The Best Thing I Never Had by Erin Lawless

Author:Erin Lawless [Erin Lawless]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007558315
Amazon: B00GLGZUS4
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-11-20T13:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

June 2007

‘Oi,’ Johnny barked, rapping his knuckles on the coffee table. ‘Focus.’ Adam glared at him.

‘I am, alright?’

‘You haven’t typed anything for a good five minutes. You asked me to keep you on task and that I bloody will mate,’ Johnny swore. ‘You were a total eejit for changing your dissertation topic last minute so now you have to pay the price. And that price is working like a dog. Get to it.’

‘I was thinking,’ Adam protested.

‘Yeah you probably were, but I don’t think it was about the book.’ Johnny arched his eyebrow knowingly. ‘You had a proper moon face on. Stop thinking about Harriet. This is all her bloody fault anyway.’

‘Hardly,’ Adam objected. ‘It isn’t her fault I hit a wall with my original work.’

‘Wasn’t it?’ Johnny’s eyebrow arched even higher. ‘I certainly wouldn’t be up for writing about sappy verse if Leigha had done to me what Harriet has done to you.’ Adam scowled. ‘Don’t allow her to indirectly make this worse, man. Focus.’

‘You focus on your own revision,’ Adam told him rudely. ‘Don’t bang on about what you don’t understand.’

‘Oh, I understand alright,’ Johnny insisted. ‘It’s practically all Ley bloody talks about so I’m actually quite well-versed on the emotional wreckage that’s been left in the wake of Harriet Shaw.’

‘Mate,’ Adam said, warningly. Grudgingly Johnny turned his attention back to his revision notes. Adam rested his hands back onto his keyboard and resumed staring into the middle distance.

That morning Adam had walked into a seminar group revision session in the library. Harriet was there; she’d walked straight out without looking at him.

‘What is going on between the two of you?’ Andrew had hissed into his ear as he’d sat down. Lucy – across from them, next to Harriet’s newly vacated seat – had given him the evil eye, but obviously wasn’t offended by his presence enough to compromise her remaining revision time by leaving in protest.

Adam had slogged away at his laptop until gone one thirty in the morning before retiring upstairs to bed. It was finally warm enough to have the window open at night, although the fresh air that circulated his bedroom was suffused with the smell of spices from the Indian takeaway two doors down.

The streetlights outside threw a square of artificial light through the open window and onto the bed. Although it felt uncomfortably like a spotlight Adam didn’t quite have the energy to get up and draw the curtains against it. He turned his mobile phone over and over again in his hands and thought about the day after Nicky’s birthday, where he’d laid there like this, waiting for Harriet to text him.

It was his birthday next week; he wondered if she had thought about that. It was always going to have been too close to the start of exam week and the coursework deadlines to have done anything big, but Miles and Johnny were insisting that they at least go out for a drink at the Armstrong. Would she come, if he asked her? At least as a friend? That’s how they’d started, after all.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.