Mollie McQueen is NOT Getting Divorced Read online

  Mollie McQueen is NOT Getting Divorced

  Copyright © 2018 by S Cartlidge

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Published in the UK.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  This book is dedicated to my amazing husband.

  Marriage lets you annoy one special person for the rest of your life.

  Thank you for being mine.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Prologue

  It was just before midnight on the last day of May when Mollie McQueen first realised her marriage was over. The look on her uninterested husband’s face when she dared to mention their non-existent sex life told her everything she needed to know…

  As a flirtatious Mollie seductively draped her legs across Max’s lap, he kept his focus firmly on his phone. His grey eyes narrowed as he stared at the handset intently, completely oblivious to his wife’s rather obvious advances. Not bothering to give her so much as a cursory glance, Max gently pushed Mollie away and pulled the duvet up to his chin with his spare hand.

  With her attempts at seducing her husband being ignored yet again, Mollie prepared to go to sleep dejected. Only this time, something inside her changed. Her frustration at constantly being rejected by the one man she was permitted to roll around with had reached an all-time high, and Mollie couldn’t take it for a moment longer.

  Rolling onto her side, Mollie propped herself up on her pillow and stared at Max as he tapped away at his phone in silence. His chiselled face was creased with concentration, his long legs sprawled carelessly across the quilted sheets.

  ‘Do you realise it’s been an entire year since we last had sex?’ She said abruptly, studying his face for any glimpse of a reaction.

  ‘Huh?’ Max replied, clearly irritated that Mollie had interrupted him.

  ‘Sex!’ She repeated loudly. ‘You know, that thing married people do?’

  ‘Bloody hell, Mollie!’ Max cast her a sideways glance and shook his head in disgust.

  ‘We’re not a couple of teenagers. We don’t need to roll around to prove that we love one another.’

  Mollie’s heart sank in her chest as she stared at her husband. You see, that’s where Max and Mollie differed. Mollie did need to roll around in order to feel loved. She craved the intimacy, the excitement and the lust she felt from the touch of a man. A relationship based on a forced peck every morning had finally left her cold, and Mollie knew this signalled the beginning of the end. She loved Max, of course she did, but the spark in their relationship had fizzled out a long time ago. The intense rush of adrenaline she used to feel when he walked into a room just wasn’t there anymore.

  Despite being in their early thirties, Max and Mollie had developed a living situation akin to that of a pair of socially awkward pensioners. Their nightly routine revolved around the sofa and too much reality television, but life hadn’t always been that way. When Max and Mollie first met, Maximilian McQueen was the life and soul of every party. His quirky bohemian attitude meant that to Mollie, he was irresistible. Unlike the rest of the boys she dated, Max was different. He didn’t want to simply pay bills and die. Max wanted something more. He wanted to travel the globe and put his stamp on the world before his time on planet Earth was up.

  As the years drifted by, Mollie grew from a free-loving teenager to a highly respected marketing executive, but Max… Well, Max never really changed, and that’s where their problems started. Naturally, Mollie left behind her ambition of changing the world one poem at a time and her dreams for the future evolved. The day she turned thirty, Mollie awoke with a determination to make her next thirty years the best they could possibly be. She made a promise to herself that she would address every area of her life and polish it to perfection. Max, on the other hand, was still content with writing songs no one would ever hear and attempting to produce organic soap in the basement.

  When Mollie walked down the aisle, in the church where she spent so much time as a child, she thought her marriage was going to last forever. She believed she was on the cusp of her very own fairy tale, but the moment that gold band was slipped onto her finger things slowly started to go stale. For Mollie, their wedding day was the beginning of a happy future as man and wife, but Max obviously had other ideas. For him, that sunny morning in October marked the day when he stopped trying.

  As she looked at Max now, with his outgrown beard and stained sweatpants, Mollie hardly recognised the man she agreed to spend the rest of her life with. The fun-loving guy she fell in love with had long since vanished. In his place was a cold, lazy and frankly pathetic excuse for a man. Mollie found it hard to believe he was the same person who used to throw her around the bedroom. The person who managed to put his dirty boxer shorts in the laundry basket instead of next to it left a long time ago. The truth is, Max probably didn’t recognise Mollie either. She might have kept her love for vintage fashion, her blunt bob and quirky tattoos, but the woman she was inside had drifted as far away from the girl Max met as could possibly be.

  When nineteen-year-old Mollie Waddles first set eyes on Maximilian McQueen, he was teaching his football team how to meditate in the local park. Their boyish jibes and boisterous banter turned the air blue, but it wasn’t their raucous behaviour that caught Mollie’s attention. It was the way Max dealt with it. Not being deterred by their incessant teasing, he kept a grin on his face and maintained the control as he coerced them all into the Downward-Facing Dog.

