Content Warning:

The following chapters include vague and implied (not glorified)

reference to eating disorders and disordered eating, and one instance of implied

fat shaming. Please take this into account before reading and make

the best decision for your safety and wellbeing.

1.

I left my fiancé over a £5 packet of M&S sushi. It was a Saturday, just after three.

The sushi was surprisingly good, if eaten too quickly to really be enjoyable - soy sauce cold and sticky on my fingertips as I ate and ran after Jordan at the same time, precarious in heels that I wouldn’t have chosen for myself, my flight further threatened by the flutter of a too-long dress around my ankles.

Edinburgh was grey and sodden beneath a stony sky, and yet I found myself breathless at every glimpse of it. I kept wanting to stop, to just hold still and stare - despite Jordan getting further and further away from me, despite the crush of surprisingly determined tourists that hit me on all sides - as we made our way down Princes Street. It seemed shocking, already, less than twenty four hours after arriving, that I had never visited before, that I hadn’t even wanted to make the trip. 

Not for another wedding of people who wouldn’t recognise me independently if I had a sign over my head; a scrolling one like you get in train stations; Lenny Moseley, Jordan’s partner, made the cake. Yes, you do recognise her from that one baking show, no she’s not the one that one, you’re thinking of that other girl, the lovely one with the gorgeous wife and toddlers, yes she did cry a lot, yes she is aware that it was only cake. 

And not for another of Jordan’s moods; predictable now only in their unpredictability, not explosive but suffocating as a sudden fog. I had let him pick my dress and heels, bought the exact products for my face that his colleague Caroline had suggested, gone and had my nails done especially, even though the technicians tsked at the way they were spotted and flaking, even though I knew that they would break immediately under all that gel and I would have effectively thrown £37 directly in the bin.

He still wasn’t happy. 

And I knew it was all my fault.

He resumed grumbling the moment I caught up to him, or perhaps had simply never ceased for the entire time we’d been separated by tourists, our latest tiff and the impossibility of walking up the longest road in Britain in the world’s worst shoes.

‘We’re going to be late,’ he hissed, taking my elbow as we crossed the wide, traffic-filled street.

‘We’re not going to be late,’ I said, in the voice I had been working on; the soothing one, the one that didn’t rise too spikily at the ends. The one that didn’t tease, swear, or jar and had perhaps never found anything funny in the entire history of its, or anyone’s existence. ‘We’re not even five minutes from the restaurant, look.’

With my free hand I waved my phone, and Google Maps, in his direction. He did not look.

‘Caroline said,’ he insisted, as we passed over Princes Street and towards the New Town; tall, pale buildings bracketing wide, intentional roads, and an atmosphere of dour expensiveness. ‘That the wedding party all needed to be in place well before she and Hugh arrived, to help greet the guests and kick off the party.’

I thought to myself that if Caroline, who had recently been promoted above Jordan at the firm, cared that much about the attendee experience of her wedding to Hugh, a man I had only ever heard speak enthusiastically about golf and his own mother, she probably wouldn’t have scheduled her 1PM wedding ceremony to be followed by a 3PM reception on the other side of town, with no food served until six.

I did not say this. 

I did not, as it was, get the chance to say anything, as Jordan was tugging the sleeves down on my dress and saying;

‘But of course you had to stop. Couldn’t make it one hour without spending money, eating something, wasting time or some combination of the three.’

‘If I hadn’t stopped,’ I snapped. ‘I would have got the spins, fallen from a height off of these heels and risked a traumatic brain injury. I hadn’t eaten since seven.’

I regretted it the moment the words were out of my mouth. But the sushi I had stopped for on our walk to the reception, delaying us for a whole five and a half minutes, most of which I’d spent pointing out that Jordan didn’t actually have to stay and supervise if he was actually that anxious, really hadn’t done anything to quell the hunger that was gnawing away at my insides, or its accompanying nausea, my metabolism super-charged by decades of obsessively reading labels, drowning my organs in detox teas or considering one bag of popcorn a day adequate nutrition for an adult woman in her twenties. 

Jordan looked me up and down.The dress he had picked was both between sizes and cut for someone either four sizes smaller or twenty years older than I was. The sleeves rode up on my arms. The bust sat halfway across my chest, bisecting my tits instead of giving them that good Bridgerton-esque push up. No amount of starving myself had ever made my face less round, my figure less lush and yet still he said;

‘There are worse things in the world.’

