Just Friends

Holly McCulloch

Just Friends

Contents

About the Author

Holly McCulloch lives in Oxfordshire and bakes beautiful (and delicious) cakes for a living. Just Friends is her debut novel.

To Friends

And one friend in particular – Mr Rick Barbaria

CHAPTER 1

I am not happy.

I am angry. On this, my Best Friend’s Wedding Day, I am angry.

And not (just) because I haven’t eaten.

I am angry because some dickhead has just made me angry on a day when I want to be genuinely full of happy. I have spent the last eighteen months helping my best friend, Mia, gear up for this day, agreeing to wear a dress that doesn’t suit me and shoes that hurt, running increasingly random errands, glue-gunning (is that even a verb?) diamantés on to orders of service, and kindly offering to sit next to her crazy Uncle Geoff at dinner the night before. Who even spells Jeff that way? He spoke to me for hours about his coffee preferences, and I listened kindly, my jaw muscles aching from all the over-enthusiastic fake smiling. And why? Why am I doing this?

I’m doing this because, no matter where I am or what friend group I’m in, I am always known for being the happy one, and happy people don’t flip their lid at having to listen to Uncle Geoff drone on about the proper way to make an Americano.

But the truth is, inside, I am not happy – I’m a mess. I don’t know what I want to do with my life. I’m stagnating at work. I avoid all awkward conversations, and instead live with a growing well of frustration inside me and an increasingly loud internal narrator, who I try to keep quiet because not many of my thoughts are that happy these days.

But I pretend to be happy because I want to be happy. And because all of my friends like this happy version of me, and because I like my friends and I want them to stay my friends, I keep up the ruse. It’s really fucking tiring.

Most days I manage it quite well.

But today is not most days.

Today I am on the verge of losing it. Today I have worked hard to be the best maid of honour a person can be. I helped calm people down in the morning, I helped find ribbon, I stood where I needed to in church, I left my wedgie where it was throughout the whole ceremony, and I even delivered a thoughtful yet amusing maid of honour speech. I haven’t eaten a proper meal in two days because of the nerves. But I was happy to do it.

And now this fool has had the audacity to tell me that I need to work on the way I answer the question ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ Apparently my reply (‘Ha, no’) totally put him off. He kindly informed me that he could have been my next boyfriend, if only I’d answered that question differently.