Primrose is a dream to date. She knows exactly how to make a guy feel special – knows to let him pay for her drinks, but not her dinner, will let him hold her hand across the table,  will ask him question after question about his job, and not even expect him to ask half as many in return.

She is excited to meet Peter. She is hoping for someone geeky but cute, kind but funny. She prides herself on not being one of those girls who cares about things like height, or the car a guy drives. She prides herself on not being that shallow.

However, if she did care about those things, she’d be in luck. Peter is 6″3 and he drives a BMW.

Fancy.

Plus, she fancies him. She likes the way he looks, the sound of his voice (that’s surprisingly important), the fact that he’s wearing button-fly jeans, which have never yet failed to turn her on.

He slides the wine list across the bar towards her, and she asks for a glass of chardonnay, just like she always does. She might usually have suggested that they share a bottle, but as he’s driving, she decides not to.

That’s where it all goes wrong.

He’ll never understand why there was no kiss at the end of the night. Nor why she ghosted him.

He’d never guess it was the pint of orange juice and lemonade.

It’s very quiet over here, like I am home alone, but I’m not. I am downstairs, on the sofa, under a blanket, and my husband is upstairs, asleep, with his girlfriend. He – they – are  asleep because he thinks I am fine, because I have told him I am fine, because I have told him that Pretty Woman is on TV and he knows that I always watch it when it’s on.

Except it’s not on.

I am trying to be chill about the fact that his girlfriend is staying over, but the truth is, I was more chill when our fourteen year old asked if his girlfriend could stay over, because at least then I knew that what I was feeling was horror. But the way I feel now is a confusing mix of fear, envy and desire – goosebumps prickle all up my arms, but my cunt is slick.

I’d like to pretend that I said I was okay with this because I love my husband, and because I want him to be happy, but that’s not really true. I pretended to be okay with it because that’s the kind of woman I’d like to be. I dream of being flat – flat stomach, flat temperament, flat emotions – when in fact I am tempestuous, uneven. Polyamory, it seemed to me, was like a diet – just a question of mind over matter. I wanted to prove I could resist envy the same way I can resist chocolate mousse.

But, just as I have cracked over chocolate mousse before – have woken in the middle in the middle of the night craving it, and snuck downstairs to feed spoonful after spoonful into my mouth by the light of the fridge, so it is with jealousy.

If he’s lucky, I won’t crack until she’s gone.

But I might not last that long.

Lily has been nannying for Ben and Izzy for six months. The job is pretty good – their children are well-behaved, the pay is okay, she has access to the family car when she needs it, and there are plenty of other perks, too.

All this to say: it isn’t clear why she cracks.

On the day it happens, everything has panned out pretty much as it always does. She’s taken the kids to the park, texted Ben to ask him a question, not heard back, wondered, while aimlessly pushing the youngest on the swings, whether it’s time for her to download Tinder again, dismissed the idea, taken the kids home, served up fishfingers, chips and alphabetti spaghetti for supper and then supervised bath time. She has not loaded the dishwasher because it’s still running from when she put it on earlier, but she has cleared the table and stacked up all the dirty plates by the sink.

There are subtler ways she could have let Izzy know what’s going on, perhaps, but they’re all so clichéd. She might have sent him nudes when Izzy would likely be around to see the messages on his phone, she might have left a used condom in the bathroom bin, rather than wrapping it in several carrier bags and disposing of in it the outside bins where Izzy is unlikely to ever discover it. But she prefers her way because it’s more fun, more playful.

That’s why, with the leftover spaghetti letters from the children’s supper, she’s spelt out ‘I’m fucking your husband.’

The day she finds out, Jessica has to work. Her heart is broken, but she still showers, dresses and is at the shop, ready to open up, by 9am.

It is hard to make it through – everything, from the heartfelt words on funeral flowers sent to commemorate a marriage that’s lasted for decades to the kindness of a get well soon message to the cheesiness of the words accompanying a flashy gesture to an obviously new lover – makes her eyes sting with unshed tears.

She is glad that her colleague is off sick. She needs some time alone.

She runs her finger down the stem of a rose, grateful for the sharp prick of its thorns that causes blood to bead, crimson and sudden. She shreds tissue paper anxiously, ties raffia in pointless, fidgety bows. She does all that to stop herself from checking her phone, because she doesn’t want to hear that he’s sorry; that it means nothing. She’s not ready to hear that yet. She wants it to mean something, in a way, because it would be doubly gutting, somehow, to feel this shit because of something that was meaningless to him.

But the routine of the day – the orders, the queries, the deliveries – it’s not enough to take her mind off things. By 3pm, she’s itching for revenge. And she has the weapons for revenge right at her fingertips.