We made our way silently to the restaurant. I could not - could never, not this far down the road - allow myself to get too far into any anger at Jordan so instead I found myself irrationally irritated at Caroline; for choosing to get married so far away, in the city she and Hugh had lived in during their Uni days; for making the groomsmen wear kilts that seemed to suit everybody but Jordan, so that as well as irrationally angry he was irrationally angry and looked faintly like a bad cosplayer; for having her reception in a restaurant I had dreamed about attending, actually, that I had half religiously followed on Instagram for years, whose chef had just become the first trans man to hold a Michelin star and who had been so unbearably hot on one of the nation’s most prestigious cooking shows the year before that my mum and stepfather had to watch his episodes from entirely different rooms in the house.

I could easily believe the turn the weekend had taken but I was still coming slowly to grasping the fact that every thing Jordan decided to ruin seemed to correspond directly to something I couldn’t help but care about, 

The Swan and Bottle was tucked down a cobbled side street. The sign had, temporarily, been taken down over the bottle green door to make way for a cursive ‘Caroline and Hugh’, surmounted by their wedding hashtag and an invitation to guests to come in, order a cocktail and ‘dance until you drop’, but I saw it propped up inside the window of what must - from my quick attempts at visualising the space - be the kitchen. A swan, serenely doing laps of the inside of a champagne coupe and surely having a better night than anyone at this reception ever would.

The interior was packed with people who were all some kind of variation on Caroline, Hugh, or Jordan - white, jacketed or dressed in florals, English and already quite impressively drunk. They covered the antique, reclaimed floor, packed out the booths, the corner tables and whacked their heads off the green glass lights. They did not look at the bar staff, dressed casually in artfully, deliberately rumpled green shirts, as they passed through the room and I noticed awkwardly that Jordan did not thank the waiter who paused, as she passed us, and proffered two glasses of champagne.

The weddings of Jordan’s friends were almost exclusively like this, and I had the sudden heavy certainty that ours would be too, if we ever set a date. Fortunately so far there had always been something else for the money to go towards; holidays, the mortgage on Jordan’s eye wateringly expensive flat in Shoreditch, the sheer number of other people’s weddings we seemed to be called upon to attend, just like this.

I bit back a wince as Ben and Anna, the couple from the last such festivity, caught Jordan’s eye and offered a deliriously cheery wave. Ben was of middling height and already slightly balding, while Anna was a petite, blue-dressed English Rose whose wedding gift I had hand picked and who blinked politely at me now, stalling as she searched desperately for my name.

‘Lottie?’ she said at last, triumphantly, as Ben and Jordan began to share some apparently hilarious anecdote about Hugh’s stag do and I made some kind of ‘eh good enough’ noise of affirmation through my teeth.

Then- 

‘Do I know you from somewhere?’ said Anna, blinking again. ‘Or do you just have one of those faces?’

‘Lenny was on TV when she was in Secondary School,’ Ben interjected, smiling at me kindly. I barely knew the man, except for all the time I spent trying to tally the relatively pleasant conversations I had had with him with the truly deranged antics he had purportedly accomplished on various stags over the years and yet I smiled at him now with the kind of forceful gratitude better adjusted people save for first responders. ‘Bake It ‘Til You Make it, the one on ITV. We used to watch it with mummy, do you remember?’

‘Oh!’ Anna clapped her hands together, quite close to my face. ‘Oh you were so sweet! Gosh I hardly would have recognised you now! I remember all the stir at the time, you were rather unhappy afterwards weren’t you, I remember reading in the paper how-’

‘Lenny actually made the cake for today!’ Jordan cut in smoothly, smiling like it’s both normal to cut across women in conversation and be personally embarassed by your own fiancee’s vaguely traumatic brush with an incredibly specific type of fame.

‘Did you really?’ Anna screeched, happily accepting another glass of fizz from a circling waiter as I smiled weakly and thought of said cake, sitting somewhere in the kitchen, probably needing one last touchup. I had been hoping inspiration might strike and I would find some genius way of slipping away to have one last go over it without Jordan taking my leaving the party for a moment as some kind of personal insult.

