Deja Vu

Typical bloody day. Work. Rain. Cruella deciding to 'work from home' which means I have to work twice as hard to cover her stuff as well as my own, while she sits on the sofa eating toast. I wouldn't mind so much if it wasn't for the fact she's on twice my salary and does this about once a week, thus working 4 day weeks for full-time pay.

If I think about it too much I will scream.

Need to do something calming.

My Bloody Valentine

So, I have been conspicuously absent the last couple of days. Not just from the blog, but really just 'checked out'. Luke and I attended an 'Anti Valentines Ball' on Saturday. Very romantic. Or, more accurately, very drunken. Somehow by the time we got home on Sunday morning I had lost a shoe, seven out of ten acrylic nails, and was wearing my sexy red corset the wrong way round.

Sunday was thus spent prone on the sofa. Literally, all day.

Monday, back in the office, I managed to do very little (as usual), attract no attention (as usual) and escape early (not that usual, but still a fairly regular occurrence). Lu and I were meeting friends for dinner at 8:00, but since I was home by 4:30, I had quite a lot of time to wait. I was so tired, and not in the mood for going out, so I thought I'd have a tiny glass of wine to perk myself up a bit.

By the time I met everyone in the pub, I was feeling very perky. I'd managed to finish the whole bottle of wine while watching Project Runway. A lovely meal, two gin and tonics and the best part of another bottle of wine later, I was still in an excellent mood as Luke and I made our way home. A less excellent mood this morning though, it must be admitted.

Occasionally it occurs to me that if I can drink a whole bottle of wine without my husband noticing any symptoms, there is either something wrong with me, or something wrong with our marriage, but the thought is swiftly dismissed.

Also, this week I have been mostly discovering Twitter...very diverting.

Favouritism

I am extraordinarily grumpy today. It’s freezing bloody cold, I am tired, slightly hungover and I wish I was at home watching America’s Next Top Model, rather than sitting at my desk.

The situation is not improved by Cruella having decided to ‘work from home’ today – a move which B2 has sanctioned, but which would be completely out of the question for anyone else. Fair? I think not. B2 knows it as well – when I asked him this morning where she was, he whispered that she was working from home so quietly that I needed a qualification in lip reading to hear him.

I responded by mentioning her unscheduled absence loudly – twice – in B1’s vicinity. I wonder if he picked up on it.

You know what? I would like to get paid to sit on my sofa in my pyjamas and check my blackberry from time to time (if I had a blackberry, which I don’t, not being important enough). That woman defies belief. I am beyond words. I am mute.

Bitch.

Conclusions

I suppose the question is, why am I telling you about Cal, the OTGA? Maybe because I think it’ll help you to get me. Losing Cal had the most profound effect on me. I went from being one of the guys, someone he could have a laugh with, to – frankly – a complete psycho.

I’m not proud of it. I used to get drunk every evening and call him, repeatedly, leaving unintelligible messages on his machine. I texted him constantly. I hacked into his email and read it, constantly, torturing myself with the thought he might be with someone else. Gradually, he ensured that our shifts at the shop no longer coincided. He stopped coming on work nights out…who can blame the boy, when I was more than likely to get drunk and then follow him through the streets, screaming that we were meant to be together.

I did that.

It took me ages to get over him. Long after I left the shop, found myself a different job, I was still hacking into his hotmail – in fact, him changing his password was the only thing that stopped me. It was torture, but an exquisite kind of pain. He split up with his girlfriend not long after I left; he moved jobs too, and now he manages a café in a different town. Before my email monitoring stopped, I saw that he’d had flings with at least three of his staff. I think he’s seeing one of them now. I hope he’s happy. I am, and that’s the best revenge.

Cal, Interrupted

That momentous evening with Cal seemed like it would never end. Actually, it didn’t. We walked Rob home and put him to bed, grinning at each other the whole time. When we ended up back in the living room, alone, with revolting cups of instant coffee cooling in front of us, we didn't speak. We sat and stared. Slowly, as the sun began to seep through the window, we reached towards each other. From the first touch, we were possessed - clothes ripped off in a flash, electricity passing through our bodies in waves as we grabbed for each other again and again.

We couldn't have known it, but from here - this inauspicious beginning on a tatty sofa, with the noise of our friend retching in the background, wet coffee stains covering the lino, the smell of beer and fags in the air - everything changed. By the time we finally got to sleep, I felt that we had been together for ever, and I know Cal felt the same. When Rob stuck his head sheepishly into the living room, he was rendered completely speechless by the fact that we were lying on his sofa, limbs entwined, covered only by his grubby throw. But Cal and I were beaming from ear to ear.

Eventually, of course, Cal had to get up and go back to his girlfriend. Although I was walking on air, I truly believed that was that – a great night, never to be spoken of again. Another one to add to Bee's Catalogue of One Night Stands TM. Until I arrived for my shift in the coffee shop on Monday, saw him, and realised that I had completely lost the power of speech. He didn’t seem to be doing much better – we grinned at each other like idiots all morning, then shot out of the shop on our break, legged it round the nearest corner, and snogged the faces off each other like two sex-starved teenagers.

