style="font-size:15px;"> ‘Which bar? He has a couple.’
‘Red. It’s an easy tube ride. We’ll sneak back in later when the coast is clear.’
That, Matt decided, resisting the impulse to take another peek at the woman who could launch tsunamis and make demons howl, was the best idea he’d heard all day.
As they clattered down the stairs Alex threw a conversational grenade over his shoulder, straight at Matt’s head. ‘By the way, I’ll wipe the floor with your face if you mess with Tori.’
Matt nodded. Warning received.
TORI, LYING ON THE super uncomfortable, lumpy and thin single mattress in the cramped boxroom, looked at the flashing display of her mobile and ignored Mark’s call.
What number call was that? Sixteen, seventeen? She placed her forearm over her eyes, feeling drained, exhausted and so, so empty. She’d acted her ass off earlier but she knew that her friends, especially Poppy, hadn’t bought it. Some of it but not all; they were too perceptive for her own good. Sometimes she thought that Poppy and Iz laughed because, knowing her so very well, they knew that was the reaction she was most comfortable with, because she always handled hurt with humour.
Tori hiccupped a sob and couldn’t believe that she was crying over a man…again. It was what she did, she thought, a pattern of behaviour that started in her childhood and she’d yet to break. She’d throw herself into a situation, looking for attention—love, affirmation—and when it ran out, sometimes in minutes, sometimes days, weeks, months, she’d be left feeling flattened and…less than.
She was so tired of feeling less than. But the reality was that she’d never been enough…not for her parents, not for her previous loser boyfriends, definitely not for Mark.
Tori rolled over onto her side and groaned as a particularly large lump dug into her ribcage. On the plus side, she didn’t love Mark, hadn’t been able to open herself up to him and reveal the chronically insecure woman below her flash surface. Maybe if she found a man she could do that with, someone she allowed to peek below the partygirl, flirty-girl surface, maybe that would be the man she could fall in love with, the man who would give her the love and attention and the stability that had always been beyond her reach.
Tori thumped her wafer-thin pillow and rolled over again. This bed was disgusting, the room small and cramped. When she and Poppy and Iz shared this flat—happy, happy days of laughter, girl chats and wild parties—Izzy had used this room to store her clothes and Poppy her medical tomes. This bed had been a place to throw stuff on, now it seemed to be a repository for the lost and strayed, first Izzy, then Lara, now her.
But everything was changing…The flat was like Love Central recently, with Izzy falling head over heels in love with Harry and Alex losing his heart to Lara.
But she’d rather be here, in this horrible bed in the tiniest room in the house with friends who cared about her, than back at Mark’s with or without his plus one. This flat, originally a fire station with its exposed red brickwork and crazy plumbing, was the place she felt most like…well, herself, and the people who lived within its thick walls were more family than her own flesh and blood. Especially Poppy, who knew her in and out and roundabout.
But really, this bed…she’d never get to sleep.
‘Isaac is away…’ Poppy had said.
Isaac is away…mmm, gorgeous Isaac. If he were in residence she’d consider making a play for him; he would be a super excellent way to forget Mark. Tori bit her lip…except that there was a weird vibe between Poppy and Isaac, something that would have her hesitating if Isaac were around…
But, right now, the bed in the turret room directly above her head was big and comfortable and, best of all, empty! She could, at the very least, get a good night’s sleep, something she knew would be next to impossible in this coffin.
Her mobile buzzed again and Tori sighed at the display. For a minute she considered answering it, considered allowing Mark to talk her around, to persuade her to jump into a taxi and come home. She’d make him grovel and, after endless hours of discussion, she’d have a warm body to curl up around tonight…
No! She was not that pathetic, that weak! He’d crossed a line as big as the San Andreas fault line and it was not okay! She was worth more than that…
Mind made up, Tori switched off her mobile, slid out of bed and walked up the stairs to the turret room, avoiding the stairs that creaked and the floorboards that groaned. In the morning, she thought as she opened the door to Izzy’s old room, she would feel better, calmer, and more able to make rational decisions.
Maybe. Or maybe she’d cave and go back to Mark…
‘You’re sounding stronger, Dad.’ Matt leaned back against the headboard, mobile to his ear.
‘I’m fine. Don’t worry.’
Matt twisted his lips at Patrick’s sharp retort. Like him, he hated being fussed over, but Matt wasn’t convinced that his dad was fully recovered from the bout of pneumonia that had hospitalised him at the beginning of August. He still sounded weak, although he tried to hide it.
And also like him, his father was a night owl and they often spent time on the phone between the hours of eleven and one in the morning. They’d chat about sport or the news and every so often Matt would explain a complicated deal he was involved in. Despite his years spent working in non-profit organisations promoting sport amongst disadvantaged children, Patrick had never lost his cool, unemotional, law-trained mind and his insights were frequently sharp, concise and devastatingly accurate. He had a way of cutting through the waffle and discarding the emotion to reveal the heart of the problem, the soul of the dilemma.
‘How’s Angela?’ Matt asked, referring to the woman his dad had met a couple of months ago.
‘Fine but she’s not your mother.’
‘No one is, no one could be,’ Matt said gently, as he had a hundred times before. And as always he was instantly transported back to those awful months after her death, his dad sobbing at night, grief racking his body when he thought Matt was asleep. How many nights had he been woken by that low keening? How many times had he slipped out of his bed to lie in the passageway next to his dad’s closed door, listening until his father finally stopped crying and drifted off to sleep?
‘Twenty-two years, Matt, and I’m still as in love with her as I was. They say that people forget their loved ones, that they don’t remember their faces, their voices. I still remember everything. Her wide green eyes, her raucous laugh, the way she always stuck her tongue between her lips when she was concentrating.’
And because his dad remembered so much, and spoke of her often, he did too. He’d adored his mother, grieved her death, but her passing had also taught him that marriage and love equated to heart-wrenching grief and he’d decided, at the ripe old age of eleven, to have nothing to do with it.
They were getting morbid, Matt thought, and changed the subject. ‘So, I think I have a new flatmate…’
Matt explained the circumstances around Tori’s arrival and soon Patrick was chortling in amusement. His dad wasn’t a prude, thank God. He could talk
