Chapter 21
21
Life just seemed a little less bright without Dennie. I sent him a text on the Saturday morning to say have a nice weekend and just got a thumbs up in return. It was all I could do to stop my thoughts running away with me. Wondering what he was doing and who he was doing it with. Worrying about whether he’d hook up with anyone while he was back in London or realise that life there was better than life here. I was scared that now he was back where he originally belonged, he wouldn’t want to return.
I tried to keep myself occupied. Saturday in the shop was a very busy day. It was nice that people came from further afield. In the downtime that I did have, I set up social media profiles and started taking what Dad called ‘arty-farty’ photos of the books along with the other items that I was now branching out into. And my pièce de résistance of course were my painted shells. Inspired by Dennis’s idea of making the shells book related, I started to copy the covers of the books. So far, I had done Wuthering Heights and Little Women . They just needed to be varnished and photographed before I could put them on sale.
To stop thoughts of Dennis filling my head all the time, I made sure that every minute of every day was accounted for. I had to distract myself to stop me from thinking. Thinking about Dennie and how much I missed him.
More than what seemed like at least a hundred times, I resisted the urge to message him, to tell him the most ridiculous of things which I knew would either make him laugh or make him think, make him smack his head at my commercial ignorance or shake his head at me. It felt like a part of me was missing. Like something I’d always worn, a piece of jewellery for instance, was lost from my life and I kept reaching out for it. A ring that I might spin on my finger, or a necklace that I constantly touched, which had been there once upon a time and now wasn’t any more.
My day off was the worst. It was simple – I missed him. We’d got into a little routine on my days off and Dennie and I had spent them going on bike rides around the surrounding areas and we’d had such fun. Me pointing out places of interest along the way, telling him a little of my history and my youth, and him very nearly a few times opening up to me. On a couple of occasions, I even thought we were on the brink of a breakthrough. Vi had told Mum he wasn’t a person who shared things easily but I felt that he did open up to me. This made me feel like I was special to him. He made me feel like we were the best of friends. He made me feel like we could be a whole lot more if we had more time together.
And when Mum came into my bedroom that night to check that I was OK, I pretended that I had the start of a cold and was feeling a bit rotten, when, to be honest, I think a little bit of my heart had gone back to London with Dennie. When she told me that she’d popped in to see Vi that day, to check that she was OK, and that Vi said Dennie was having to stay in London for the next couple of weeks, I felt physically sick. This was the exact reason why I didn’t want to be in love with someone. People said that it was better to have loved and lost but I didn’t think it was. I’d seen the state that my brother had been in when his girlfriend dumped him. He was literally a broken man. Then how grateful he was to her when she deigned to take him back after he begged her to. I’d never been fond of her, and after that performance, I was even less so, even though I had to be nice to her for his sake. That’s what love does to a person. And it wasn’t something that I wanted to be part of. Not a feeling that I wanted to have.
Not that I was in love with Dennie of course. Absolutely not. Of course.