CHAPTER 18
SHERIDAN
My phone vibrates aggressively with an onslaught of text messages, and it gives me an instant headache. What’s worse, is that I already know who they’re from and what they’re about without even having to look at my phone.
Brin
Oh, it’s a good one today, Shez.
SO GOOD.
Are you ready?
White shirt.
Black tie (with tie clip).
MAROON trousers.
And a freaking brUSHED WOOL GREY WAISTCOAT.
I REPEAT.
A FUCKING WAISTCOAT.
Me
The black tie ruins it.
Brin
*Glaring emoji*
Every weekday, Brinsley sends me a catalogue of what Myles is wearing, and every day I pick fault with it, just out of spite. We’ve been doing it for a month now. I’m not even angry at Myles for ditching my phone number and leaving me wondering. I thought I would be but I’m not.
Maybe I wasn’t as into him as I thought I was. Maybe the bubble that came with being on vacation with him made him seem marvellous and handsome and special, and now that we’re back in the real world, that bubble has popped.
And that’s okay.
I pick fault with his outfits because I think Brin might finally get the hint that I don’t care. Which I don’t. I definitely don’t imagine him in said outfit, and then peeling him out of it at the end of a very hard day playing teacher to bratty teens, while his pretty hazel eyes track my every move with heady lust.
See? Zero fucks.
Myles was good in bed for one night on holiday, and that’s absolutely okay. People have one-night stands and say things they don’t mean all the time.
I let my head fall against the table where I’m working and release a pent up groan. It’s high-pitched and petty and pitiful. Every day Brin reminds me of him, and every day I go through the same pathetic thought cycle.
Why didn’t he text me?
I need to get out of the house.
I stretch when I stand and leave my study with a yawn. Hector barks when he spots me and heads for the front door. Walking the dog seems like a great idea.
Hooked up to his lead, we head outside and toward the village. It’s warm still, even for early October, so I’m only wearing jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt. We walk our classic loop—down into the village so I can pass by the shop for my essentials, and then down through the pub garden to the canal and back along the path to my back garden.
When we slip around the front, Nash is on the bench by my front door waiting. I didn’t realise what the time is, and I forgot it’s Wednesday. He said last week he’d come for dinner on Wednesday.
“Sorry. Forgot the day,” I lament as we head inside. Once Hector is unhooked, he runs off out of sight.
Nash smiles. “Don’t worry,” he says.
I wander off to the kitchen and stick the kettle on. He’s still in his suit so I know he’s just come straight from work.
Nash and Stavros started a business together out of university—an online travel agent for elite clientele only, featuring luxury properties and first class travel. Beau is a member. I could be a member if I wanted, but I rarely travel for pleasure, and I don’t book luxury hotels for work, so it seems pointless.
When I come back with our tea, I find him not in the living room where he usually is, but in my study. Oh shit. I left the office door open in my haste to get out of the house earlier. I never leave the door open.
He’s standing right in front of my storyboard for Goth Frogs, hands tucked into the pockets of his navy trousers. Sometimes, from behind, I can’t tell him and Beau apart. The only distinguishing difference at the moment is the length of their dark hair and their clothes. Beau rarely wears a suit day-to-day, and his hair is longer. Nash’s hair is a neat undercut which he usually styles back with wax.
If I wasn’t his sister, he would terrify me.
Nash is not only wealthy and attractive, but he’s imposing, too. He’s got a complex about being born last and being the least understood out of all of us, which I struggle to accept. He’s built like a tank, and people who meet him for the first time are often afraid of him.
“What’s this?” He asks, with a lazy finger pointed at the storyboard.
“Nothing. Come sit in the lounge.”
He turns to face me, expression ambivalent. “Think you’ll ever grow out of your weird drawing phase?”
I flinch at his words. I can’t help it. Even as a grown woman with a well-paid job and my own house, my brother’s obvious distaste for my hobbies—and some might say talents—always hit a nerve.
We’ve been doing this dance since we were practical babies. I have a weird brain and Nash doesn’t want to understand it. I draw weird pictures and he thinks there’s something wrong with me. When I was a teenager, it’d upset the hell out of me. With him joining in on everyone’s critique of me, I’d go home crying and we wouldn’t talk to each other for weeks at a time. Until that one day that changed everything.
