No one’s said anything about the article. I went back into work the next day and Oliver emailed me some mindless pieces he wanted in place for next month’s issue – a comparison of tablecloths for reception tables and the best sandals to change into if your wedding shoes are uncomfortable, and now it’s Monday morning and The Man Land’s new issue is taunting me from the shelves of every shop I pass, and as I walk into my building and go up in the lifts, I can hear people sniggering and feel fingers pointing at me.
His vile article is out then. Even now, I was still clinging on to some vestige of hope that he wouldn’t do it. That somewhere under his R.C. Art persona, the real Rohan would do the decent thing and not go ahead with it.
‘Bonnie, have you seen this?’ A bloke from the marketing department flaps a copy of The Man Land towards me when I walk into the office.
‘Yes, thank you,’ I snap at him, thinking of those crinkled pages at the bottom of Rohan’s bag.
He makes a face and goes back to flipping through the magazine. I can’t remember the last time I snapped at a colleague and I want to turn and apologise to him but I’m about three seconds away from bursting into tears and one more snigger is likely to upset the balance.
‘Bonnie, is this you?’ One of the girls asks as I sit down.
I square my shoulders and give a nonchalant hand wave. ‘Nope, must be someone else as tragic as me. What are the odds, huh?’
Great. So everyone knows how pathetic I am. He didn’t even try to hide it. I thought he might be kind enough not to mention me by name, but even that was too much to hope for. And it’s completely my own fault, partially for trusting him and partially because I loved that wedding dress so much that I showed everyone the picture on my phone. It didn’t even cross my mind how pathetic it was. I just loved it and wanted everyone to see it. And didn’t that come back to bite me in the backside? Even if Rohan’s article hasn’t mentioned me by name, all of these people have put two and two together and got me.
‘Bonnie, are you sure you’ve read this?’ someone else asks.
‘Oh, believe me, I’ve read it live in living sodding colour,’ I say, absolutely positive they can all hear the tremble in my voice.
I thump down into my seat and drop my head into my hands. I should’ve stayed home today. I knew the magazine would be out this morning. I knew all my colleagues would read R.C. Art’s stupid column. I should’ve just stayed in bed and not come out.
‘Bon.’ One of the girls from the art department touches my arm and slides a copy of the magazine underneath it.
‘For God’s sake!’ I jump up and hurl the magazine across the room so it crashes against the opposite wall and drops to the floor with a limp flutter. ‘I’ve read the thing, all right? I know what he wrote. Yes, it’s me! Yes, I really am that stupid and sad and pathetic! Yes, I write about love for a bridal magazine but I’ve never been in love! Yes, I was stupid enough to trust someone I was only ever meant to be faking it with anyway! Yes, I’m a complete idiot!’
Every person in the office, probably in the whole building, is watching – most of them with their mouths open in shock. They look blurry from the tears that have filled my eyes and my cheeks are so red that they might explode.
‘I’m sorry,’ I stutter in a mumble-whisper, my throat too tight to get any words out properly. I feel light-headed and like I’m about to explode, my heart pounding so hard that it scares me. I have to get out of here and the door to the ladies’ loos is the nearest.
I cover my face with my hands, mainly to stop my tears dripping all over the office carpet, and I run for the sanctuary of the toilets. I’m sure at least one of the girls will follow me in for all the juicy gossip, but it was that or jumping out of a window, which in hindsight, doesn’t sound like the worst of plans, even if we are on the ninth floor.
I lock myself in a cubicle and sink to the floor, the tiles cold against my knees, and rest my throbbing forehead on the cool veneered door. Howling sobs heave through me and tears splatter down my top as I let the dam break.
How could he go to such lengths for a story? He opened up to me too. He shared things with me. Were they all lies? Were they just carefully constructed tales to earn my trust? I have no idea what was real and what wasn’t, and not just all the kisses that felt pretty real. The things he told me, the way he spoke about his parents’ divorce and opened up on the beach the night of Amy’s non-reception. He was unguarded and emotional. Was he making all that up to gain my sympathy? Or was it true, and he’s just morally okay with exploiting his own past like that for a story?
