Chapter 10
Ivy
Jan and her husband, Bill, have run this caff for twenty-three years.
I’ve known them for nine years, since we moved into our flat.
They gave me my first job when I turned sixteen and got my National Insurance number, sweeping and mopping the floors after school, and it’s no exaggeration to say they’ve been like family to us.
I don’t know what we would have done without them in the days after Dad had his aneurysm and vanished from our lives, just like that. One minute, he was hearty and alive and warm and here; the next minute he was cold and stiff and being stuffed into a crematorium furnace.
Bill and Jan made us eat every meal downstairs at the caff.
They force-fed us endless mugs of tea and coffee.
Jan came upstairs at the end of her shift every few days and helped me tidy the flat and change the beds because Dawn was in such a bad way that she could barely function.
She—Jan—even took the dirty sheets away to the laundrette so I wouldn’t have to process them.
You don’t forget kindness like that. It comes from the heart, it does.
And they’ve taken me back in again while I regroup and try to work out how I can even begin to earn Alchemy-level money.
They can’t pay me much—the caff doesn’t exactly turn over a fortune, no matter how popular it is with the local construction workers and street sweepers—but the timing works just as well for me now as it did when I was sixteen.
It’s not worth their while staying open much past four o’clock, so I can be done with my shift before the girls get home from school.
They’re doing okay, and when I say okay, I mean that.
Not awful—last Saturday aside—and not great.
It’s hard to know how sad they are, how unstable they feel about the state of their home life, but they internalise so much between just the two of them that I don’t feel like I have much insight into them at all.
They came home late from school yesterday because Lily got a detention for being gobby to a teacher, and I can’t help but worry that they’re ‘acting out’, as the experts would say.
All I can do is be there, I suppose. Be physically present and show them that I’m not falling apart, and I’m not going anywhere.
They need all of that because our first visit to Dawn on Saturday morning was a total bloody nightmare.
She wasn’t having a good day, and she got agitated, and she sure as fuck didn’t know who any of us were, and then she said the slut word to poor little Rose, who immediately started bawling her eyes out, bless her, and then Lily called her mum a crazy bitch to her face, and it all went to shit very bloody quickly.
Let’s just say it had me pulling out a book Dawn had bought when Dad died, called Bringing Up Bereaved Teenagers.
It’s not the most soothing bedtime reading—it makes my anxiety spike every time I pick it up—nor is it that helpful for dealing with the kind of grief they’re dealing with here: the grief of having a parent who’s still alive not know who the hell you are most of the time.
Still, it’s something. It makes me feel less bloody useless, and God knows I need that right now.
All of which is to say that there’s a lot going on, so when I got that text from Gen saying that Xavier had shown up and was wanting to meet up with me, it was a head-fuck of epic proportions. Gen, bless her, finished the text with this:
He’s very charming, but this is 100% your choice. I can get you your money without you having to see him. Please do what’s best for you right now, my love xx
She really is the dog’s bollocks.
Still, I was curious. I don’t know why, really.
Maybe it’s because life is a bit too real and gritty at the minute, so I could use a little distraction from someone who’s absolutely not a part of it.
But I suspect it’s because the memory of That Night lives on in my head as something dazzling, something out of a fairytale—even if no one got their happy ending, if you know what I’m saying.
And him showing up at Alchemy and wanting to see me again is like a single sparkly loose thread dangling out of the fairytale and into the real world.
What can I say? I want to pull the thread.
And if, for whatever weird reason, he wants to give me money that I didn’t really earn, I have to admit that I’ll be sorely tempted to take it.
After all, I meant what I said to him in that pissy whisper as I tried to leave that room with my dignity intact:
We can’t all afford to have morals.
I don’t know if or when he’ll show, though.
I replied to Gen yesterday, having slept on it for a couple of days, and she came right back saying she’d let him know.
I didn’t actually need all that time to think about it, but it was more about preserving the possibility for a day or two, a night or two, just to wallow in it.
