"No, you go without me, Kim! Have a great time."
"Yeah I know but I can't go tonight; not in this state."
"I'll be fine by tomorrow really; Monday latest. I'm really sorry."
"Nah, don't worry. I'll be ok. See you soon. Bye!"
I touched the screen of my phone to end the call and slumped sulkily down on the sofa. It was ten o'clock on Saturday night and I was home alone; not something I was used to and definitely not something I liked.
As a twenty-year-old single girl and a student at the local college, my Saturday nights were normally one big party. Usually by ten o'clock I would be the wrong side of a few vodka shots and out on the town with Kim and the girls, carefully dressed in the right short skirts, the right high heels and the right short sleeveless tops looking for the right bars with the right boys inside and having a right good time.
But not tonight! Tonight I was home alone and feeling sorry for myself.
It wasn't that my friends had deserted me or that I was mourning the recent end of my last relationship; my best friend Kim would have come over and sat home with me if I'd asked but I wanted to be alone that night. I wasn't anything like as unwell as I'd told Kim either. No, the problem tonight was not my friends, it was me; my face to be precise!
I had broken up with my boyfriend a month earlier after over a year of relatively steady, relatively monogamous relationship. Although I hadn't expected to spend the rest of my life with him, I had cared enough and trusted him enough to have gone on the pill for him and we had stopped using condoms in bed.
Our already-great sex had soared once we had gone bareback and the physical side of our relationship had surged ahead but he had always had a wandering eye and even great sex hadn't been enough to keep us together. Around our first anniversary the itch had set in and the selfish bastard fell for Millie, a slim blonde hairdresser. They had been fucking for a full month before he broke the news and dumped me; there had then been that godawful row in McDonalds during which I had slapped his face and our relationship was over.
Of course now I was back on the dating scene, condoms were essential so I had stopped taking the pill and gone back to trusting in latex.
And that was where the problem lay.
When I had started the pill my hormones had gone haywire and my skin had become terrible. To make things worse, I put on quite a bit of weight and had to check for spots and pimples every day. I strongly suspected that this had helped make my ungrateful shit of a boyfriend look elsewhere. I suppose I couldn't blame him on one way; Millie was two dress sizes smaller and had peach-perfect skin, the cow!
The irony was that, by the time he dumped me my skin had cleared up again, though I admit I was still carrying those extra pounds. It was that as much as anything that had made me believe that dumping the pill was good riddance.
The trouble was that in the month since I had I stopped taking it, my weight hadn't gone down and the same skin problems that had appeared when I went on the pill came back when I came off it.
How unfair is that?
Indeed, two days before that Saturday, my face had broken out into a rash of angry red that itched like hell and which no amount of make-up or concealer could hide. It was simply too embarrassing to inflict on a new date, even in a dark nightclub.
So there I was, home alone on Saturday night, hair unkempt, dressed in my old pyjama bottoms and a baggy T shirt, slouched on the sofa watching terrible movies, eating potato crisps and half way down a bottle of Mum's favourite Chardonnay.
Ok, maybe I was a little more than half way down the bottle but if I bought another full one and hid the empty bottle she would never know. Mum and Dad were away on one of their 'date weekends' so I had plenty of time to put things straight before their return the following evening.
I pressed 'play' on a particularly dreadful hen-party comedy, refilled my glass and settled back to let my brain turn to tipsy mush, wishing Kim was there too, both of us getting slammed on Mum's wine. Kim and I had been inseparable since we were very young and were best friends still; 'Kimberley and Samantha'; 'Kim and Sam, the terrible twins!
I chuckled and took another sip of wine, running it round my mouth before swallowing. Kim was fun to have around; a gorgeous, cheeky, leggy brunette nearly six feet tall and a size eight at most! I'm tall too but blonde and at the time of this story was a size twelve, though I'd promised myself that was only temporary and my slim figure was only a few months away.
Alright, Chardonnay and potato crisps wouldn't help me regain my figure but comfort eating was a need too!
I wondered who Kim and the girls would meet up with in town. She and I were both well known to the boys in our year, but she had a rather less flexible definition of 'being faithful' than I did. Kim was currently single like me, but when she had a boyfriend she was strictly a one-man girl; the man in question might change from time to time but when she was with a boy, she stuck with him.
I had a rather broader view which allowed me the occasional one night stray from the straight-and-narrow, as long as I returned to my man of the moment quickly afterwards, preferably with my indiscretion undiscovered. Not all my boyfriends had been happy with this so I took the view that what they didn't know couldn't hurt them!
The movie was getting into swing and I began to giggle; I had seen it so often that I knew the words by heart and could see the jokes coming a mile off. Shuffling down on the sofa I took another sip of wine and waited for messages to come through on my phone from the girls. I hoped to get a few juicy pieces of gossip as the night progressed but nothing had come through so far. Still, the night was yet young and there was plenty of time for bad behaviour and more!
I had just turned back to the TV when I heard a car pull into the driveway. Dad's SUV had a very distinctive sound that even I could recognise so I knew it wasn't my parents but it was only ten fifteen so surely it was far too early for Robbie to be home.
Robbie is officially my stepbrother though his Mum and my Dad married when we were toddlers and I can hardly remember a time he wasn't around. We have always called each other brother and sister and have behaved as if we were, with all the squabbling and competitiveness you expect from siblings. We got on ok in an undemanding way but had very different personalities as did our parents.
Robbie was two school years behind me at the time and was just eighteen. He's quite tall but at the time was a bit skinny and geeky and wore glasses. I had always considered him to be the baby of the family which he hated but played up to when it suited him.
On a Saturday night he would usually be out with his long-standing girlfriend Mary, a sweet but bookish girl he had been seeing for nearly a year. Mary was pretty in her own way but quite reserved and would never have been seen in the kind of clothes my girlfriends and I routinely wore to go out.
Still she suited my little stepbrother and I was pleased for him.
I was sure they were going to a birthday party that night and knew that Robbie would normally take Mary home afterwards so I was amazed to hear the front door slam and loud footsteps thunder across the hallway.
I put the movie on 'pause' and went to investigate; in the kitchen I found Robbie dressed for a party but in a frantic, agitated state. He was popping open one of Dad's beers from the fridge, something he would never normally have done.
"Better not let Dad know you've had that," I said in a slightly slurry voice from the doorway.
Robbie spun round.
"Sam! What are you doing there?" he growled.
"I live here, dumdum!" I said, laughing. "Remember your big sister? Or is it so long since breakfast you've forgotten me?"
"Sorry!" he growled, "I thought the house would be empty. I did wonder why the lights were on but..."
"But getting a beer was more important?"
"I guess so," his whole demeanour was one of deflation. My little brother was not a happy boy.
"Shouldn't you be in town?" he demanded.
"Not tonight," I replied sulkily.