I lose track of time while I sit there, tears pouring down my face as I go over every moment of the past few weeks in my head.
It’s not the kisses that made it feel real. It’s the little things. The times he held my hand even when there was no one around. The easy touches. The spark I felt when our eyes met. The mischievous joy of having a secret with him. The things he shared with me, things that I still genuinely don’t think he’d shared with anyone else before. It makes me cry even harder. How can it all have been fake? How can he be so callous that he’d go that far for a story?
The toilet door opens and I hear the heavy footfall of shoes coming towards me. Outside my cubicle door, a pair of large, shiny brown boat shoes appears and Oliver clears his throat.
‘This is the ladies’,’ I say, my voice so thick with tears that it sounds like someone else’s voice. ‘You can’t be in here.’
‘Mitigating circumstances,’ Oliver says. ‘The girls will understand.’
I don’t say anything and neither does he. Why can’t he just go away?
After a few minutes of silence, he sighs. ‘I take it this is what the article you left on my desk the other day is all about?’
I give him a noncommittal huff.
‘You know I can’t publish that, don’t you?’
Of course I know. Two Gold Rings wouldn’t publish an open letter to a man who has broken their heart. We write about making the most of your big day, not being convinced you will never have one. ‘Fire me then,’ I say instead. ‘Find someone else to save Two Gold Rings or give up on it completely. It’s not like I’m any good to you now, is it? I can’t stomach the thought of a wedding, let alone blagging my way through something sappy about love and happily ever afters. And I can’t give you the article you want about the church of no-divorces. The people there are lovely and I can’t betray them even more.’
‘I’m not going to fire you, Bonnie. This is the greatest love story of our time. I’m getting reports that our last issue has sold out of most stockists and the online server has crashed three times this morning because of all the extra visitors.’
‘So they can all laugh at me? How comforting.’
Oliver makes a confused noise. ‘Bonnie, are you sure you’ve read this?’
‘Oh, certain, thank you.’
‘I really think you should give it another glance. I think you might’ve missed something the first time round.’
He bends down and slides a copy of the stupid magazine under the cubicle door. The corner hits my knee and lies there, taunting me. A gorgeous male model on the front, shirtless of course, emblazoned with things like ‘Blitz the belly’ and ‘Seven days to a six-pack’, which I’m fairly sure is impossible. The gorgeous specimen is staring up at me, perfectly airbrushed green eyes mocking me, daring me to pick it up and see Rohan’s words in cold, hard ink, humiliating me, printed for the rest of the world to have a good laugh at my expense too.
‘No, thank you.’ I shove it away so hard that it slides out of the toilet cubicle and hits the sink units on the other side of the bathroom.
Oliver sighs and bends down to retrieve it. He walks away and I think he’s finally going to leave me alone as his shoes disappear from my line of sight, but after a few moments, his footsteps stop and there’s a rustle of paper.
‘My name is Rohan Carter but you know me better as R.C. Art, The Man Land’s anti-marriage columnist,’ Oliver reads aloud through the door and my heart jumps into my throat. He’s used his real name. He’s revealed his pseudonym.
‘Six years ago, I stood in a church and waited for my fiancée to walk down the aisle. And waited, and waited, and waited. My best friend – my best man – was also missing. The day after, I was tagged in a photo on Facebook – a photo of the pair of them getting married. She was wearing the dress she’d chosen to marry me in, he was wearing the suit he’d chosen to be my best man in. I felt replaceable. I felt worthless. I felt like I’d been ten rounds in a boxing match and my opponent was love itself.’
I scramble to my knees and unlock the door, and Oliver smiles as he hands me the open magazine. ‘Read on, Bonnie. I don’t think you’ve read what you think you’ve read.’
I’m shaking as I grab the magazine from him and spread it out in front of me, my sweaty fingers sticking to the pages, making me growl in frustration as I can’t find his words quickly enough.
To this day, not one friend or family member knows what I do for a living. I write under a pseudonym because I wanted to hide my pain from them. I didn’t want anyone to know how broken I was. I put on a brave face and went about my life, telling everyone I was glad to have had a lucky escape, but inside, I was damaged and angry.