The bouquet she makes is beautiful. She wants it to be hard to throw it straight in the trash. It’s all springlike – tulips and snowdrops and hyacinths – the promise of new beginnings. She wants it to contrast with the message she writes on the card.

‘I’m sorry, I made a mistake. I can’t do this to Jess. I don’t want to see you anymore.’

India is twenty-three and she’s been telling the same story for five years now.

The story goes like this – she might be sensible and settled now, but she hasn’t always been, don’t you know – once upon a time India was on her gap yah and during that year she met a man, and that man taught her everything she knows about sex. When she talks about him, she varies the focus – sometimes it’s his rippling abs she mentions, other times his piercing green eyes, occasionally the fact that my god, the guy was hung. The amount of details she gives might vary according to how much wine she’s drunk, but regardless, she never, ever mentions his name.

After these evenings of drinks with the girls, India goes home to her boyfriend who fucks her – missionary position, obviously – as he does twice a week, three if his libido is demanding more attention than the consultancy projects he gets paid a small fortune to work on. India doesn’t come. Nothing unusual about that, either.

After, he gets in the shower. And that’s when India comes.

She comes to the thought of the man she talks about. The man she met in Thailand, who did have, sure, rippling abs, because he spent more time in the gym than he did studying for his A-levels, who did have nice green eyes, although piercing might be over-stating it, and who, yes, had a nicely proportioned dick.

She comes to the thought of the thing he taught her that she’s never had the chance to try again since: he taught her that sometimes it might be fun if she went on top.

Holly hates Christmas. She hates it because she’s named for it, obviously, and because her birthday comes so hot on the heels of it, but she also hates it because all the sparkle and glitter of it – all that light in the darkness – it just makes her feel more, well, dark inside.

And so at Christmas, she fucks. Anyone, anywhere. Which makes tonight unusual. Tonight she picked a guy up in the pub, but rather than fucking him in the loos, or in the street, as would be typical for her, she lets him take her home.

There’s a reason for that, though, a good one. The guy – Pete – has a kid, a kid who lives with him, and a babysitter who won’t stay later than midnight.

‘I wouldn’t normally do this,’ he says, ‘I don’t like to introduce him to people until I’ve been seeing them for a while. But, y’know, it is Christmas.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Holly says. ‘I’ll sneak out long before he wakes up.’

‘You don’t have to do that,’ Pete replies.

She laughs. ‘Maybe not. But I will.’

She keeps her word. When they fuck, she keeps her screams to a minimum, so as not to wake the kid. When she creeps to the bathroom down the hall to pee, she puts her dress back on, so as not to be accidentally caught in the nude. And then, in the early hours, once Pete is sleeping, she creeps down the stairs.

In order to get out, she needs to find the keys. That would be her excuse, if he ever asked her why she did it (although he won’t; he doesn’t have her number) – that she was searching for the keys and she saw it, and she was what … starving?

But that isn’t why she did it.

That isn’t why she ate the chocolates in his son’s advent calendar.

Every. Single. One.

She did it because she hates Christmas.

Georgie wears her new boots to the pub. It seems like a good opportunity to break them in, but there are no free tables and after just half an hour of standing at the bar, she can already feel the blisters beginning to form on her heels.

‘Nice boots,’ says some random guy, and she can’t quite figure out his intentions. He’s not the type who usually hits on her, and he looks like maybe he really is only interested in her footwear – he’s heavily tattooed, wearing a battered leather jacket, and sporting some pretty jazzy footwear of his own.

‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘They’re killing me.’

‘I’ve got a life hack for that,’ he says. ‘You got a tumble dryer at home?’

Georgie nods.

‘Well then, what you wanna do -,’ he pauses, ‘is, you wanna run the tumble dryer until it’s nice and warm inside and then you wanna turn it off, and put the boots in there, and a wet cloth, too, and I swear to god that the heat will make them stretch and you won’t have anymore trouble with ’em.’

Georgie has no idea whether this will work, or whether it will just trash her brand new boots. She might try it, maybe, but either way, it won’t help her now. Luckily, she thinks she might have a plaster in her bag.

She excuses herself to go to the loo, where she peels her tights off the raw skin and covers the wound.

When she comes out of the loos, he’s waiting for her directly outside the door, lounging against the wall. She knows not that it’s definitely not fashion he’s interested in after all.

‘You want another life hack?,’ he asks. ‘You got an iPhone? You know the one with the space bar?’

She gets up close to him, real close, clutches a handful of his t-shirt.

‘Wanna fuck me, Lifehack?’ she hisses. ‘Then have the guts to ask me. The rest of my life, I’ve got it sorted, but thanks.’