We had been dating well before my stint on Bake It Till You Make It - he had, at one point, been my first real love - but Jordan still found the Occasions baking business I’d founded after the show more than a little embarrassing. By the point it really got off the ground he was already applying for jobs at the same firms his father had worked at and all his contemporaries were either thrillingly single, or married with two to three children. My inability to either maintain a ‘real’ job or present as a convincing housewife rankled upon him, although he had no issues recommending me to anyone vaguely higher ranked at work than him who might need baking for, even if it meant transporting three layers of wedding cake halfway up the country with a cool-box of back up frosting and what I were sure would be my first five grey hairs.

Just then, another groomsman - entirely more dapper in his kiltsuit, it regrettably had to be said - slid up to Jordan and firmly, if politely, pulled him away.

And I was left standing with Anna, whose mouth fell open in a little ‘o’ of awkwardness, and Ben, who I was really very sure was about to ask me something to which there could be no form of polite response.

I waited until Jordan’s retreating form was completely out of sight, and then I did the only reasonable thing.

I ran.

Murmuring something largely insane about ‘cake’, ‘swiss meringue’ and ‘sprucing’ I backed awkwardly through the crowds, only stopping when I came up to the very first doorway in sight.

I had no idea where it led. 

I was pretty certain I did not care

The kitchen was like another world. Cool and dim and quiet. So tiny I found myself stretching out my arms as far as they’d go, bulging seams and all, trying to imagine sharing the space with even one other person. 

My cake had been set carefully on one of the prep stations, the tools I’d left in case of touch ups arrayed neatly at its side. 

I took a moment to take it in - the watercolour effect on the buttercream, the precise piping. I was proud of it. It was beautiful. I really wanted to feel something about it other than absolute, resounding, nothingness. 

I leant against the worktop and tried to work out at what point in my life I’d started slipping away from parties and not even noticing. Why I felt like I was always at the wrong place, the wrong time. 

It couldn’t just be Jordan. It couldn’t be. Not when he hadn’t always been like this. Not when I was the common denominator in everything that had ever gone wrong. 

I put my head in my hands and wondered if it was time to start plotting my way towards the kind of person Jordan seemed to think I would be happier being. Anna was happy, wasn’t she? Caroline always seemed happy enough, on the three and a half times I’d met her outside of Jordan’s office in the last five years. 

The door to the kitchen burst open. A draft of noise; chatter and laughter and popping corks, rushed in, as well as a crack of a light. 

I jumped, startled out of my spiralling, and spun on the spot - 

And found myself staring at the most significantly gorgeous person I had ever seen.

2.

Jordan had always been pretty cute with his wide green eyes and tousled dark hair. Mila, the girl I’d dated before him had been simply stunning - warm brown skin and a wide smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes and hair that fell nearly to her waist. I might have been off the market for a decade but it’s not like I’d been walking around with a bag over my head the whole time.

It was just that looking at the man in front of me was like looking into the sun.

He was broad, and the arms folded across his chest were muscular in a way that was making me rethink my prior taste in romantic partners by the second. His blond hair was short at the sides and longer on top, and for some reason I could not stop myself from thinking about how it probably fell in his eyes all the time, how he must have to always push it back, how it would feel to do that for him, fingers tangled up in the strands, cupping the side of his face, his pale blue eyes searing into yours.

I should probably have been taking that moment to get really, really worried about the fact that I had never once - not in ten, comfortable enough years - thought like that about Jordan but instead I was contending with the feeling of every single synaps of my brain dying one after the other after the other.

I was not prepared, at the best of times, for an unexpected interaction with the world’s most gorgeous stranger and these were not, in anyone’s imagination, the best of times.

In the interest of doing something, anything, other than just stand and stare, open-mouthed - if only because the last surviving parts of my brain were screaming at me that that is not an even remotely normal thing to do in front of even unnattractive strangers- I whirled around, gesticulated wildly at Caroline and Hugh’s completed wedding cake and blurted;

‘I’m allowed to be in here!’

The stranger looked at me, looked at the cake, and raised one eyebrow fractionally.

‘I’m really happy for you.’

His voice was slightly raspy, his accent pure Edinburgh - rounded at the edges, soft and warm.

‘I’m the cake, shit no I’m here for the cake, shit that’s not it either-’ I paused and rubbed my face for a moment. ‘Fuck.’

‘No I think this is going really well.’ 

And he did look vaguely amused, but not really altogether surprised, as if women went to pieces right in front of him all the time.

