herself. Izzy was with Harry now, in love and so damn happy it sometimes hurt to watch them. But Poppy would be home…
She just needed to get home and she would feel better. They loved her, they always had, and right now she needed to be around people who did.
Love, her holy grail, her constant search. It didn’t have to be perfect, or a ballad or a fairy tale. She didn’t want a prince but she sure as hell would like to be someone’s princess.
But obviously not Mark’s any more.
‘You…’ Izzy’s voice was loud in her head ‘…are the ultimate bum magnet when it comes to men, Toz. You look around and choose the most screwed-up guy in the room.’
Maybe she did but there was always the divine hope that this man could be the one who could love her; intensely, absolutely, for ever.
She was a master of wishful thinking.
She should’ve dumped Mark ages ago but she’d kept hoping that she could change him, that she’d wake up one day and he’d be…better. And, let’s be honest here, she adored the fact that she was centre of his unwavering attention, of being constantly and continuously wanted. It wasn’t the love she craved but it was something…
It was enough of a something for her to ignore the naughty text messages she’d seen on his phone, the teenager who’d rocked up at the door a couple of weeks ago looking for Mark, not to mention his ex-girlfriend who constantly called. She suspected that he’d dipped his ink in any and all of their wells but she’d never found the—what was Alex’s expression?—the smoking bullet. They’d fought about it—hell, they fought about everything!—and she’d justified staying with him by thinking that their emotional, loud, crazy see-saw of life was better than her being alone and loads better than the cold war she’d grown up in around her parents. Hot fights were always better than derisive comments, sarcasm, frosty insults tossed out with a contemptuous, sneering smile. She’d take loud and explosive over quiet and deadly any day.
At least with volatile you got some sort of warning and you could attempt to avoid or contain the emotional bloodshed.
Quiet but deadly…wasn’t that the perfect way to describe her parents’ formal union? She was quite sure that if she called it a marriage the gods of love would nail her with a lightning bolt.
Mark wasn’t perfect, far from it, but neither was she. But at least they expressed their emotions…loudly and often. Maybe too often to be healthy. And maybe he hadn’t been the poster-boy boyfriend but he was someone to wake up to, go to sleep with. Be with.
Except that his smokin’ bullet turned out to be a freaking nuclear bomb, Tori thought as the taxi pulled up next to her old home, the top-floor flat of a converted fire station with Ignite, an Italian bistro and coffee shop, on the bottom floor.
Wiping her now wet eyes with her fingers, she hauled in her breath and climbed out of the taxi, yanking her overnight bag from the floor.
How was she going to spin it this time? she thought, looking up to the window of Poppy’s flat. Since she was a little girl, Poppy’s home had been hers too, the place and person she ran to when life kicked her to the kerb.
Poppy and Izzy, her oldest friends and the people who loved her best. They’d welcome her back as they always did and then they’d settle in, waiting for the story…because there was always a story. For once she just wished that she had the guts to drop her guard and tell it as it was. That she felt battered and bruised and emotionally flattened. Sad and so damn scared that she’d never find what she needed, what she was really looking for.
Petrified that she would soon be thirty, then forty, fifty and kept around for her charm, her entertainment value, her pretty face but still, under it all, unloved, unvalued and, worst of all, unneeded.
‘Seriously, she was riding him so fast that I thought that her wings were going to launch her off him…’
Tori was in her favourite chair in the eclectic, messy, colourful sitting room of the flat, her bare feet tucked up under her and a glass of red in her hand. Poppy was in the wingback chair opposite her and Izzy sat on the ottoman next to her. Both were doubled over, clutching their stomachs and laughing uproariously.
Yeah, good job, Tori, she thought wearily. You’ve pulled it off again.
‘Oh, God, Tori, stop.’ Izzy whimpered between snorts of laughter. ‘Your love life should be serialised as a soap opera, hon.’
‘And Mark? How did he act?’ Poppy asked, wiping her tears away.
‘He didn’t even bat an eye, just turned and said, “Get naked, join in, and What’s-Her-Skanky will show you what to do.”‘
Two mouths fell open, perfectly synchronised. ‘And you didn’t know about this?’
‘Hell, no!’ Tori made herself smile. ‘If I had, I would’ve had a say in who to pick as contestant number three. But really, God—her? She looked like a walking mattress. Besides, women just don’t do it for me.’
‘You did kiss Melissa Butler.’
‘I was thirteen, Poppy! And you dared me to!’ Tori stared up at the ceiling.
Poppy sat up, leaned forward and sent Tori a searching look. It was her Poppy patented, sneaky you-talk-a-good-game-but-I-know-you-are-full-of-BS look. ‘Are you really okay, Toz? You’re acting like you couldn’t give a damn but—’
Tori tossed her hair and dredged up a reassuring smile. ‘I’m fine, I promise. Mark is welcome to dip his ink into her radioactive well.’
‘Talking of, please tell me that he’s clean and so are you.’ Poppy—Dr Poppy now—asked, frowning. ‘Maybe you should come in for a check-up, let me run some tests. Do a complete physical.’
She was stupid emotionally but she wasn’t a complete idiot. ‘Relax, Pops. We always used condoms, Doctor. No exceptions, ever.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’ Poppy let out a huge sigh of relief and Tori was grateful that she’d never, not once—despite Mark’s bitching—deviated from that rule. And Mark could bitch for days.
‘On another subject…I’m homeless and I need to move back in. Can I have my old room back?’
Poppy and Izzy exchanged a frantic, oh-no look that had her heart crashing to the floor. If she couldn’t move back in then she didn’t know that she could hold it together. The only place she could contemplate being was in this flat, with these people. Poppy looked agitated. ‘The problem is that Alex and Lara are in your room and I’ve rented Izzy’s room to Isaac—’
‘But isn’t he away?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘She can have the boxroom,’ Izzy interjected, ‘since I’ve moved in with Harry.’
Ick, the boxroom. Tiny, cramped, child-sized bed. Jeez, it wasn’t even big enough to swing a fly. No cupboard space, a tiny window and you could hear every noise from the bathroom and its old, rusty pipes.
On the plus side it didn’t have her
