Thankfully, I’d just slipped a forkful of yolk-soaked toast in my mouth, which gave me a moment to ponder. “I don’t know,” I answered, and meant it. “The spark’s gone out. I’m trying to get it back. Every night I go to bed so angry with myself, and you’d think that’d stop me shovelling chip butties into my mouth, wouldn’t you? But nope. In they go.”
“Well work fucking harder.”
My fork stopped mid-air. My mouth stayed open.
“I know it’s hard, I really do. I can tell you the switch in your head will flip, that you’ll get there eventually, but it could be too late then. You’ll be right back where you started, and where was that? Fucking miserable. Put away the deep fat fryer, say no to goddamn cake and be an adult and eat some fucking greens. They don’t exist to make your taste buds orgasm. It’s fuel. Goodness. Get over yourself and take care of the only body you’re gonna get.”
Wow. My fork still hadn’t moved. Sarcasm usually spilled from my lips like a reflex, but nothing came. Part of me, most of me, knew he was right. The rest wondered whether he really did know how hard it was, because I didn’t fail every day or lie awake every night tormenting myself on fucking purpose.
Zac blew a heavy sigh. “Look, I’m harsh because I know what you can achieve. I know what being motivated does to your mood. I know you can do it, Hel, and you deserve to. You’ve come too far to go back now.”
I nodded, scraped some food around on my plate. Suddenly, I didn’t want it anymore. “I know,” I agreed, ending with a tight, barely-there smile. “I know, you’re right.”
We hardly spoke through the rest of lunch. I didn’t finish mine and Zac polished his off fairly quickly. We didn’t sit around like we usually would, talking workouts and exchanging banter. After splitting the bill, we headed straight back to Zac’s car, making idle chitchat about stuff neither one of us were really interested in.
After a short while, his words started sinking in. I’d never been mad with Zac before, but then he’d never been so blunt with me before. Either way, my frustration had been directed at the wrong person. I was miserable and I only had myself to blame. I needed to decide what was harder to deal with; the way I felt? Or eating some bloody vegetables.
“Thanks for that. Seriously, I needed it.” I didn’t look at Zac, too ashamed by my attitude over the last few months. Not that he could see me anyway while he drove us back to the gym to pick up my car, the radio playing low in the background.
“It’s what you pay me for.”
“I don’t pay you to be my friend, which is what you’ve been today. To my friends, I’ve always been the happy-go-lucky gal. Fearless. Bubbly. I’m the typical ‘fat friend’, you know?”
“Were,” he corrected.
I smiled, exhaled an appreciative chuckle, but, although a lot slimmer, I was still the fat friend in comparison to the svelte goddesses that formed my inner circle. I still had two stone to lose if I wanted to be classed as a healthy weight for my height, and that was before I’d gorged a sixteen-pound tyre back onto my middle. Then, when I achieved my goal weight, I might just be able to get away with passing off as a hippo in the fashion world, rather than the blue whale I was currently.
“What I’m saying is, I’ve always been able to be the fun friend because I had my mum. She got the other sides of me; the emotional wreck, the hormonal monster, the guilt-ridden binge-eating pig on a rampage.” My head dropped from the weight of the memories. “And it’s not even like she was a massive help in those situations because, most of the time, she’d nag me or, worse, worry about me and that made me feel like shit.” There had only ever been one person who didn’t make me feel that way, who truly got the other sides of me and accepted them without fear or judgement. Only he was gone, too.
“Now…it feels like I don’t have anyone. I’m still a wreck sometimes. I’ve got damn hormones. I eat like a fucking pig and then hate myself for three days and…” I trailed off, blew out a long breath in an effort to stop the tears stinging the rims of my eyes escaping. “Who do I tell?”
I kept my focus on the view outside, on the buildings blurring into each other as we drove by, yet I still felt Zac’s fleeting gaze land on the side of my face. The car fell all but silent for an uncomfortably long moment, broken only by the tenor tones of Ed Sheeran’s voice, and I wondered if Zac felt as awkward as I did. Zac and I weren’t these people. We weren’t sharing friends. We didn’t cry together over exes or spill our darkest, most emotional secrets over Netflix and ice cream. We bounced off each other, told jokes and threw insults and he yelled at me to keep moving until I nearly died.