This became the pattern for the next few months. Cal was cheating on his girlfriend, and I was no saint – I had started seeing someone a few weeks before, although it hadn’t seemed significant then, and definitely didn't now. As bad as it sounds, I think that kept him on to fill the moments when Cal went back to her, to stop me sitting and worrying that this would be it, that our luck had run out. Every break we had, we broke free from the confines of the shop and walked until we were out of sight, before sitting down and exploring each other. Cal made me feel like no one had before him – I actually physically burned to be with him, something I’d never believed in but now couldn’t avoid. We took as many opportunities to be together as we could; stolen, glorious nights when his girlfriend was away, or at drunken house parties; once, when the shop was closed, in the store cupboard where we kept the syrup bottles, glass clinking as the shelves wobbled, the cloying smell of vanilla essence rising in the heat.

It wasn't just sex. We talked a lot about what we were doing, about the future, about the inevitability of coming clean to everyone and admitting we were an item. We both knew that had to happen. The day he came in, tears in his eyes, and told me that being with his girlfriend the night before had felt like he was cheating on me, I held him, heart hammering. We were meant for each other – I knew it, he knew it, and soon, once the housekeeping was taken care of, everyone would know it.

The day my heart broke started the same as any other. I was on the morning shift, Cal was not, and on the way to work I sent him a cheeky text, telling him I couldn’t wait to see him later on. Humming, I practically skipped down the hot pavement to the shop, grabbing my phone from my pocket as it beeped its bleak response.

**SHE KNOWS. I CAN’T DO THIS. IT'S OVER.**

The One that Got Away

The One that Got Away. I think it deserves the capital letters, don't you? Everyone has one. Luke and I have never spoken about it, but I'm sure he has one. I'm sure B1, B2 and Cruella all have them. I'm sure even Brad and Ange have them. But just because this is such a common phenomenon, does not make it any easier to bear.

My OTGA was a complete surprise. Cal and I worked together in my first job out of uni, a small coffee shop where the hours were long, the steam was hot and most of the staff were completely incompetent. I was 'having a break' before launching into accountancy and needed to earn some money and Cal had a grand plan to end up managing the shop, or one very like it. He was my team leader - I thought he was a great guy, not least because he was one of the few of my colleagues I could have an actual conversation with. He had a brilliantly quick, dry sense of humour, and he and I spent a lot of time laughing together about the customers, our colleagues and anything else we could find to be cynical (or bitchy) about.

I knew that Cal had a girlfriend, but this didn't matter one bit to me - I had already ascertained when I first started at the shop that I didn't fancy him, and our budding friendship had done nothing to make me change my mind about that. He just made being in the shop that bit more fun, that bit easier, and I found I didn't mind the long shifts and the over time nearly as much as long as I was on shift with him.

The crowd at the coffee shop was young, and very sociable, and we quite often piled out to the pub after we'd closed for the day. Cal and I would often stick together on these occasions, drinking pints and making each other laugh with progressively more stupid jokes. Sometimes the drinking went on longer, and we all ended up in a club, a big raucous group of us drinking and dancing until chucking out time.

It was one of those occasions. We had been drinking tequila - I forget why. It was almost closing time, and one of the younger girls was running around the club in tears looking for her lost shoes. I was hunting for her, trying to get her out before she caused any more trouble. As I pushed my way through the dark haze towards the bar, I tripped over someone's discarded pint glass and tumbled head first into Cal.

He caught me easily, righting me on my feet. As I stood there, trying to get my breath back, I looked up at him to ask if he'd seen Tia, but for some reason, I couldn't speak. Without saying a word himself, Cal leant down, and kissed me full on the lips.

I have never, ever had such a kiss. Perhaps because it was so unexpected, perhaps because of the Tequila but even now, god knows how many years later, thinking of that kiss still makes me tingle. I stood, reeling, as the bouncers shouted behind me for everyone to get out. We stared at each other for hours, neither of us really able to believe what had happened, until seconds later Tia jumped up behind him and insisted loudly that we all go back to hers for more drinks.

Usually, at this point, I would have made my excuses and left. But suddenly, I had no idea what was going on any more. Mutely, I left the club behind Tia and Cal. All our friends were outside, and none seemed to have any clue what had happened. As we started towards Tia's house, in a messy, noisy approximation of a crocodile, I was so wrapped up in my own feelings that I hardly noticed when Rob, another team leader, peeled away from the group and started being sick. It was only when Cal came up behind me, put his hand on my shoulder, and said 'I think we'd better take him home' that I even registered Rob's presence.

'Good idea', I replied, and we split from the rest of the group.

Dilemma

I promised myself I would at least keep the blog going. Even if no one’s reading it, I wanted to keep it going for myself. But the thing is, once you start, it seems like such a commitment…suddenly I’m so overwhelmed with all the things I want to say, that I end up saying none of them at all.

The whole intention of starting the blog was to talk about my day-to-day life. The quotidienne. But I’ve quickly realised that I can’t really talk about my life now, without letting you know about my life in the past; and I can’t move on and let go, change my life, while I’m still dwelling on that. Classic.

So, what should I do? Give up? The whole point is I’m not doing that any more. So please, prepare yourselves for an onslaught of mixed up, confused entries; some are now, some are then, some, I admit, are just crap.

Sorry.