The Wedding Date. Zara Stoneley

       Chapter 1

      Reasons I, Sam Jenkins, cannot go to this wedding:

      Reasons I have to go to this wedding.

      I could add ‘and my hair looks crap’ but that one is easily handled. Much more easily handled than losing the chocolate-cake-and-chips stone in weight that has very comfortably settled itself round my stomach like an unwelcome lodger who intends to stay. Healthy food is on my to-do list, it just hasn’t made it on to my shopping list yet. I mean, you have to prioritise, don’t you? And I’m not quite ready.

      Now don’t get me wrong, I can be pretty determined when I want to be, and show amazing self-control (last summer I lost 5 lb in weight the week before we went away, which meant the 7 lb I put on during the week was totally acceptable), but there are times in life when only a super-size bag of crisps and a bottle of wine will do, and the last few months has been one of those times. It has also been a time for espresso martinis and bumper bags of gin and tonic popcorn.

      I was dumped, and now this.

      A wedding invite. Well, advance warning of a wedding invite to be more precise.

      Normally I love a good wedding, who doesn’t? But, right now, cheering on any happy couple would make me feel slightly hopeless and weepy for all the wrong reasons. And this is worse. This is the worst.

      This isn’t just any wedding invite; it’s from Jess. My bestie.

      We’ve known each other forever. She told me some time ago to ‘save the date’ (when I was still the deluded half of a happy couple), and now she’s emailed to tell me why.

      She is getting married! The invite is in the post! It will be here any day! She is excited! Dan is excited! Everybody is excited! Her mum has already bought a hat!!! The wedding is going to be A-MA-ZING!! (The exclamation marks are hers, not mine – she is excited.)

      Normally I’d be pretty thrilled too – after all, I love her to bits. I want her to be happy, I truly, truly do, and she will be. But normally was the time before Liam shredded my heart, hopes, and the perfect future I’d created in my head, as thoroughly as he shredded his very private and confidential banking documents – and pretty much every other sheet of paper left carelessly lying around. And Jess is marrying Dan. Liam’s brother. And Liam will of course be the best man. Not that ‘best’ or ‘man’ are words I’d voluntarily apply to him.

      So I am not thrilled. I am imagining walking up the aisle behind my best friend towards the man who cheated on me. And everybody there will know he cheated on me. I will be the elephant in the room, the person that everybody stares at but avoids talking to because it is all so embarrassing and we are all so terribly British.

      And if I’m totally honest I actually feel like an elephant, as in big and an anaemic shade of grey - and I don’t have time to remedy the situation. I’m not sure any spray tan or control knickers are slimming enough.

      For the sake of my own battered self-esteem I need to be that kitten who looks in the mirror and sees a lion. Except in my case I need to see the sexiest pre-break up version of me possible. Liam and all our friends and family need to see that girl too. I need to be me, not the girl Liam dumped.

      And I do not have time.

      In two months’ time, Jess will be saying ‘I do’.

      I’m halfway to work when my phone starts beeping.

       Did you get my email? Isn’t it amazing?! Can’t wait to catch up with you, it’s been ages!

      It has been ages. Five months, three days, five hours and thirty-seven minutes (give or take the odd minute). That was when I’d waved goodbye to Jess and her boyfriend Dan, just five minutes before his snake-in-the-grass wanker-banker brother Liam dumped me.

      He’d put his hands on my waist and pulled me in for what I thought was a pre rumpy-pumpy kiss. Liam liked to work to a routine which could, if I’m brutally honest, be a bit long-winded and anti-climactic (though the last bit is only true for me, he peaked as regularly as clockwork). The foreplay started at the pub, lasted the entire walk home with increasingly amorous snogs and squeezes, there’d be a brief grope as we stumbled up the stairs, then it culminated in a five-minute shag, a groan of satisfaction – his, and only occasionally mine – before he collapsed on his back and fell asleep.

      Anyway, I thought that’s why he’d grabbed me, so I puckered up and closed my eyes. And nothing happened. I opened one. Liam was giving me his spaniel look. Beseeching. So I opened the other eye, wondering what could be so earth-shatteringly important as to disrupt his foreplay routine (those two words shouldn’t really sit side by side, even I know that).

      ‘Samantha—’ he only called me Samantha in front of my parents, his parents, and his boss ‘—you’re a lovely girl—’ I could feel my body stiffen, as though it was expecting a blow, though my brain hadn’t twigged why ‘—but this has started to feel like a habit.’

      Ahh, maybe at last my subtle hints about our all the way home warm-up session had sunk in at last. ‘I know what you mean.’ At last! A chance to add a bit of spice to life. Impulsive just isn’t a word you’d breathe in the same sentence as ‘Liam’, but maybe he’d seen the fun his brother was having with Jess, and decided to go for it.

      I loved Liam with all my life, he was kind and considerate, but we were in a bit of a rut. Maybe he had realised that a rut isn’t good when you’re not yet thirty. Perhaps it was time to buy some new sexy underwear, a little