I’m thrown back to that version of me at fifteen, when I was unstable and going through the motions every day wondering what I was doing to draw such negative attention to myself. I feel a foot tall while my big scary brother crowds me against a wall in the school halls and all his friends call me a psycho. I see a bottle of antidepressants and then steam from the hottest shower of my life, my naked legs barely keeping me up. And then I see a hospital bed and my mother’s sallow eyes and my sister’s heartbroken face, Beau’s rage, and Nash, in the corner of the room making himself as small as possible even though he was already pushing six foot.
I have no desire to go back to that place—that utterly destitute frame of mind. I’m not that girl anymore.
Out of all of my siblings, Nash and I have the worst relationship. Or we did when we lived at home. As adults, he definitely tries harder with me, and I do with him. But on occasions like this, it’s quite clear he still finds me to be strange.
Now, I also don’t let his words affect me so much.
“I hope not.” I tell him.
He takes in a deep breath, and I can see he regrets what he said. “I didn’t mean it like that, Shez.”
I turn away, knowing he’ll follow me. I hope he’s chivalrous enough to close the door behind him.
“You did mean it like that, Nash, just like I know it’s one thing you’ll never understand about me.”
“Perhaps not. But I didn’t want to upset you. I find your imagination a little wild, that’s all.”
“Rather a wild imagination than one like yours. Grey, straight,” he seems to hate that word, “linear.”
“Alright, alright. I get it.”
I leave our tea on the coffee table and sink into the sofa. Nash removes his suit jacket, drapes it across the armchair and then sits next to me, snatching my hand to give it a squeeze.
“You think I’m boring.”
I roll my eyes at him. “I don’t think you’re boring. I just think the inside of your brain is incredibly dull.”
“The weird and the dull,” he muses.
I give a little chuckle. “Anyway, onto more pressing matters. I forgot you were coming, and I don’t have much in the way of food.”
“I’ll treat us to a curry, then.”
“You really do know how to make a girl forgive you,” I jest.
“I’m practising for my future spouse.” He grins.
* * *
After curry is consumed and our argument long forgotten, Nash departs and heads back into the city, leaving me alone for the night.
I hole up in my study, real work shelved for my wild imagination to take over. I picture a fae woman, with thick black hair that falls to her hips, dark skin and glowing ember eyes. I start to draw her, dressing her in white furs with raven collars, leather boots and fighting armour. I imagine her with jewellery on her ears, her nose, her lip, her fingers, her neck, her head. A fierce warrior queen.
I call her Caerwyn.
She falls in love with a human boy—man—who doesn’t believe in magic after she is cursed by a bitter hag of a high priestess. I draw a human man—handsome, obviously—but when I’m done with him, I realise he’s wearing a brushed wool waistcoat and maroon trousers. And he’s blond.
I clear the page on my iPad and start again.
And I draw for hours, making plot notes as I go, until the sun rises again from the back garden, and I have an entirely new cartoon to animate when I’m ready. But I’ve not slept.
“Bollocks,” I mutter to myself.
I have an appointment at lunchtime in the city, so I set my alarm for an hour before I make my way up to bed.
I haven’t pulled an all-nighter for a very long time, and it wasn’t even on purpose.
Turns out, being insulted does wonders for the imagination.
* * *
On Saturday morning I wake up in a hotel room in London. It’s not my ideal way to wake up on the weekend, but the restaurant and the hotel I’m working for both had work starting on them this week and I needed to be on-site for a day with them. Well, half a day.
I shove my face between the pillows and scream. I hate being away from home. I don’t know why I chose a career that requires that so often. I just want to make my silly little web shows with my silly little drawings and take my silly little dog for walks whenever I damn feel like it.
After contemplating my life choices for another half an hour, I finally peel myself out of bed. I turn the kettle on as I pass the little desk on my way to the window, and I throw the curtains open.
It’s a pleasant day outside, which hopefully means the drive back to Coventry won’t be so bad—people tend to be more stupid on the road when it rains. And yes, I did drive this time, no thanks to the train strikes. Fortunately, this fancy ass hotel came with parking when I booked directly—a perk I know for a fact doesn’t come included with a membership from Nash’s agency.
I’m about to finish making my tea when I spot movement in one of the trees in the hotel’s courtyard.
There, on a low branch picking at acorns, are three green ring-necked parakeets.