I channelled that anger into R.C. Art. It came out in the blog posts I wrote, which turned into my monthly column for The Man Land. I’ve always been embarrassed by how angry I felt, embarrassed by how much I had let myself get hurt, embarrassed by how much I had let it change me. I used to be a happy, positive person. Since the non-wedding, I’ve been a sarcastic and hostile twat who enjoys antagonising people.
Five weeks ago, I wrote a column that crossed the line. A journalist from Two Gold Rings rightfully called me out on Twitter, telling me straight that I’d gone too far, and as usual, I made a joke of it and tried to make her look stupid. I did go too far, I know that, but I will never apologise for that column because it brought Bonnie Haskett into my life.
We recently joined forces to get a story. We pretended to be an engaged couple to gain access to a place that wasn’t meant for us, to con nice people into trusting us, but I think the only people we ended up fooling was ourselves.
When I had her in my arms, I didn’t feel broken any more. When I kissed her, I felt alive. She made me want to get up in the mornings. She made me watch The Sound of Music and she didn’t laugh when I cried at the ending. She held me and made me feel important, and although I was already well on the way to falling for her, that was the moment I tumbled over the edge of the precipice.
I’ve spent the past six years asserting that love doesn’t exist, and I’ve gone and fallen head over heels in love.
And I’ve ruined it. From the moment we were assigned our story, I had been scribbling notes in my notepad, knowing I had to deliver something to keep my job. I wrote down everything I could, every titbit someone told me, not intending to use them in the column I was writing, just because that’s what I do. I take notes.
I quickly realised these notes were heading in the wrong direction, and having met Bonnie and the people our story would affect, I knew I couldn’t write it as I’d originally planned. I stuffed the notes into the bottom of my bag – not in the bin, where they belonged, because I was scared our host would find them in the rubbish and our cover would be blown. And I didn’t want our cover blown, not because of getting the story, but because I didn’t want to stop being engaged to Bonnie.
Bonnie, if you’re reading this, which I suspect you won’t be but I’m hoping your colleagues will force it on you eventually – please forgive me. I shouldn’t have written what I did, but I would never ever have used it. It was a mistake – a mixture of desperation to keep my job and pressure to find something to write about that wasn’t what we were originally assigned, and a need to keep up my persona when all I could think about was how much I was loving your company and how I didn’t want it to end.
Bonnie Haskett, I love you. I don’t know what I expect this article to achieve, but if nothing else comes out of it, at least you know I love you. You deserve to know that you made me believe in love again. You made my false smiles into real ones. You made me feel safe. You made me feel loved. You made me not have to pretend everything was okay when it wasn’t.
For a very brief, very fun time, you made a cynical old grump into the happiest man alive.
‘Wow,’ I say, feeling the adrenaline leave me as I sit back on my knees and slide down to the tiled floor with a thump. ‘He’s never shared any of that before. That’s really…’
It must have killed him to write that, to be open and honest, and know that everyone would read it. And he’s not writing about the church. He couldn’t do it either.
‘He’s a good man, Bonnie,’ Oliver says. ‘That brought a tear to my eye, and the last time I cried over anything to do with love is when I had to pay the divorce solicitor’s bill.’
I was frozen in motion as I read that, but now I’m sobbing again for an altogether different reason. It wasn’t false. I didn’t read my feelings so catastrophically wrong.
He loves me. And I love him. If only I could stop crying for one flipping second.
‘I’ll give you a minute to get yourself together,’ Oliver says. ‘Take as long as you need, and then go and put that poor guy out of his misery. R.C. Art has been my hero for years, it’s not right to feel this sorry for your heroes.’
‘Thanks, Oliver,’ I sniffle.
‘At least now I know what you’ve been up to for the past few weeks.’ He gives me a grin as he walks out the door, and then sticks his head back round it thirty seconds later. ‘By the way, have you ordered a dress or something? A huge garment bag has just turned up for you and it’s taking up half the office.’