Wow.
I couldn’t stop blinking as my eyes worked overtime: soft blue eyes; curved lips that looked as though an artist had painted them; a doubtful smile, full of good humour; a riot of curls glowing with the sunset – and a little dent in her chin.
She was looking at me expectantly. Oh, right, she’d said something. I was supposed to say something back. Except every single word had fallen out of my head apart from one:beautiful.
‘What?’ she prompted.
Fuck, I’d said that aloud. Clearing my throat with a choked cough, I gestured wildly out to sea. ‘Evening,’ I added. ‘Beautiful evening. For fooling around on the beach—’
Her eyes widened.
‘Fooling around with a volleyball and a bunch of mates.’
‘Sure is,’ she said in a soft American accent, her smile crinkling.
She was laughing at me, but I didn’t care. It was still a smile. I claimed it, matched it, grinning at her while the stars blinked on one by one in the sky behind her and I fell a bit in love in an instant.
Her head tipped towards me and I leaned closer, drawn helplessly. ‘It’s just…’ She gave a little shrug and I held my breath, waiting to hear what she’d say. ‘You’re standing on my sweater.’
Chapter 32
Leesa
All I managed to do after stumbling out of his room was to hunch under the shower for 40 minutes and then collapse into bed without eating dinner. I didn’t keep track of how much of that time I was leaking tears. I’d cried before – over much more meaningful things than some guy who’d made me feel special in bed. I’d fractured four ribs in a crash once. That had hurt more – a bit more, anyway.
I wanted to go home – back to the States, back to my parents’ place. Anywhere but here, seeing Colin everywhere I looked. My head was such a mess I was very glad I wasn’t the one lining up for a stage of the Tour de France and I felt wobbly every time I thought of him getting out on the road.
But I was also somadat him I was worried it would start to show in my work. How dare he suggest his feelings for me went beyond sex and then calmly ask me to leave the room! Talk about some weird back-handed compliment. He was a silver-tongued, juvenile heartbreaker.
And he was going to breakmyheart.
Lori saw it in me when she said goodbye the next morning – I was certain. But she didn’t say anything, she just wrapped me in a hug and told me Colin was an idiot. Maybe he was, but I kind of wanted him to bemyidiot.
There was a passionate part of me that wanted to hang over the barriers and holler for him, wear a talisman for luck – get another tattoo. God, if he knew about that, he’d grow an even bigger head. But I’d lived ten years of sacrifice and failure in my own career. My brain pulled me up and told me I’d hate myself when I was 30-whatever with nothing to show for myself but an unhealthy obsession with Colin Gallagher – who might well have passed me over by then, no matter what he’d not quite said last night.
I’d noticed the major glaring omission from our discussion: any hint of a future relationship. He’d been all selfish and needy about his feelings, but he’d put me in an impossible position. It would be so much easier if I could convince myself he was a jerk who’d led me on.
I avoided him – or he avoided me – for the rest day on Monday. It was bad enough I had to look at his face – with and without the moustache – all day every day for my job. I wasn’t ready to see him in real life after whatever we’d tried to say to each other in his room. Even on the morning of the next stage, an epic day in the mountains, I went down to breakfast late so I wouldn’t have to see him.
I must have looked as bad as I felt when I finally emerged from the hotel with my suitcase, because Wil steered me away from the bus to a team car driven by Chris, one of the swannies.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she asked out of the side of her mouth after we’d taken our seats in the back.
‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ I mumbled, hiding behind my work phone – legitimately, honest. I’d scheduled the next PowerFuel video to go out in the early engagement window and I had to double-check everything had worked as planned. It wouldn’t be the first time a post got swallowed up by Mark Zuckerberg’s pet shark.
But the video was there, Colin’s big, gorgeous face filling the little screen – and every last one of my obsessive thoughts. I knew how his throat bobbed when he spoke lazily in his deep voice, how his wry smile covered up the times he was secretly being earnest.
I could say his words in the video along with him, hear them in his slow voice: ‘You want some motivational crap, right?’I didn’t need to watch it again, but something made me do it anyway. Masochism probably.
I knew what came next. I’d asked him what kept him going when it hurt and he’d answered: ‘Stubbornness. Pride.’
Morgan’s suggestion of a close-up camera had been ingenious and I had two angles of his face, a permanent record of the few minutes before he changed the way I thought about myself. I should never have given him that power.
‘Is it going to be a problem? For you at work?’ Wil asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I answered with a grimace. I thought of my shiny new contract and the fact that Bill Weekes might find out that I’d slept with the talent. I hadn’t even signed it yet and Colin had tarnished even that achievement, the inspirational bastard.
He’d cut me in two and I didn’t know how to put myself back together. I almost wished he’d been a bad influence and asked me to stay. At least then I could have thrown away my life for love.
