Chapter 5

Millie

“Hey…” Annie said, coming closer. We’d all stood around and gave our statements to the police while the fire crew went over the burning ruins. My eyes kept being drawn towards the pub, like a passerby’s might to a car wreck.

Trouble was, it wasn’t a mangled car that caught my attention–it was them.

Knox was walking around the rubble, poking through it with his team, Charlie’s blond hair shining in the artificial light, and then Noah— I forced myself to look away, not wanting to feel the same pang I experienced when I realised who’d put the fire out, but if I was looking for a distraction, Jim’s loud voice as he hectored the police officers, demanding answers, was enough.

“Don’t worry about that dickhead,” Annie directed, using her best mum voice. “Worry about this Christmas party.”

“Are you going?” Felicity, one of our barmaids, asked. “Can I come too? Because I’ve got a whole other fire they can put out.” She bit her bottom lip, then slowly let it pop free. “In my pants.”

“I got that,” I replied drily. “Look, I’ve got bigger issues to deal with right now.” I didn’t need to explain further, all the female staff clustered around me nodding in agreement. “I don’t even know those guys.”

“You know one.” Annie fixed me with an even stare.

“I knew one,” I corrected, the words coming out way too fast. “It’s been ten years. We weren’t even that close…” I stumbled on my words, never being all that good at lying, and her eyebrow cocked upwards. Annie smelled blood in the water. “OK, fine, Noah was supposed to be my first kiss.” I could get through this, I could. “I thought he was into me and then he wasn’t. He never explained and we finished school, only for me to never see him again.”

“Until now,” one of the girls said, the others giggling at her portentous tone.

“He’s the kind of guy you dream about running into on the street,” Annie said, her lips quirking into a small smile. “Right after you’ve had a stomach bug and lost ten kilos vomiting up everything you put in your mouth.”

“This is an oddly specific scenario,” I said with a frown.

“You’re walking one way along the beach, he’s walking up the other, and when you’re in your tiniest bikini, you happen to bump into him,” Annie continued.

“Is this how you met Mr. Annie?” I asked. “Is there a Mr. Annie?”

I looked at the others, who all shrugged.

“You’re an adult, and he stumbles up, unable to believe his eyes, taking in how amazing you look,” Annie said.

“Damn…” I coughed, still feeling a tickle in my throat. “Yeah, that would be cool.” I raked a hand through my hair, grimacing at the sooty texture. “Instead, I’m dirty, smoky, and damp.”

“So go to the Christmas party all dressed up and make him realise what he missed out on. Wear something sexy for a change,” Felicity said.

“Nah, I?—”

“And if Noah doesn’t sweep you off your feet, one of the others will,” Annie said. I stared at her, not sure what to say, but if the idea was so outlandish, why did I still feel the warmth of Knox’s arms around me? Those gentle hands, his voice asking me if I was OK?—

“Or both of them.” We all stared at Felicity. “If Jamie managed to bag all those hotties, why can’t you?”

“Ew,” I replied, “you called my brothers hot.”

But as arguments went up around the group about which brother the girls thought was hotter, Annie smiled.

“Why not all three? Why should Jamie have all the fun?”

Why not indeed.

The first day of being unemployed I spent sleeping, eating a breakfast of M&Ms and Diet Coke, then sleeping some more before watching something brainless on the TV until, you guessed it, I fell asleep again. My body had decided that because I didn’t have to do night shift anymore, it was going to make full use of my free time to reduce my sleep debt.

The next day I tried to nap but felt a weird kind of restlessness. I deep cleaned the shower, scrubbed out the oven I rarely used, and considered whether or not the bathroom cabinets needed replacing again. I thought floating vanities were cool, but the grime that seemed to accumulate under them? Not so much. I could get Jamie to blackmail my brothers to redo them yet again, and their wails of protest would be half the fun.

Anything to stop that empty feeling that persisted in my chest, even after I scratched at it.

It was when I started to alphabetise my book collection and colour code my underwear that I realised I might have a problem. A problem shared was a problem halved, so I did the only thing I could do and rang my bestie, Jamie.

“Hello?”

Brock sounded all husky and, gag, happy, which made me think he and my best friend had just been enjoying some horizontal refreshment, and that put me in a difficult position. In my mind, my brothers were like Ken dolls, smooth, sexless, and useful only in a limited number of scenarios, but my best friend? I wanted her to get railed from sundown to sun up in as many different positions as she could imagine, until she expired in a puddle of sex goo.

