Out with the Ex, In with the New: An utterly perfect feel-good romantic comedy by Ranald Sophie

Author:Ranald, Sophie
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-83888-247-1
Publisher: Bookouture
Published: 2019-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

On my way to work the next day, hungover and hollow-eyed with lack of sleep (because, of course, after Gus and Charlie had finished laughing and Gus had gone to bed, Charlie and I had resumed the sex I’d inadvertently initiated with his brother), I replayed over and over in my mind what had happened. And soon, checking my Twitter feed, I realised I was going to replay it online, too.

Pranking Charlie’s bae, the Berry Boys’ tweet read. Check out our new video – sorry @sparklygems and thanks for the LOLs.

Sorry, not sorry, I thought. And why should they be sorry? Pranking videos were what they did. By being Charlie’s girlfriend – Charlie’s bae – I’d signed up to be part of that. So why did I feel – I tried to get my feelings straight in my head – cheated, almost? Exposed. Humiliated.

I plugged my headphones in and pressed play on the video. I saw Gus and Charlie in Charlie’s bedroom, giggling as Charlie took his T-shirt off and Gus pulled it on. I saw Gus peering into the mirror, rearranging his hair to look more like his brother’s, before climbing into bed and pulling the duvet up to his chin. I heard Charlie say, “Shit, I think she’s coming,” and duck behind the curtain.

Then, before I could see myself coming into the room, see myself in the sexy lingerie I’d meant for Charlie’s eyes only, not for hundreds of thousands of YouTube viewers, the train pulled into the station and I had to press pause, stuff my phone back into my bag and join the shuffling throng of commuters emerging on to Oxford Street to begin their working day.

And, I reminded myself, my working day was beginning, too. What happened in front of a camera, in the evenings, alone in my bedroom or with Charlie – that wasn’t work. Work was brainstorming meetings with my colleagues, hoping my Clickfrenzy posts would get all the hits, making rounds of tea. Work was ‘Why The World Would Be A Better Place With Cats In Charge’. Sometimes I looked back and remembered how thrilled I’d been about my new job, back in June, and wondered whether I’d have felt the same if I’d known that it was going to be wall-to-wall cats, every day. I wondered if there was any hope of that ever changing, but I made myself not think about it, because the idea that it might not, that I’d be stuck trying to think of funny things to say about cats forever and ever, was too depressing to contemplate. And I reminded myself that I was lucky – I could be unemployed, barely making ends meet on benefits or on a zero-hours contract somewhere, or scraping by with one waitressing job after another, still living with Mum. This was real life – this was what paid the rent.

Maybe, I told myself, glancing longingly into the window of Liberty as I walked past, my channel would get big enough for me to quit Clickfrenzy and vlog full-time.

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