Read Getting Over Mr. Right for Free Online Page B

with me!” I said eventually. “You took me to bed!”
    “I know,” said Michael. “I shouldn’t have done that. But what can I say? I’m a man … I’m weak.” He shrugged and pulled a
Tchuh! Boys!
kind of face, as though to cue a laugh.
    Weak? If I hadn’t felt so bloody weak right then, I might have socked him in the jaw.
    “You came over and you looked so great and you got so drunk …”
    “That you decided to take advantage of me! Michael! I thought it meant something.”
    “It did,” Michael told me.
    “What?” I spat. “What did it mean to you?”
    “I suppose that part of me thought it was a good way of saying good-bye.”
    “First shag, last shag?”
    “If you want to put it like that.” He winced. “It does sort of complete the circle. Is that such a bad thing?”
    “Yes! Yes!” I shouted. “Yes, it bloody well is a bad thing. How could you?”
    “You were the one who got into my bed naked,” Michael pointed out.
    “As you said, I’d had quite a bit to drink. You could have refused to get in there with me. You could have slept in your spare room.”
    “That bed’s uncomfortable,” he said. “The mattress is all lumpy.”
    “You mean a lumpy mattress made it seem better for you to use me like some kind of unpaid prostitute?”
    “Now, come on, Ashleigh. You know it’s not like that. You know that I always had the very finest feelings for you …”
    “And I
still
have the very finest feelings for you. And you knew that because I told you and yet, knowing that you weren’t going to get back with me, you still took me to bed? You must have realized I’d get the wrong idea.”
    “I didn’t tell you I’d changed my mind.”
    “But you acted as though you had! What was I supposed to think?”
    “I’m sorry,” said Michael. He still hadn’t turned around.
    “Turn around and look at me when you say that!” I demanded.
    He turned around, but he didn’t look contrite anymore. Instead he looked frankly irritated to find me still standing there, as though there had been a chance that my reflection in the mirror was some kind of mirage. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “But, Ashleigh, you need to put your clothes on. I’ve got to go to work. And so have you, I’m sure.”
    “You can’t go to work right now. Not while we’re in the middle of talking about the most important thing in our lives!”
    “I’ve got a breakfast meeting,” he told me.
    “And you’re actually going to go to it?”
    “I can’t miss it.”
    He left me standing alone in the bathroom while he went to get dressed and make himself a coffee. Though he had lookedfairly rattled as he walked out, less than two minutes later I could hear him singing again. The pig! It was no time for bloody singing. I pulled on my dress and followed him into the kitchen. I continued to tell him what I thought of him while he swallowed his vitamin tablets.
    “You’re an absolute c—,” I said, using a word I ordinarily considered unthinkable.
    Michael had the decency to choke on his cod-liver oil.
    “I can’t believe you called me that!”
    “I can’t believe you turned out to be one!”
    I was still arguing as Michael shuffled me out of his front door, with my hair dripping and the buttons on my dress done up wrong. A car was already waiting to take him to his big, important meeting. The meeting that was so much more important than our relationship!
    “Take a taxi home,” he said, pressing a twenty into my hand. “I’ll call you later.”
    He didn’t kiss me—not even on the cheek—and there was no disguising the relief on his face as the car pulled away from the curb with him safely in the backseat.
    What was I supposed to do?
    “You … you utter, utter twat!” I called after him.
    A woman walking her dog past the main gate gave me a very disapproving look. Michael lived in the kind of complex where the residents would call the police if they saw someone wearing high-street clothes passing by,