Trouble is, I could not handle her talking about it.

“Hey, Buttface,” I said in a deliberately breezy tone. Brock was like a bloodhound, sniffing out trouble in seconds. “Put my best girl on the phone.”

“My best girl—” he started to say.

“I licked her first.” I slapped a hand on my forehead. “Not like that.” His snicker made clear what he thought about my verbal diarrhoea. “Just put Jamie on the phone.”

“You got it, Amelia Bedelia.”

I sighed as I heard the sound of the phone being passed over, but Jamie entered the chat soon afterwards.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“The pub burned down and I lost my job, but then I quit.” This was the problem with my brothers shacking up with my best friend. It meant I couldn’t keep her on speed dial anymore, updating her on the minutiae of my life. “A bunch of hot firefighters turned up, like calendar-worthy dudes. Anyhoo, they put out the fire and one rescued me from doing something really stupid, and then the really cute one asked me to come to their Christmas party.”

This was where I told her about Noah, right? Right? Nope, the words came and squatted on the end of my tongue, but they were not coming out. If I said them, even to Jamie, then it’d all be real.

The shame I felt thinking I had something with Noah Taylor. The excitement I’d felt when we turned up at the party. My body was a lightning rod ready to be struck when he turned up and took my hand almost as soon as I arrived. We’d gone and sat under a tree, watching the stars, and then he’d turned to look at me and I gazed right back, the tension that was there between us both in class and out growing to fever pitch. His eyes dropped down, tracing the shape of my lips, then he leaned forward, right as Jamie came stumbling through the bushes, a hand clapped over her mouth.

She had been binge drinking with some of the other girls at school, and what goes in must come out, apparently. I led her away to vomit in the bushes, holding her hair back and making soothing sounds, but when we emerged, my brothers were waiting for us, not Noah.

He never spoke to me again, not even when I approached him in the hallway, the whole school looking on. He just shook his head and turned away, leaving me to stand there and bear the burden of people’s snickers and whispered comments.

I shouldn’t remember that so vividly, I knew that. It was ten years ago and time heals all wounds, yet somehow mine was still festering.

But maybe not for much longer.

“I know you hate dressing up and well, dresses of any kind, but I need you to come over and make suitably impressed sounds as I try to find the best revenge outfit in my wardrobe,” I informed my best friend.

“You’re going to stalk into the workplace of that freaking weirdo that tried to get you to not wear makeup on the first date?” she asked, instantly warming to the idea. “Or the guy who started walking you into the restaurant and then backed out and said he couldn’t do this?”

Ouch, that was the problem. I wanted to say that I got a whole lot better at choosing men after the whole Noah thing, but nope. The guy jinxed me.

I thought I’d be married now, have a couple of kids and be living in a house much like my mum and dad’s. I’d bring the grandkids over and my parents would spoil them rotten, giving me a break. I’d sit side by side with a man who looked at me like my dad did Mum, and he’d love me for the rest of my life. Instead of Prince Charming, I just kept finding toads.

“None of them. Someone worse.”

My voice wavered, threatening to crack, because it all wanted to come out. I didn’t think of Noah each time I dated someone new, didn’t moan his name when I came. I didn’t even dream of him when I slept. I rarely thought of him at all, except those quiet times between sleep and awake, when my defences were down. Inside my head, I kissed him that night, making the first move, claiming him and the connection I was so sure was real. We’d have broken up a month later, like so many of my friends at school did, but then I’d know.

What it was like to feel his mouth on mine, his hand in my hair.

Or was it Knox’s? Or Charlie’s? Felicity’s suggestion ran through my head now, unable to be pushed away by busy work, because tonight was the night of the Christmas party, and I was about to get into the spirit by giving myself the gift of revenge.

If Noah was going to have the bad taste of growing up and getting hot, well with the help of Spanx, a contour game that could put a Kardashian to shame, and a very cute dress, I was going to give myself the gift of closure. Hopefully with Noah’s tongue lolling out of his mouth like one of those cartoon wolves.

“Who?” Jamie asked, sensing a story.

“Just get your arse over here and grab a bottle of wine on the way. I think I’m going to need some liquid courage for this.”

“On my way,” she said.