Right Here Waiting for You: A brilliant laugh out loud romantic comedy. Rebecca Pugh

her gaze from where it was dangling between his legs. Then again, she’d had it in her mouth an hour or so ago, wet with her saliva, so now was hardly the time to act coy. She wished he would put it away though. For some reason, the unbidden thought of him, wind milling his penis round and round in front of her, flashed into her mind and she had to force herself not to snort at the scene playing out in her imagination.

      ‘I would have stayed down there all night if you’d asked me to,’ he said, moving his hips from left to right and watching his penis as it moved. Realising what he meant, Magda managed to stop herself from physically recoiling from the offer. Just the thought of his mouth getting anywhere near her lady garden for a second longer made her vagina want to shrivel in on itself. Already, it felt sore from his relentless tongue-probing. ‘Mind if I use the bathroom?’ He hitched a thumb in that direction and smiled a confident smile.

      ‘Go ahead.’ Once he’d closed the door behind himself, Magda stood and pulled on the silk kimono she’d brought along with her. It did little to warm her up. Feeling underwhelmed and deflated, not to mention physically and emotionally exhausted from her performance, she looked around the room and wondered what to do with herself now that it was all over. With no other ideas surfacing, she poured herself a glass of champagne from the complimentary bottle and wandered with it towards the window.

      It was hard to make out anything in the darkness that had fallen, but she knew from when she’d arrived earlier that the grounds of the hotel were spectacular, perfectly pruned and delicately peppered with ornate statues and stunning flower gardens she could get lost in for days. She couldn’t help thinking that they should be, considering the price she’d paid for an overnight stay with breakfast included. There were other features like the pool and the gym, but she’d be making no use of those. It was a quick in-and-out job, so to speak, and tomorrow morning she’d be gone as if she’d never been there at all.

      As beautiful as it was, the acres of land surrounding the hotel made her feel isolated and, not for the first time, frighteningly alone. She sipped from the glass as her mind wandered towards old friends and older places. She felt hopeless, and the emotion washed over her, growing stronger as she remembered all those wild and fanciful dreams she’d had as a teenager. Life had turned out to be so very different from how she’d imagined and, with a sigh, she turned abruptly from the window, as if doing so would cut off that train of thought instantly.

      When had she veered off the right path and stumbled down this one? Had there been a specific point in which everything had changed? If so, she found it impossible to pinpoint the exact moment. She’d been happy once. She was sure of it. Her memories told her so, and the sad thing was, she was beginning to have more faith in them than in the present day. She’d stopped living for the now and, more and more often, found herself wanting to rewind time so she could do it all again, have the chance to do it all differently. She often fantasised about it and wondered where she’d be now if she’d made different choices.

      Magda shuddered as a memory of her Aunty Cassandra surfaced, who she’d found snogging one of her dad’s work friends in the upstairs bathroom during a Christmas party when she’d been little. Her aunt’s husband had been downstairs in the kitchen, asking after his wife, and the whole time Aunt Cassandra had been upstairs, rolling a condom over another man’s willy. Even back then, Magda had known it was wrong and felt disgusted. But all these years later, wasn’t she doing the exact same thing? Wasn’t she just as bad?

      She needed the emotions and memories to recede. She wanted them to return to the little box in the back of her mind where she kept them locked up tight. It hurt her to admit it, but alcohol was becoming something she was turning to more and more often. It helped to a certain extent, or she pretended it did, but the morning after an evening spent indulging in an alcoholic binge full of hope, she usually realised that her problems remained, only now with a banging head to go alongside them. It was becoming a vicious and never-ending cycle she could see no escape from.

      The sound of a ringing phone broke the silence. Magda turned and eyed it from across the room, watching as the screen flashed. Only when it had stopped ringing did she choose to approach it, but she already knew whose name would be on the missed call notification. Her assumption was proven correct when she snatched up the handset with a shaking hand and saw that the caller was him. She switched it to silent and dropped it in her bag. Out of sight, out of mind. Probably.

      ‘Listen. I’m going to shoot off. You don’t mind, do you? Only I’ve got a meeting first thing in the morning that I can’t afford to miss. The thing is, I’d really like to spend the rest of the night here with you, but you know how it is.’

      ‘That’s fine. I understand.’ Magda tried to rein in her enthusiasm over his finally leaving. She wanted nothing more than to climb into the big soft bed and close her eyes. She wanted him gone and she wanted to forget this whole thing had happened, forget that all the other things had happened too. The men. The sex. They’d all been attempts to make herself feel better but had only ever slapped her back in the face. She was not the woman she had become. She looked at the man standing before her, buttoning up his shirt.

      She didn’t fail to notice how his eyes travelled down the length of her body. She tugged the kimono tighter around herself but it did little to hide the lengths of creamy skin that remained on display. Stupid, useless thing.

      He shrugged on his tailored suit-jacket, having managed to tear his eyes away from her petite and curvy frame. ‘Tonight’s been amazing.’ He walked towards Magda and stroked the side of her face, the movement slow and gentle, as if she were something precious. It had been a long time since someone had made her feel like that. The gesture was so tender she could have cried. ‘I’d really like to see you again.’

      Magda took a step back to create a gap between them. ‘I’ll call you,’ she muttered, although she had no intention of doing so. She didn’t plan to see him again. She looked at the floor and waited for him to leave. When he made no move to go, she glanced back up and said, ‘For the record, I enjoyed tonight too.’ She at least owed him that. She didn’t want him to walk out of there feeling worthless. As clichéd as it sounded, it wasn’t him, it was her.

      ‘Goodbye, then.’ He turned and left the room, leaving Magda staring at the closed door. She climbed into bed soon after that, her mind full of the past as she fell asleep cocooned within the duvet.

      ‘We’re always going to be mates, aren’t we? I mean, sometimes I think about where we’ll be in the years to come, and I just can’t imagine not having you there next to me. It’d be so sad, wouldn’t it? If we ended up in completely different places, living completely different lives? I don’t want that to ever happen, Magda.’

      Sophia eyed the rest of the group up ahead and laughed as they attempted to perform handstands on the sand. It was cold and dark, and the smell of the sea blew around them in the breeze.

      ‘Course that’s not going to happen. Don’t be stupid. Me and you will always be together. You know that. We’ve already got it all planned, haven’t we? I mean, we’ve planned to try and become pregnant at the same time so our kids can grow up together. It’s mad, really.’ Magda laughed and nudged Sophia’s shoulder with her own. They were sat side by side. ‘But don’t worry, we’ll never be apart. I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you.’

      ‘Come on, you two!’ Ben called from up ahead, waving at them. ‘Show us what you’ve got!’

      ‘Best friends for ever?’ Sophia held her little finger out towards Magda.

      ‘Best friends for ever.’ Magda hooked her own pinky finger around Sophia’s and they grinned at each other before leaping to their feet and joining the rest of the gang further out, laughing as they ran hand in hand across the sand.

Chapter Two

      Sophia Good stared listlessly at the boiling kettle. Was it her imagination or was it taking longer than usual? Finally, once she was able to, she poured the steaming water into her cup of coffee granules and sugar and stirred it into the magical concoction known as coffee