At First Sight Hannah Sunderland (free e books to read online txt) 📖

to ache. ‘I just don’t understand him. One minute he’s saying that he’s in desperate need of a friend and that I am that friend and that he wants to know more about me and then he’s looking at me with those big, I want to kiss you eyes and then poof, he’s gone again.’ I could feel the brush snapping through hair when the bristles encountered tiny knots but I couldn’t stop; the brushing, and subsequent pain, was cathartic.

‘Darling, darling. You’ll have no hair left.’ She held her hand up to the camera, begging me to stop. ‘You know your grandmother had trouble holding on to her hair. Let’s not help the genes on their way.’

I dropped the brush down onto the ‘table’ like it’d turned white hot and surveyed the number of hairs lying in the bristles. Not too many – I wouldn’t be going bald just yet.

‘Seems to me like he’s messing you around and you’re better off following Ned’s advice and getting yourself on Bumble.’ She resumed her typing, although each hammer of the key was a little louder this time.

‘I don’t want to go on Bumble, but I agree with you about the messing me around thing. I’m giving him one last day. He has until the stroke of midnight to text me and if he doesn’t, then I guess he goes back to being a pumpkin.’

‘Good plan, Nelly. Let me know how it goes. No word on when I’ll be back just yet, but it’ll be soon, I promise.’ She picked up the phone and drew it towards her face.

‘Uh-huh. A lot of people keep making me promises at the moment.’ I sighed.

‘Nelly, I am your mother. If you can’t trust me to keep a promise then who can you trust?’ She blew a kiss into the camera. I caught it and returned one of my own before hanging up and turning to the mirror.

I was wearing my hair straight today, parted in the middle like a Seventies hippy. I applied some hair oil to my hand and dragged it through my unruly locks in a last-ditch attempt to calm the frizz. I had done very little with my day so far. My only real objective had been to go into town to buy a film and some pizza for me and Ned tonight. I’d thought about calling around to my ever-evaporating pool of friends but in the end, I decided that I’d much rather wander around town on my own. It had been an empty, boring kind of day where you can’t wait for night to come so you have an excuse to sit around and be lazy.

I caught the bus into town, due to the sudden shower of rain that disappeared as quickly as it came, but gave its all while it was here. I vowed to walk my way home and attempt to get to at least four digits on the pedometer.

I tried to clear my mind and enjoy my day, but there was a quiet anger that bubbled away in the background, turning my smallest of actions into expressions of frustration. I’d slapped my card down so forcefully onto the reader when I entered the bus that the driver recoiled a little. I knew that the annoyed, proud part of me, the part that’d been raised on tales of Boudica and Pocahontas, wanted to be strong and cut my losses with Charlie Stone now, before that treacherous warmth in my chest grew to be something that I’d carry with me in various forms of damaging behaviour for the rest of my life. I was a strong, capable woman and I didn’t need a man to complete me. I would, however, like to have someone to sleep beside or kiss me when I left for work. I had Ned for all my platonic needs but it would be nice to have the romantic needs covered too.

I went into HMV and bought a bargain-bin romantic drama with an embracing couple on the cover. Ned was a sucker for this type of film and he’d be overjoyed to curl up in our mountain of scatter cushions and use one of them to hide his moistening eyes when the credits rolled. God forbid we had a tear-stained repeat of the A Walk to Remember debacle of 2019.

I grabbed two pizzas and a couple of four-packs of Peroni and began heading back home. It took about twenty minutes to walk and that would give me enough time to think a little more about the Charlie situation, before putting it all to rest. It must have been somewhere near five o’clock, so that gave him seven hours to text and if he didn’t, then I would do what I should have done a week ago and step away.

The walk home seemed long and arduous and I thought about turning around and heading to the bus station, but I had promised myself that I would get at least some exercise. Caffeine was what I needed, a little boost to see me through.

I turned in the direction of caffeine and approached Cool Beans Café. I shamelessly walked in through the glass door, turned opaque with condensation, and scoured the room for him, like I’d done every lunchtime these past two weeks, and came up with nothing. I walked up to the counter and ordered a coffee from the rookie employee as I continued to scour the place with increasingly frustrated eyes.

‘Americano,’ the boy said and handed me my drink. I thanked him and was about to walk away when I turned back to him and glanced down at his name tag.

‘Sorry, erm, Russel?’ I asked. Russel turned back to me, worried that he’d cocked up my order. ‘Can I just ask if that Irishman with the dark hair has been coming in recently?’ A magenta-lipped woman in the queue sucked her teeth in my direction. I had become the very thing I hated the most, someone who holds