couple and then suddenly – wham – you’re going to be a family. I swear pregnancy takes so long to give us a chance to get used to the idea.’

I’d wished, privately, that Mother Nature wasn’t giving me quite so much time when it came to my own attempts at pregnancy, and would get her ass in gear. But of course I wasn’t going to say that to Megs.

‘The timing’s awful,’ she’d said, ‘because Matt accepted that three-month secondment to the Beijing office and I don’t even know whether he’ll be able to be there for the birth, never mind be hands-on afterwards. But Mum will be around. I’ll manage, won’t I?’

‘Of course you will,’ I assured her.

And now I was having to step up and manage Ripple Effect on my own, and the prospect of choosing everything from kitchen cabinets to scatter cushions for the house was daunting to say the least. So I should have been grateful for Bianca’s help – but the idea of everything being chosen by someone else felt all kinds of wrong.

Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted to live in a showpiece filled with ‘pieces’ sourced from the interiors boutique Bianca ran. I wanted to live in a home, a home that would one day contain a family. Where in this ‘design-led space’ would the oceans of plastic that I knew children accumulated fit? Where in the ‘low-maintenance, Tuscan-themed walled garden’ would anyone be able to kick a football or play hide-and-seek? How would the expanse of polished concrete on the floor of the ‘entertaining space’ work when a toddler was taking their first steps and falling over all the time?

‘I’m just concerned that it won’t be very homely,’ I ventured.

Bianca looked at me like I was speaking ancient Greek. ‘Of course it will be homely. It’ll be your home.’

‘Yes, but, once we have a family – what about all the stuff?’

‘We’ve planned for integral storage,’ Myles said impatiently. ‘Just because there’s stuff, doesn’t mean there has to be clutter. Honestly, sweetheart, it was all in the initial designs. I wish you’d pay more attention.’

He was right – I’d found the whole design process so confusing that I’d agreed to pretty much everything he’d suggested. The next thing I knew I was packing all our stuff away in boxes to be shipped to a storage unit, creating a makeshift temporary kitchen in what had been our spare bedroom (and which I hoped would one day be a nursery) and coming home every day to look in horror at the expanse of rubble, ladders and scaffolding.

And the dust. Oh my God, don’t get me started on the dust. It was everywhere. No matter how much I tried to clean, it seemed to get into every corner, every single item I owned. Even my stockings, when I took them out of the drawer in the morning, rained white powder down onto the carpet of our bedroom.

We were three months into what Myles said would be a ten-month project, and I’d never been so fed up with anything in all my life. And I found that every time I got a call at work from a carpenter needing to know what height to position the ceiling joists at, or from the project manager wanting to know when he’d receive his next payment, or from Bianca wittering on about some wallpaper samples – because, mysteriously, Myles never seemed to be available when these crucial bits of information needed to be imparted – I resented it more and more.

My dream – our dream – of having a baby was looking more distant than ever, because we were too tired, the house was too much of a mess and my mood was on too much of a hair-trigger for me to feel even the tiniest bit erotic.

I mean, you try feeling sexy when your knickers are full of plaster dust. Go on, I dare you.

‘Did you have a moment to look at the Pinterest board I set up of possible fireplace surrounds, Sloane?’ Bianca cut into my gloomy introspection.

‘Not yet.’ I forced a smile. ‘Why don’t you make a list of the decisions we need to make over the next week, and Myles and I will be sure to focus on everything, together?’

‘Great plan,’ my husband said, glancing at the vintage Rolex watch I’d saved and saved to buy him for a wedding present, even going without cigarettes for an entire week and taking in peanut butter sandwiches for my lunch. ‘Shit, I must be off. I’ve got a client meeting in half an hour. I’ll leave you ladies to it.’

Never mind that I’d rescheduled three client meetings that morning to fit this in, hoping that, with all three of us there together, we might actually make some decisions.

He kissed Bianca on both cheeks and me on the lips, swung his leather messenger bag over his shoulder and breezed out, apparently oblivious to my simmering annoyance.

‘Now,’ Bianca said cosily, once the front door had closed, ‘how about a nice cup of tea?’

I opened my mouth to point out that the corner of what used to be the kitchen was a no-go zone filled with dirty cups, the floor gritty with rubble and spilled sugar.

But she was way ahead of me.

‘I never visit clients without a flask of my special chai latte,’ she said, rummaging in her linen tote. ‘You never know when you’ll need sustenance on site. And disposable mugs – bamboo, of course, and compostable – and some of my special chia brownies. I’ve trained Charis to make them; even though she’s only seven, that child is a Great British Bake Off winner in the making, I can tell you. Shall we go upstairs?’

Upstairs. I felt a flicker of panic, remembering that, although I’d asked Myles to dispose of the remains of our Chinese takeaway the previous night, he hadn’t, and that it was probably swarming with flies in the makeshift kitchen.

That left our bedroom – the one room that was at least vaguely habitable and serene. I didn’t want Bianca in our bedroom, but I had no choice.

‘Come on then.’

I led her up the stairs, half-listening to her remarks about how stair runners were ever so fashionable now, of course, but they did attract dust and we might want to consider a fitted carpet, which was a much more practical and classic choice. I gestured for her to go ahead into the bedroom and watched as she arranged napkins and cups, poured the latte and carefully unpacked the brownies her daughter had baked.