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Louise doesn’t spot me until I appear at the table with a vodka, which I slide toward her.
“Liam!” She hurls herself at me and I steady the stool she’s about to fall off. Her swimming eyes meet mine. “Glad you came back for Christmas. Thought you’d disappeared back to Barbie in La-La Land again.”
“I’m flying back after the New Year,” I say. “Blue Phoenix isn’t exactly flavour of the month currently.”
“Yeah. How’s Jem?”
“Same. How are you?”
She raises and eyebrow at my subject switch. “Cerys left.”
“Yeah.” I fight the need to go twenty questions on her, if she’s drunk, she’ll tell me anyway.
“Can’t believe she went back to him,” she continues. “I wouldn’t.”
“Why did she?”
“Ella wanted to go home. Me and Cerys had…words, I told her she was a fucking idiot, but Cerys insisted Ella should spend Christmas with her Dad. Cerys said she’d decide what to do after Christmas.” Louise takes a long drink from her vodka and tonic. “I said I’d help out if she changes her mind.”
So not a definite reconciliation with the arsehole? As if that matters to me.
But it does. I don’t know why, but I got sucked into Ella and Cerys’s life. This is me, soft-hearted Liam who doesn’t like people hurting, that’s why. Okay, I know that’s a lie too. We knew each other before and we were drawn together again by a shared past and a shared hurt but this is more. Connecting with Cerys was like plugging into a new energy, a resonance that opened my heart and called it home.
“I can help Cerys too.”
“You can help by staying away, Liam. She’s confused enough without you hassling her.”
“I meant financially,” I snap.
“Sure you do.” She drains her glass. “I know you kissed her. Nice one, messing with her head like that.”
“I didn’t force myself on Cerys.”
“Yeah, if you’d screwed her I’d punch your face!”
“Sure, Lou...” Shit, this girl is drunk. I’d better hang around to help her home because nobody else at the table looks capable. One girl with long brown hair is asleep against a man’s shoulder already and several people have their elbows on the table, heads in hands. Two other girls with tinsel wrapped around their hair and shoulders sway from side to side and sing along with the cliché Christmas songs blaring from the pub speakers.
She sits back. “But you didn’t screw her, so I won’t.”
Cerys is in Cardiff. I’m on my way back to the States. So is this over before we started? Would we have allowed the resonance to change our lives? The painful awareness that Honey is the person who suits my lifestyle edges in.
“Did they take the gifts from under Mum and Dad’s Christmas tree?” I ask.
“What? Why?”
“Some of the gifts under there were for Ella, weren’t they?”
Louise shakes her fringe from her face. “You’re weird, worrying about a little girl’s Christmas.”
I don’t tell her I’m worrying about Cerys’s Christmas if she opens my gift to her in front of the dickhead who’s Ella’s dad.
