This is a Love Story Read Online Free Page B

thing I know, Amelia’s bags were packed and she was sailing off into the horizon with floppy-haired, watery-eyed Toby Hunter. I only hoped he would be sailing off somewhere nice soon, in an ambulance . . . The whole thing made me sick. (Actually, I am a tad jealous about his law career. I’m fast becoming a bitter ‘artist’ who wished he’d studied something else.)
    Amelia didn’t even serve out her notice period. Boom. Gone. Just like that. And all the while Toby’s wife was coming round on Friday nights and crying into a hanky while we got drunk on Grolsch, wondering what the hell had hit us. She even tried to kiss me one particularly booze-addled evening. I soon put a stop to that. The whole thing was enough of a mess as it was.
    Needless to say, it was all pretty embarrassing at work. Everyone knew what had happened. It was a messy home situation, which should never have leaked into our professional lives. Getting together with people at work is a huge mistake.
    I feel like life has juddered to a grinding halt. The brakes have been applied, pretty sodding hard, and there are angry tyre marks on the road. People don’t seem to be taking my position very seriously, either. I’m sure if she’d left me for someone a bit cooler, like a footballer or a musician, they would be rushing round with porn magazines and takeaway.
    My career has hit the buffers, my love life is in tatters and most of my friends are now marrying/having children/having some sort of meaningful life. Ibiza and its aftermath did a good job of numbing the pain for a couple of weeks, but when I woke up this morning I was greeted by that horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach.
    Doom, I think it is.
    This is not what I envisaged when I left university. Full of the hope of youth, I thought that by the time I reached thirty I would be the CEO of some multimillion-pound company, with a sexy wife, two children and a car that required that special petrol just because . . . well, because it’s a flash car, isn’t it?
    OK, OK, I know that’s not very realistic. But at least I could be running my own design studio or something. I could have at least got that sorted.
    Now I have just two and a half years to achieve all this and basically it’s not going to happen.
    I was considering this very situation on the train this morning, the same anxiety gripping my chest, when something odd happened. Flicking through my copy of Metro , I stumbled across a picture story about a squirrel on waterskis. Utterly ridiculous.
    For some unknown reason, this was a temporary cure for my weary heart and I felt the sudden urge to laugh my backside off. You know, the kind of laughter that makes you accidentally fart or snort like a greedy pig. The kind of laughter that only comes when you are so depressed that suddenly the most inane things are funny enough to bring you to tears.
    You can’t laugh like that, though, on a stuffy train full of tight-lipped Brits. It wouldn’t be acceptable. So I spent a few minutes holding in my amusement with great difficulty. The more I held it in, the funnier it became. My eyes were filling with water and my stomach muscles were jumping up and down furiously. Trying to divert my attention from the rodent I looked up and saw a pair of the most beautiful denim-blue eyes ever, peeping over the top of the same newspaper.
    Wow.
    My stomach filled with butterflies and she mouthed a word at me.
    Squirrel . . . she said.
    She was bloody gorgeous, with a thick, straight fringe just touching her eyelashes and the most healthy-looking, beautiful skin I have ever seen. Her hair was a chestnut brown and I just wanted to touch it. Not in a horrible, overtly sexual, pervy way, or even in a gay hairdresser way. In an I’m not sure if you’re real, so I just want to touch you to check kind of way.
    Jesus. Be cool, Nick, I told myself.
    Just. Be. Cool.
    I did the opposite and stuck my right thumb up at her. Why? Why would I do that? She seemed pretty