Which maybe they did I reflected, watching the flex of his arms as he did up the last few buttons of the chef’s whites which stretched across his chest. His hands and forearms were dotted with a combination of burns, cuts and tattoos and I’d met chefs before and I’d seen arms like that before and never once had I been that transfixed.

‘Sorry,’ I said bluntly, reeling at the pressure to somehow recover the moment. ‘It’s not every day I get corned by a brick shithouse in a dark room with no warning.’

This did seem to catch him off guard, although I was almost too consumed by the realisation that I had sworn more in the last five minutes than I probably had in over a year. Jordan had been working hard on my ‘unladylike’ qualities. 

I didn’t have too long to think about it though because three things happened at once.

A familiar voice rang out as, from the other side, Jordan tried to force open the kitchen door.

I flinched backwards, despite myself.

And the gorgeous stranger saw it all.

Without looking at me, but without hesitating either, he threw one arm across the door behind him and said, in as ‘do not fuck with me’ a tone as you can get without raising your voice or seeming to even break a sweat said;

‘Sorry pal, kitchen staff only back here.’

Silence.

I could almost see Jordan, sizing up the much bigger stranger. I could also see him making calculations, altering himself minutely. Jordan hated being a fish out of water. Couldn’t help but try and fit himself into any situation, force his way in if he had to.

‘Yeah sure man,’ I heard him say, muffled through the door. ‘I just thought my fiancée might be back there. Short girl, blue dress, bit weepy.’

I cocked my head and grimaced at the description. As if it was funny and not somehow both the most bare minimum way you could possibly describe someone you’d known since you were a teenager and also vaguely insulting.

The stranger looked me up and down, out of the corner of his eye then said; 

‘Not got one of those back here buddy.’

He kept his arm across the door until we heard Jordan’s footsteps recede once more.

‘So,’ the stranger said into the strained silence that followed. ‘Leave him.’

‘Well yeah,’ I retorted. Embarrassment prickled across my skin, a nauseating sensation combined with the cold sadness that puddled at the pit of my stomach, and the heat that flared across me every time the stranger caught my eye. ‘I’m obviously going to end my relationship just because some random told me to.’

‘Some random?’ he mouthed. ‘First off, you’re the one who’s wandered into my place of work, so chalk that down. Secondly, the best he could do is short and weepy. Well you are short, to be fair, and you do look like you’ve been having a wee cry but I just spent three minutes out there with that lot and I’m already minded to join you.’

The words settled over me strangely.

It wasn’t that I’d never thought about leaving Jordan. It was just that it’s never just leaving someone. It’s packing up all your things. It’s finding another place to live in a city so eyewateringly expensive you couldn’t afford the rent on somebody’s broom closet. It’s every nice thing that person’s ever done for you and everything you owe them for that.

It was that I also, frankly, didn’t get the chance to be told I ought to leave Jordan because he was really the only person I spoke to anymore. Ever. About anything.

‘Right,’ I said drily, and wondered if outside the kitchen door they were still handing out free alcohol. ‘Is it right now that I’m leaving him or do you think I should wait until the speeches?’

The stranger folded his arms again.

‘I mean I don’t want to rush you,’ he said. ‘But in about five minutes I do have to pack five fully grown men in here to finish cooking dinner for what looks like a good third of the next generation of the Conservative party so if you’re asking what’s more convenient for me-’

‘I’m going to marry him,’ I blurted out. It was unclear which of us I wanted to convince. 

‘No ring though,’ he pointed out.

He’d checked?

I looked down at my left hand, as if I’d never seen it before. 

‘It doesn’t fit,’ I said. I tried to sound extremely cool about the whole thing as I did. 

‘And you haven’t resized it,’ he rebutted. ‘So it’s either ugly as shit, or you can’t actually face up to being eternally shackled to that guy.’

It didn’t feel like a good idea to agree that the ring was ugly. The best that could be said of the round, gaudy stone, was that it was large and the worst that could be said was that it had been bought by somebody who thought the size of a stone was the only thing that mattered. I thought of it, guiltily, pressed to the far  back of my sock drawer because i didn’t own a jewellery box and it seemed like the kind of thing you shouldn’t leave lying around, less it start a small fire or serve as too great a temptation for a passing magpie, or be needed to bludgeon somebody to death..

‘Jordan,’ I corrected, absently.

‘Nope,’ the stranger chirped and took a step forward, clearly deciding that if I wasn’t going to leave, he was going to at least claim more than the three square inches of space in the kitchen he’d been taking up that far. ‘Carey.’