Just to know that the lovely, sparkly thread was still hanging loose, and the precious package of That Night hadn’t been wrapped up and put away forever. Not just yet, anyway.
I suppose it was a way of making sure the ball stayed in my court for a little while longer.
My court is very, very short on balls right now—literal and figurative balls, sadly—and it was nice to hold onto one for a couple of nights while I tried to get to sleep.
Because now that I’ve texted Gen, the ball is back in Xavier’s court, and that feels a bit shitty.
I purposely suggested the caff because it’s neutral territory.
He doesn’t have to know I live right upstairs.
And I suspect a tiny bit of me wants him to see me like this.
The real Ivy, working in a greasy spoon, with no makeup and no cute Regency hairdo and my tits hidden away under a George from Asda t-shirt and not out on a platter thanks to some dreamy corset.
Wanting him to see me like this is probably not the right turn of phrase at all.
I don’t want him to. Ideally, I’d like him to remember the fairytale version of myself I was That Night, but honestly, that’s pointless.
I looked the hottest I’ve ever looked, and he still didn’t want me badly enough to get over himself and his stupid principles, so when he sees me here, like this, it’ll be a good way to draw a line under everything.
To remind him that I’m just a normal working-class girl who looks way less good when she’s not tarted up.
It’s not that I want to sabotage myself, but I do want to prove to myself that there’s nothing to sabotage.
That there’s nothing lingering here. Nothing to dream about in bed except for an evening that ended up in humiliation for me and blue balls for him.
I want to crush every last tiny bit of hope for something, because I’ve learnt the hard way that hope is the most dangerous thing there is in life.
I’ve talked a good game to myself, so I don’t know why it’s such a shock for the physical reality of him when he appears in the caff not even twenty-four hours after I texted Gen back.
It’s probably because he looks so ridiculously, laughably out of place in here.
Most of our orders are to go, so the only other punter in here is Dennis, one of the local street sweepers, who’s finished his shift and is nursing a mug of builder’s tea so strong the spoon is practically standing up in it.
He doesn’t have his own teeth anymore, bless him, and he doesn’t bother putting his dentures in when he’s on a shift, so he can gurn with the best of them.
Xavier, on the other hand, looks like he comes from a different species from the likes of us.
He strolls in, looking all suave and chic and borderline European, even though he’s only in jeans and a pale blue shirt.
Still, you can tell his clothes cost money.
He has the sleeves rolled up just so, and I clock the tanned forearm porn at the same time as I take the rest of him in.
It’s a bit weird seeing him in modern dress, given he was in full Grosvenor mode last time I saw him, and it’s also strange seeing one of my clients in the wild.
My first thought upon clocking his general hotness and poshness is OMG, I’ve had his dick in my hand, which must seem immature, but I’ve never seen anyone I’ve fucked at Alchemy out in the real world, if that makes sense.
So yeah, I have to admit it gives me a kick when I see him, just because he’s so hot and exotic and out of place. His dark hair is the same as it was that night—shiny and floppy—and even in jeans, he still has a commanding presence. He doesn’t look arrogant, exactly, just… entitled, I suppose.
He looks tired, too.
Tired and sexy.
He glances around the caff as soon as he crosses the threshold, and the barely disguised look of horror on his face makes me want to laugh but also slap him.
He might think Jan’s Caff is beneath him, but I can tell you, this place is spotless.
Spotless. No matter that the lino on the floor has worn through to some brown patches, or that the Formica on the tables is chipped around the edges.
Bill and I go over every inch of this place with industrial-grade cleaner every chance we get.
His lordship has nothing to worry about.
His gaze sweeps from Dennis, hunched over his cuppa and still in his hi-vis, to the counter, and lands on me standing behind it. Instantly, his expression goes from unimpressed to Aha. There she is. Target locked and loaded.
Oh shit. He’s coming over.