At First Sight by Hannah Sunderland (latest novels to read TXT) 📕

very often when I was young.’ He cocked his head to the side. ‘And when I was older, in fact.’

‘She’s a smart woman, your mother.’

‘Aye. At least I got a smile outta yer though.’

I pulled my smile wider. ‘Which smile is it? My show one or my sunshine smile?’

‘What?’

‘It’s what you said before. That my real smile was like sunshine,’ I said, enjoying how much he squirmed.

‘Ah, God. Did I say that? Smile like sunshine?’ He grimaced. ‘Never let me drink again. There’s no call for me to start getting all poetic.’

Despite everything I chuckled and looked down at the table, annoyed with myself for not being harder to crack. I’d thought that I would be like granite but I’d ended up being Play-Doh.

He clenched his teeth together and sent me a toothy grin, complete with hopefully raised eyebrows, and nudged me with his elbow.

I shook my head and exhaled loudly, sitting back and dragging my keys from the table to my lap. The staff began to close in around us, placing chairs on tables and dragging crumb-filled brooms across the floor, the subtle go-home signals not so subtle anymore.

‘What are you doing now?’

He shrugged and smiled a crooked, cheeky smile. ‘Talkin’ to a pretty girl. How about you?’

I rolled my eyes. ‘I’m going shopping.’

‘Oh, okay.’ He looked down at his hands in his lap.

‘I could use your help though, if you wanted to come.’

He looked up again, hope back in his eyes. ‘Ah.’ He sighed. ‘I was so hopin’ yer’d say that.’

Chapter Seven

The distant sound of ‘Islands in the Stream’ played from speakers, suspended high up in the corrugated metal ceiling of the homeware superstore. Charlie and I stood before a wall of scatter cushions that was so extensive it stretched from one end of the shop to the other and had every shape, size and colour that any human could ever need.

‘Well, you’ve certainly come to the right place for scatter cushions,’ Charlie said as he grabbed a royal blue one and began feeling the velvet with subconscious strokes of his fingers.

‘Okay, so we’re going for anything cheerful.’ I took down a yellow cushion and tossed it into the trolley behind us.

‘How many do you want?’ he asked, holding up the blue velvet one. I nodded and he threw it in too.

‘I don’t know. Let’s just choose the ones we like and we can whittle it down later,’ I replied.

He walked a little way down the aisle, pulling out a bright orange one and holding it out in the air in front of him at arm’s length, like he was inspecting a work of art.

I took an oblong violet cushion from the bottom shelf and playfully swung it to meet with the back of his knees. He lost his balance for a moment and took my arm in his hand for support.

‘Don’t think for a second that I’m goin’ to have a pillow fight with you in the middle of this shop and certainly not in my underwear,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but women don’t really do that.’

‘You mean … it was all a lie?’ His arms fell to his sides in mock disappointment. ‘Ah well, another day, another crushed dream.’

‘I’m sorry, but someone had to tell you eventually.’

He turned back to the shelf and slid the orange cushion into the space it’d come from.

I winced a little as the figure popped up on the screen of the horridly out-of-date till and the cashier motioned towards the card reader. We’d run away with ourselves a little and had failed to whittle down the amount by more than a few. We’d spent a good hour in the shop, walking the aisles with our trolley of cushions and sharing small talk. The whole time, I found myself trying to supress the glimmer of excitement that refused to leave me alone whenever he was in view, or out of view for that matter.

I’d lost Charlie to the pick ’n’ mix stand at one point and he’d rejoined me in the queue after several minutes of shovelling sweets into a clear plastic bag. I’d looked down at it and seen that it was filled with nothing other than hundreds of gummy bears, their stubby little limbs pressing against the bag as if they were begging to be set free. The cashier looked at me from beneath her under-pruned brows as she tried to decide what two people could want with seventeen scatter cushions and a kilogram of pure uncut gummy bears. By the look of confusion that lingered on her face as we left, I doubted that she’d come to a conclusion.

We made our way to the car, where we proceeded to stuff every available space with our purchases. We raced each other to the trolley park and back and were out of breath by the time we slumped into the seats.

I leaned back against the headrest and angled my head towards the windscreen, although I was watching him from the corner of my eye. He breathed heavily as he sat there in the passenger seat, little puffs of steam whisping from his lips, and he drew a hand through his shaggy dark hair. His lips sat in an almost smile, although the set of his jaw looked tense, as though he was worried about something.

‘I came back, you know,’ I said out of nowhere.

He looked up at me with a question in his eyes.

‘When we met at the café, after I left. I got all the way back to work before I turned around and came back, but you were gone.’

‘Oh yeah. Why d’ya do that, then?’ he asked, his cheeky expression showing me that he knew exactly why.

‘Because I wanted to see you again and I thought that that would never happen if I didn’t get your number.’

‘That’s right, is it?’ He was smiling and, of course, that meant I was too.

‘I just knew, the moment that I saw