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

least this physical divide would absorb some of the sexual tension I felt towards him. I often found it a struggle to look away from him. The feelings zipping and chiming in my chest when he caught me with that intense blue stare.

The room held the damp chill that old houses always do, the subtle blast of evening heating that I could still feel lingering in the air, unable to chase away all of the cold. The ceiling, high above us, held hairline cracks, again just a product of age, that ran across the whole span of it, disappearing behind the ornate plaster ceiling rose.

‘Do you miss it?’ I asked, my voice sounding quiet in the large room.

‘Do I miss what?’ His voice was dreamy, content.

‘Home. Ireland. Your family.’

‘Yes and no. I miss the place, obviously. It’s beautiful. Have yer ever been?’

‘I haven’t, but well done on that particular attempt at conversational misdirection. Almost seamless. What about your family?’ I probed further.

‘Touché. Erm, some of them. I highly doubt they miss me though.’

‘Why is that?’ I pressed a little more, hoping that I wasn’t pushing my luck.

He sighed. ‘I did something real shitty a couple of years back.’

I shifted a little, the zip of one of the cushion coverings digging into my side. ‘What did you do?’

‘Technically it’s more of what I didn’t do.’ He paused, his voice thick with something I couldn’t quite decipher.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘At some point, but not now.’

We lay in the silence for a while, the air thick with our own individual trains of thought. It was a while before either of us made a sound and when that sound came, it came in the form of a rustling plastic bag. A moment or two after the rustling, a hand appeared over the barricade of soft furnishings, clutching a fist full of gummy bears.

I reached up and touched my hand gently to his. His fist unfurled and a rainbow of bears fell into my open palm. ‘Thanks.’

‘No worries,’ I heard him utter in a dreamlike way as he retracted his arm. I tossed one into my mouth, without taking notice of the colour as all gummy bears tasted the same to me, and the sound of my chewing was so loud in my ears that I stuffed them all into my mouth and got rid of them in one go.

I felt something uncomfortable behind my back and reached around, pulling out a blue cushion, covered with brown patches of atlas print. I ran my fingers over the soft surface of the cushion, mentally counting the places Mum had been to and lived in over the years. So many different places, filled with new people and cultures. And where had I been? Cowering in a corner, making excuses not to visit her because I was afraid of flying.

I saw movement over the wine-red pillow of the barricade and I watched as his fingers began to set up a line of gummy bears, all looking over into my section. I narrowed my eyes and looked at the bears a little more closely, lined up as if they were about to begin a goose step, and all of them had had their heads removed, the vacant space filled with a head of a different colour.

I leaned up on my elbows and looked at the line of bears in horror. ‘Erm … are you doing some weird gummy bear head transplant surgery over there?’

He placed another bear in the line, red with a green head. ‘Yeah, with this one I was goin’ for a festive Christmas sort of vibe.’ I still couldn’t see his face, only his right shoulder leaning against the blue velvet cushion he’d picked out himself.

‘Isn’t the first sign of a serial killer when they start butchering poor defenceless animals?’ I asked.

‘I don’t think gelatine bears count.’

I blew a laugh through my nose and sent one of them over into his section with a flick of my finger.

‘Hey!’ he called with somewhat genuine annoyance. ‘What’ya doin’ to young Frankenstein there?’ A moment later, delicate fingers picked him up and placed him back in line.

‘Sorry, I didn’t know you’d grown so attached to them.’ I saw the dark hair of his head, bobbing over the partition as he constructed more poor unfortunate monstrosities. ‘You do know that the monster wasn’t actually called Frankenstein though, right?’ I said, throwing a piece of utterly useless knowledge out there.

‘Yes, he was,’ he argued as he placed his eighth creation, a clear head on a yellow body, in line.

‘No, the doctor was called Victor Frankenstein; the creature didn’t have a name. He’s referred to as Adam at one point, because he’s the first of his kind, but it’s not his official name.’

‘Are’ya serious?’ he asked, sitting up and finally coming back into view. ‘Yer tellin’ me I’ve been gettin’ that wrong me whole life?’ He stared at me with pinched brows and a mouth hanging crookedly open in question.

‘The whole theme of the book is abandonment and the fact that he refuses to give the creature a name reflects the theme,’ I said, reiterating something that my mother had once told me.

‘Where d’ya keep it all?’ he asked, looking impressed.

‘What, the useless information? I store it in the spaces reserved for actual useful knowledge, like where the Isle of Man is or how to change a fuse.’

The overhead light emitted a warm glow that made shadows of the strands of his dark hair, which hung down over his eyes, and the straight bridge of his nose.

He picked up the ‘festive’ gummy bear and raised it to his lips.

‘No,’ I gasped comically, ‘you can’t.’

‘Oh, I can and, shortly, you’ll see that I will.’ He opened his mouth and held it just inside.

‘But you brought them into this world!’

He dropped it onto his tongue, closed his mouth and chewed.

‘You monster!’ I exclaimed.

A forced, evil cackle rolled from his lips. ‘Mwahaha!’ He snatched the rest of them up