My best friend Lyn was always lusting over guys she couldn’t have; they were always either married, in a serious relationship, or just not interested. Not that that was a problem of course — nothing ever happened between her and her latest love interest.
But the really infuriating thing was that Lyn was always convinced that the man in question was equally as besotted with her as she was with them. And that’s when it got annoying. All she could do was talk about how in love everyone was with her — every married man on the planet, apparently, was just waiting to leave their wife for her.
It didn’t get really personal though, until the day she announced her latest fatal attraction — her new gym instructor — and couldn’t help but add how much sexier, better looking and smarter he was than my own fiancé — who happened to be in the next room at the time!
If she’d just left it at that, I might have got over it. But she often brought it up: that she was going to marry a stud, while I settled for a pleb. I was furious.
Apart from anything else, I was willing to bet that Brett was, like everyone else before him, going to be completely out of reach. But Lyn never even seemed to consider this possibility. She just ran away with her love at first sight. I finally plucked up the courage to ask her if she had thought about this, and to my utter surprise she said yes! Brett was actually getting married.
For the first time, it dawned on me that Lyn might not be so innocently developing crushes: she was actually trying to break relationships up! It was time to teach her a lesson.
A few weeks later, Lyn went out of town on a business trip. I knew she was due back around 6pm — after which she would head straight for the gym. It was time to put my plan into action.
At about 5, I wondered down to her health club armed with my gym bag that was filled, not with gym clothes, but with propaganda. Paying for a casual day class, I strolled innocently into the women’s change rooms, and papered every locker with a hastily printed poster:
LYN JACKSON LOVES BRETT O’REILLY. SHE WANTS TO BREAK UP HIS MARRIAGE AND HAVE HIS CHILDREN. I LOVE YOU BRETT XOXO
I included a photo for good measure.
With every surface of the locker room covered in these posters, I hid in a toilet cubicle and waited. Several women came and went, laughing hysterically.
It wasn’t until I heard a harsh gasp, followed by footsteps running from the room, that I knew Lyn had seen it. I waited a few minutes and then left the gym, wondering what the fallout would be. As it turned out, it was far worse than I had anticipated.
My prank got back to Brett, and he quit as Lyn’s personal trainer. Then he got Lyn banned from the gym for apparently stalking him — which, with the evidence I had planted, looked pretty likely. Lyn was distraught. She couldn’t work out who had played the joke, and how Brett — who had once been so “in love with her” could suddenly treat her so badly. It was her complete failure to realise that he had never been interested that stopped me from feeling very guilty.
Lyn didn’t talk about a new fatal attraction for a very long time. I don’t think she ever suspected me, but she was suspicious of everyone. I enjoyed being able to have real conversations with her, about things I knew were the truth, all the while knowing that I was keeping a very big lie from her… That I’d set her up to look like a stalker!
Names in this story have been changed. Picture: Getty Images, posed by models.
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