‘No he’s-’ I had to stop and swallow very suddenly, my heart pounding sickeningly as the stranger got closer and then closer again. He smirked at me as he reached for something on the shelf directly above my head. He was so close I could feel the heat coming off of him, I could smell his cigarettes and the warm hit of his cologne. ‘He’s Jordan,’ I managed at last. ‘And I’d better go-’

‘Tell him he seems at best extremely uninspiring?’

‘Plan our life of devoted marital bliss.’

And then I found myself bolting once again, ducking under Carey’s arm, out of the kitchen and into the party once more. Which was still loud, still boring and Jordan still looked pissed off at me, dsepite being surrounded by at least five people who were meant to be his closest friends and happily swigging away at what was almost certainly wincingly expensive champagne. Caroline was at his elbow, wearing the kind of high necked white gown which ought to have looked alarmingly severe and which she was making look oddly sexy.

‘Oh hello Lenny,’ she drawled as I came closer, the only person I knew who could inject a note of boredom into any sentence, at any time. ‘Jordan said you were probably off having one of your moments.’

He did not meet my eye as I turned to look at him. Just sighed a little put upon sigh. Took another sip of his drink.

For one odd, wild moment I wondered what it would be like to describe Carey to Jordan. How it had felt to stand so close to him. How  I had felt, in ten minutes with a stranger, more alert and more aware  than I had in months, or far, far longer.

But then that moment passed. Another colleague of Jordan and Caroline’s complimented the Restaraunt.

‘How chic,’ she said, as I tried desperately to remember if her name was Rebecca or Georgina. ‘What a sweet little place, you know?’

Caroline shrugged.

‘Hugh’s Dad owns the whole group, so we made a mint in savings having the party here. Absolute joke though, I really don’t rate it if I’m honest with you. We had a nightmare of a time getting the chef to agree to anything, he kept complaining about their so called Sustainability policies.’

Jordan scoffed.

‘Policy’s a very big word from someone who definitely didn’t go to uni, let’s be real,’ he said, and even as he said it I glimpsed Carey leaving the kitchen once more, golden and shining over the crowd. He caught me watching and raised his eyebrows, darting a look from me to Jordan with a smirk.

And it was suddenly very clear to me that if I didn’t leave just then I wasn’t going to. If I didn’t leave when even a complete stranger could see how obviously pathetic I was, it wasn’t going to happen. If I wasn’t going to leave when I was surrounded by people I not only hated but thought were maybe some of the worst on the planet, it wasn’t going to happen. If I wasn’t going to leave when I was standing in a restaurant I’d wanted to visit for actual years and loathing every second…it wasn’t going to happen.

I had lost any bit of momentum I’d ever had. I’d given it away. I was being given a push and if I didn’t take it I was going to start hating everything I saw apart from the godawful dress I was wearing, which I’d somehow start liking just like I’d start liking Jordan’s jokes and Caroline’s weird deadpan voice, because I had to.

And I’d stay so still inside and so empty that five minutes with a total stranger was all it would take to set my heart off like a rocket.

It would have been extremely cool to throw the shitty, obscene diamond sitting back at home in Jordan’s flat in his face but obviously I didn’t have it, thanks to its shit obscenity. And the words ended up coming out in such a panic anyway that I didn’t even take advantage of the perfectly good trays of champagne circling the area either.

In the end, I just wrapped up my relationship of ten whole years by half screaming, to a room of seventy five people;

‘God you really are just the worst.’

Jordan looked at me.

I looked at Jordan.

‘Well you are,’ I said in my own defence. ‘You’re a terrible fiancé and you’ve got terrible taste in pretty much everything and I’m literally going to have to leave you right here at this wedding, which is an objectively terrible time to leave somebody, and I’m so sorry, but if I don’t do it right now then I never will but you’ll also never stop being the worst and it’ll all just be shit. Forever. So, you know, sorry about that too.’

I turned to leave, then suddenly turned back.

‘Oh and Caroline, the cake’s in the kitchen whenever you guys are ready to cut it. There’s wooden rods in there holding everything together so I normally say to brides just to take a nice small cut out of the side for the photos and let the event staff do the rest.’

And with the world’s most awkwardly phrased breakup officially on my hands, I made a beeline for the staff exit at the back. 

Carey held the door open for me as I passed.