  Unbeknown to Mollie, Max had spotted her weeks earlier. Wearing a headscarf that was tied into a perfect bow and her trademark polka dot dress, Mollie had walked past Max and his football squad dozens of times before. Too busy clutching her skinny latte and reading her horoscope in the latest gossip magazine, Mollie was completely unaware of their admiring glances. But on that particular day, when the Gold Lions’ laughter echoed around the park, Max and Mollie’s eyes met for the very first time.

  Not having been in love before, Mollie didn’t quite understand the tingling sensation in her stomach. Nor did she understand why her heart raced when he raised his hand and flashed her a grin. It wasn’t long after that initial contact that Max gathered the courage to ask Mollie on a date. Said date involved a visit to the only vegetarian restaurant in the area and a ravenous Mollie devouring a Big Mac on her way home. Within a year of sharing falafel by candleli
ght, Max proposed and the two of them got to planning the perfect wedding.

  Enjoying living in a love bubble, Mollie took charge of the preparations and left Max to focus on his football career. At the time, Max was beating record after record with the Gold Lions and single-handedly carried his team up the ranks. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long before the big clubs came knocking and the future started to look bright for young Maximilian. The up-and-coming football star was huge news on the pitch. Everyone who was anyone wanted a piece of him.

  In an awful twist of fate, an appalling tackle finished Max’s glittering football career before it had properly started and the repercussions hit home pretty hard. Not being in the right frame of mind to attend cake tasting appointments or choose procession music, Max asked Mollie to postpone the wedding and she reluctantly agreed. Once the initial grief subsided, Max turned to Buddhism, Taoism, and a cluster of other religions in an attempt to make sense of why the universe had taken his life in a direction he never expected. His efforts at understanding why fate had decided to destroy his knee ligaments were never answered, and Max eventually decided to look towards the future.

  It was during a meditation session that he first had the idea to use his insurance payout to start a business of his own. Needless to say, his onion bhaji delivery service was not the overnight success he dreamt it would be, but that didn’t deter Max. Every month, he would convince himself that he was on the brink of making millions. Whether it was developing an app that promised to predict the most likely lottery numbers or creating an alternative to fossil fuels, Maximilian had encountered more failed big breaks than Mollie could care to remember and each one was more ridiculous than the last.

  At first, Mollie excused Max’s refusal to get a steady job with the simple explanation that he was heading for something bigger. The reality was, Max hadn’t turned a profit in the eleven years they had been together. A whole decade had rolled by and Max was still refusing to grow up. As a result, Mollie’s faith in Max’s entrepreneurial abilities vanished and the pair of them started to row. What started as gentle bickering soon escalated into blazing arguments. Before long, the subject of Max’s so-called career was off the table completely.

  Over the years, Mollie came to terms with the reality of being the sole breadwinner in their household, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a bitter pill to swallow. Putting in the extra hours to cover for Max’s lack of income had become the norm for her. As such, she had less and less free time to devote to her head-in-the-clouds husband.

  Turning thirty is what made Mollie view her life in a whole new light. The house she was once so ecstatic to get her hands on suddenly filled her with dread. Despite three years passing since they were handed the keys, the minuscule mews was still in the same condition it was when they first stepped over the threshold. What Mollie initially viewed as bijou, she now considered painfully small. With Max being eternally unemployed, you might think he would have turned the shoebox house into a mini palace, but unsurprisingly, Max was too busy with his disastrous entrepreneurial ventures to dedicate any time to renovating the home they fell in love with. As much as the tired house irked Mollie, it wasn’t the only thing she decided she was unhappy with. It was simply the tip of a very large iceberg.

  The lack of intimacy in her sexless marriage was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and as Mollie flicked off the lamp on that warm night in May, she felt a weight lift from her shoulders. Two hundred and ten pounds of weight, to be precise. All of a sudden, she realised she didn’t have to settle for a man who played video games all night long, barely acknowledged her existence and drank milk straight from the carton. No, she wasn’t going to fall asleep questioning her marriage for a second longer, because Mollie McQueen was getting divorced…

  Chapter 1

  ‘I’m leaving you.’ Mollie said bluntly, while eating her breakfast the following morning. ‘I want a divorce.’

  Pausing with a handful of kale over the blender, Max turned around to face her and frowned.

  ‘What?’ He grumbled, hitting the on button before Mollie could repeat herself.

  The deafening screech of the blender flooded the kitchen as Mollie motioned for him to switch it off.

  ‘I said… I’m leaving you!’ She yelled, dropping her buttered toast onto the plate in front of her. ‘I want a divorce!’

  Seemingly unfazed, Max waited for the blender to stop whirring before pouring his vomit-like smoothie into a cup and taking a seat at the kitchen table. His sandy hair fell into his eyes effortlessly, in the way that used to make Mollie’s knees feel weak.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Jabbing a straw into his plastic cup, he stared back at her calmly.

  ‘I want a divorce, Max.’ She said once more, ensuring to keep her voice steady. ‘I’m sorry.’

