Holiday Read by Taylor Cole

Author:Taylor Cole [Cole, Taylor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781804545324
Publisher: Head of Zeus

Twenty

‘You’re here to meet Alexis?’ I say, filled with a sense of betrayal, because how could she?

But then, I shouldn’t be surprised, because I know Makayla’s liked him from the start. She made no secret of that. If anyone should have been on that couch in the cottage with him, it was her, not me.

‘Keep your knickers on,’ Makayla says. ‘I’m here because he wanted to talk about you. I didn’t know you’d be here too.’

‘When did you two even swap numbers?’

‘You passed his business card on to me, remember? I thought I should text him to say thank you for the flowers. Wish I hadn’t bothered now, to be honest.’

‘What did he tell you?’ I ask, not able to meet her gaze.

‘Not a lot. He knows he messed up and he wants to make things right.’

‘How? Can he go back in time and not start writing a cringe story about me?’

Alexis has taken one look at us and swerved to the bar, where Kristoff does not engage him in conversation, but instead serves another customer. Maybe it’s the boyband looks or Alexis’s penetrating stare, but something is throwing Kristoff off his bartending game. Was this what I looked like when Alexis first walked into Demigorgons? Did he push me off balance like this?

Alexis gets his drink eventually and walks sheepishly to our table and sits down.

Makayla goes to him, gives him a peck on the cheek, in the same way she might kiss her grandmother, and then looks at the three of us, sitting in silence, and turns to go.

‘Don’t even think about leaving,’ I say, and she shushes me, and goes to a bar stool to talk to Kristoff.

‘Why are you here?’ I say to Alexis, before Daniel can try to smooth things over.

‘Firstly, to say sorry again. I’ll always be sorry about how I handled things with you. I shouldn’t have got naked with you. At least, not without talking to you about all this first.’

‘I’ll just go up to the bar too, I think,’ Daniel says, suddenly flushed. ‘Give you guys some time to talk.’

I go to say something to Daniel, to tell him he has no reason to feel awkward because what happened with Alexis is in the past, it will never happen again and we didn’t even have sex, if that is at all relevant, but which also feels like extreme overshare.

Alexis puts up his hand. ‘Okay, mate. I’ll see you at the bar in a bit. Candice, please let me finish.’

‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Go right ahead. I’d hate to interrupt the author’s flow.’

‘The truth is I was in a bad way. Drunk and depressed. It’s that old adage, really: hurt people hurt people.’

This is how Alexis is excusing his behaviour?

But why shouldn’t he? That was how I excused Joseph’s behaviour. The damage flows through toxic men like radiation, distorting cells, flowing right out of them into the person standing by them.

Joseph had been troubled and for the longest time I didn’t even know, because when he was in a good patch, he functioned great.

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