Page 18 of Stella is Starting Over

‘Fuck me, that hummus is insane,’ I say, as soon as I’ve swallowed. ‘Is it the fancy one from M&S?’

‘No,’ she says, sitting down across the table. ‘I made it. And yet my husband still left me.’ She laughs.

‘Crazy,’ I reply. ‘I’d stay married to someone really evil for hummus that good.’

‘Right?’

There’s a silence, and I can hear French pop playing on the speaker, I presume via Stella’s phone. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she says. ‘About what happened upstairs.’

‘Me too.’

Another silence.

‘It wasn’t anything you did,’ she says.

‘Oh, thank god,’ I reply. ‘Hang on, are you sure? You don’t have to say that, I’d really rather know, if I did do something—’

‘Really. It wasn’t you. It’s just – that was my bedroom with Gav, it was like, our bedroom, and I’ve obviously never had anyone else in there, and no one else has, like, taken their clothes off, or touched me, and when we kissed the other day that was great so I thought I was really ready for this but turns out I’m actually not, and I’m just really sorry for dragging you into all of this and making you give up your evening to like, come and watch me cry because I’m clearly not over my ex-husband.’

‘It’s really fine,’ I say, putting my hand on her forearm. ‘Genuinely. It’s not a big deal – we had a drink, we had a chat, you’re great company, if you’re okay then everything is okay.’

She smiles at me. ‘You can call an Uber now.’

For some reason this really doesn’t feel like a natural next step. But then she also might well be asking me to leave and the last thing I want is to hang around when she’s desperate to get rid of me. ‘What are you going to do?’ I ask.

She half laughs, but her eyes fill with tears and I wince, really wanting her to stop crying. ‘Probably make some pasta, drink some more wine and watch a reality show about Mormon wives.’

Okay, good. She’s fine. She’s got a plan. She doesn’t need me to stick around.

‘Can I stay and do that with you?’ I hear myself say. Why have I said that? Yes, okay, the Mormon wives show does sound great and I am absolutely starving, but this woman probably wants me out of her house and I am very clearly not getting laid this evening, not that I need to get laid, but surely I’m wandering into some quite weird territory if I just stay here and pretend to be her like, fake husband for the night?

‘I mean. . .’ She looks bemused. ‘Sure?’

I really hope she isn’t standing there wondering why the fuck I’m not leaving.

Stella

Why the fuck isn’t he leaving?

Look, it’s not that I dislike Dominic being in my house. It’s just. . . weird. He came over for sex, I decided to cry instead of have sex with him; the obvious thing to do was put his clothes on, suffer through a weird goodbye and then block my number on the walk home. And yet somehow, he’s still here. Which, in some sense, is nice. Unless he thinks that I’m going to change my mind and we’re going to have sex? Which I guess I could. I might. But it feels unlikely. Very unlikely. Or maybe he’s angry with me for promising sex and backing out, and he’s waiting to have a go at me? But then he’s dutifully chopping the tomatoes I told him to chop, and humming away to the music, so he really doesn’t seem annoyed. He just seems. . . present.

I find a packet of conchiglie at the back of the cupboard – made by a fancy brand, a relic from the time Gavin and I lived here together. Rose was five or six weeks old and the house was stacked with boxes, but I was determined to show everyone I was still fun, I was still a great wife, I could still give Gav a decent birthday. At the end of the night, Rose woke up and I was still getting to grips with breastfeeding, so feeding her involved rolling my tit around for fifteen minutes, so I went upstairs and fed her sitting on our bed, listening to them laughing downstairs and thinking how lucky I was, and how lucky Rose was that she was going to grow up in a house where there were people laughing over pasta and candles and red wine downstairs. Did Gavin know then that he was getting ready to leave? Had he started putting essentials into his gym bag and dropping them to his mum’s? Had he run through how he was going to tell me that he was out? Or was he still genuinely happy, and if so, isn’t it even more genuinely terrifying that less than a month later, he was gone?

‘What’s your favourite pasta shape?’ Dominic asks, pulling me back to the present.

‘Whoa. Huge question,’ I say, filling a pot with water to boil. ‘Genuinely.’

‘I know,’ he says, entirely seriously. ‘But I am going to need an answer.’

I think about it for a while. ‘Okay, well, you need a spaghetti type of thing, for bolognaise, a standard pomodoro, all those classics. And I’m tempted to go tagliatelle, but I’m going to play it safe and go linguine.’

He mocks shock. ‘Go on.’

‘And then something that does a lot of heavy lifting with sauce, so I’ll say a mafalda, and then you need a short pasta, so I’m going for a calamarata.’

He looks bemused.

‘Calamarata is like a shorter rigatoni,’ I say, by way of explanation.