  As those two little words escaped her lips, Mollie realised she didn’t mean them. She wasn’t sorry for wanting to divorce Max. She was only sorry for allowing their flailing relationship to drag on for so very long.

  ‘Is this because I broke your laptop.’ Max asked, resting his elbows on the chequered tablecloth. ‘Because that was an accident.’

  A frown crept onto Mollie’s heart-shaped face as she reached over the table and turned the radio off.

  ‘I didn’t know that you had broken my laptop.’

  ‘Oh.’ He replied, looking completely flummoxed. ‘Is it because the edible toilet paper business didn’t take off? I know you’re not a fan, but the initial feedback was great. If I just give it a few more months…’

  ‘Max!’ Mollie interrupted, really wishing she had poured herself a cup of coffee before having this conversation. ‘This isn’t about the laptop or the… toilet paper thing.’

  ‘It isn’t?’

  ‘No.’ Mollie groaned. ‘And it isn’t just about the wet towels that you leave on the bed or your inability to put your dirty laundry in the basket. Or that you cut your toenails on the duvet, put my DVDs in the wrong cases and play meditation music while I’m trying to sleep. Or that you…’

  Mollie’s voice trailed off when she recognised she was rambling.

  ‘Where was I going with this?’ She asked.

  ‘You were telling me why you’re divorcing me.’ Max snapped. ‘But please don’t let me stop you. Feel free to continue with your list of my many, many flaws.’

  Sighing heavily, Mollie rubbed her eyes in frustration. She didn’t want to hurt Max. Nor did she feel the need to make this any more difficult than it needed to be.

  ‘Now that I think about it, I have a list of my own.’ He said scornfully, scratching his naked chest. ‘You use my razor to shave your bikini line. You eat all the hummus and leave the empty container in the fridge. You leave hot hair appliances on the floor knowing that I will step on them. You take so long to choose a meal in a restaurant that we have to send the waiter away multiple times. You lose more hair than a Siberian Husky. Seriously, when I get in the bath, it’s like Chewbacca has been in there before me…’

  ‘We don’t have to do this, Max.’ Mollie said sadly, shaking her head. ‘We don’t need to tear strips off one another to prove a point. It won’t change anything…’

  Silence came back at Mollie once more and Max turned on the radio to fill it. Immediately turning it off in retaliation, Mollie cursed when Max responded by hitting the on button. She gave him a look that said don’t mess with me, but Max stubbornly refused to back down. This charade continued for another thirty seconds before Max finally surrendered and raised his hands in the air. Tucking the radio under his arm, he walked out of the kitchen and slammed the door behind him, leaving Mollie alone at the kitchen table.

  Strangely, Mollie didn’t feel alone at all. She felt more powerful and more in control than ever before. Mollie was taking her life back. She had told Max she wanted a divorce and he didn’t protest. It would appear her incessant malting drove Max as crazy as discovering his toenails in the bed drove her. From his blasé reaction, you would b
e forgiven for thinking he’d been expecting the divorce bombshell all along...

  As Mollie sat at the breakfast table, casually eating her toast, she got to thinking about the grounds for her divorce. Unreasonable behaviour? Adultery? Desertion? Where did growing into two different people fit into the picture? Which category did tiring of being married to an overgrown teenager who refused to grow up fall into? Looking at her engagement ring, Mollie smiled at the shimmering opal as she dropped it onto the table. Without the opal for company, her gold wedding band suddenly looked so very lonely on the third finger of her left hand. Isolated and deserted by its partner, just like her.

  Picking up her engagement ring, Mollie walked around the breakfast table and leaned against the counter next to Buddy Holly’s fishbowl. The multicoloured gravel swirled around in the water as Buddy Holly IV swam up to the glass to greet her. His bulbous eyes blinked at Mollie inquisitively as she glanced at her wedding band once more before pulling it off her finger and dropping both rings into the bowl.

  Divorce is something Mollie McQueen never really thought about. Mainly because she never believed she would fall victim to it. She came from a very happy marriage, as did Max. Their parents had shown them the greatest examples of couple goals, so they couldn’t blame their failure on following in the wrong footsteps. But with an alarming number of marriages ending in divorce, the odds weren’t exactly in their favour.

  Biting her lip, Mollie realised she didn’t know anyone at all who had gone through a divorce. Where did she even start? Of course, telling Max what she intended to do was probably the first step, but what came next? Did she change her Facebook status? Did she send out a group Whatsapp message alerting all and sundry of her new single position? Did she sign up to Tinder or an equally cringy dating app?

  Spotting an ancient copy of the Yellow Pages behind the kitchen door, Mollie dropped it onto the table and flipped through the pages. For the past few years, the dust-covered directory had been used as a doorstop and nothing more, but today, it held the answers Mollie was searching for. Circling the first divorce specialist she could find, Mollie tore the page from the book and walked over to the vintage telephone on the windowsill.