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‘I did not know that.’
‘When I quit, or at least, when I cut down, I found it easier if I channeled all that new energy into something positive.’
‘What?’
Marcus looked at the splintered wood and scattered furniture around the room. ‘Tell you what? Let’s work a while longer, and then I’ll show you.’
*
Sophia waited a good ten minutes before the voices had disappeared before she finally came out of hiding.
I think I like her.
That’s what he’d said.
‘Stupid ass,’ she spat as she walked over to her stuffies. ‘He’s only just met me. How’s he supposed to know if he likes me or not? What is he, psychic?’
Even as she spoke the words, though, she knew that she felt the same.
‘He’s probably just hoping I’m an easy lay. Or convenient. Finds a girl in his bar, so obviously he’s gonna think about having sex with her.’
Little does he know that you’re not an easy lay, Sophia. Quite the opposite.
It was the oldest trick in the book. The trick that she always pulled when it felt as though someone was being nice to her or showed some tiny scrap of interest in her. Convince herself that they hated her and move on with her life.
How else was she meant to protect her virginity? Over the years, her virginity had become a marker or pride for her. Her father had wanted to control it by making her marry before she was ready, but he failed. She had lost so much, but her virginity was the one thing nobody could take away from her.
Sophia took the stuffies down from her shelf one at a time, saving the ones on her family shelf for last. Every day that went by without working she was wasting time, risking making her customers angry.
She had a very good rating on Fiverr and didn’t want to give that up. A couple days without working shouldn’t affect it too badly, but the last thing she wanted was to damage her record.
‘This is definitely the right choice,’ she said to herself. ‘I’ve got Kandi’s place and I can carry on with my work.’ Plus, if the commission from Clever Monsters came through, she’d be ready to go at the drop of a hat. She picked up an item from her mixed bag of accessories.
‘At the drop of a very cute, teddy-bear-sized, sailor’s hat.’ She tucked the blue and white striped scrap of fabric into her belt and kept on packing.
As she worked, a depressing thought struck her: she really didn’t have all that much to pack.
Her bears. Her restoration materials. Almost no clothes. Her sleeping bag. It wasn’t much to show for the five years she’d been here.
It would be so wonderful to have a place of her own. To paint and decorate it. To make it comfortable. And more than anything else, she wanted a nursery — somewhere that made it super-easy to slip into Little Space whenever she felt like it.
She was a Little — she’d known that ever since she’d googled ‘Why do I still want to play with dollies aged 18?’ — but she almost never got time to connect with her Little. That scared girl inside her who just wanted to live without fear, to learn through play.
Each of the stuffies on her family shelf had a special place in her heart, and it was hard to pack them away. She tried to make peace with the fact that she wouldn’t be able to have them on display until she’d moved out of Scraps and Studs. She was going to miss them.
‘Peter Rabbit,’ she said, placing her old, blue-jacketed friend into his box. ‘Don’t eat too many radishes while you’re in there. I don’t have any parsley to help settle your stomach.’ She turned her attention to her matching owls. They were limited edition, made in the seventies, and she’d found them for a bargain price at a thrift store. ‘Twit-twoo-twins, what am I going to do without your wise counsel?’
Peter was her brother, and the Twit-twoo-twins were her sisters. But the tiny multicolored mice were her babies. She couldn’t even bring herself to say bye to them. She just gently laid them in the box.
That just left Teddy. He was sitting on the bar, with just one stitch on his back cut. It wasn’t ideal, but chances were that he wouldn’t lose too much of his stuffing in transit.
‘Teddy,’ she said, ‘let’s g—’
There was a crash. Sophia yelped, and — without thinking — dove into her secret passage. She left out the box with the lid open, and Teddy was right there on the counter. Argh, why was Wolf back so soon?
‘What a fucking shithole.’
That wasn’t Wolf’s voice. Not even close. But itwasa voice she remembered.
