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

His thumb stroked the soft skin over my cheekbone as he looked into my panic-stricken eyes. ‘It must have slipped my mind.’ He chuckled and before long I was laughing along with him.

Chapter Ten

There are moments in life when you stop for a moment and simply have to ask yourself, how the hell did I end up here? And as I sat in the uncomfortably itchy folding cinema seat with my prosthetic latex nose slowly detaching from my skin and dangling precariously over the bucket of mixed popcorn in my lap, I decided that this was most definitely one of those moments.

The Day of the Marathon was on over in Worcester, a one-day film festival showing all the George Romero zombie films. My heart had sunk at the thought of it. Not only would it be zombie films, but ancient ones, the kind that have niche, cult followings of men with untamed facial hair whose staple diet is Mountain Dew and Wotsits and still live in their parents’ basements at the age of forty-five. Nonetheless, I had accepted, simply because it meant several uninterrupted hours of time spent with Charlie. It wasn’t until I had sworn myself into this event, that he’d added a caveat.

I picked up a puffed kernel of corn and chucked it in the general direction of my mouth with a sassy and seemingly putrefying hand. Soft sniggering came from the seat beside me and I cast a pissed-off look his way. I’d agreed for him to come to mine a couple of hours before we had to leave so that he’d have time to transform me into one of the undead, on the promise that everyone would be doing it and that there would be a prize for the best cosplay.

I’d been reluctant at first but he’d looked at me with downturned corners of his mouth and pinched lines between his brows and I’d come to the conclusion that this whole thing was happening in Worcester, where I knew no one. It would be fine; I’d just take the back routes to the motorway, so I didn’t drive past anyone I knew, not that they’d even recognise me with blacked-out eyes and half a rotten face.

So, I’d sat there at the kitchen table and let him do his worst. He’d gently rested the crook of his wrist on my cheek and worked carefully, with a concentrative tongue pinched between pursed lips. After a few seconds I’d realised that having him paint my face was the perfect excuse for me to do what I’d wanted to do since I’d first met him, sit and stare at his face from close proximity, but in a way that wouldn’t make me look like a creep. As time ticked by and he delicately augmented the blood spatter above my top lip, I took in the fine lines that had begun to take up permanent residence in the skin around his eyes, the deep russet reds that sprung up at intervals throughout the otherwise dark hair of his chin and the subtle scars scattered over his cheeks, which must have been left over from teenage acne.

A strand of hair, which had escaped the claw clip holding my hair back from the array of sticky things being applied to my face, trembled with every aggressive thump of my heart. He looked good. Putting his mind to things, using his skill. I had wondered, in those minutes when he hovered a few inches away from me, what would happen if I leaned over and kissed him. Would he lean into it, or turn on his heel and run for the door again? I’d thought about it and come to the conclusion that, as far as I knew, he wasn’t into necrophilia and so, me lunging in with zombie face probably wasn’t the best turn-on.

‘You’ve never looked more beautiful,’ he said, and even though I knew it was a joke, the albatrosses took flight inside my stomach again.

Three and a half hours later, the glue that he’d used to adhere my fake rotting nose to my real, thankfully un-rotting, nose was beginning to itch and it was taking all the resolve I had to not tear it from my skin and throw it across the crowded theatre. The rows were filled with all kinds of people of all ages and all walks of life, not just the type of people I’d thought would be here. But whoever they all were, none of them, I repeat none, were made up like zombies and the second I’d realised this, I’d almost got straight back in the car and driven home without him. He seemed unaffected by the strange and amused looks that we sparked when we walked into the foyer, as if he didn’t care a bit that he appeared to have a gaping hole in his cheek, through which fake blackened teeth could be seen.

As we walked through to the screen, I saw a timetable on the wall, detailing how the movies would play. My heart sank when I saw the extensive list of films, but Charlie reassured me that we were only staying for the first three as, according to him, they were the only three worth watching and that we could leave if I got too bored.

The first film flew by in a blur of popcorn and screaming and I’d enjoyed it more than I thought I would, or more than I’d openly admit to Charlie. There was one person behind us, a right Chatty Cathy, who was sitting about two rows back and had whisper-talked throughout the whole thing. She needed to recalibrate her whisper to talking ratio because I could hear every single one of the passive-aggressive comments she handed out to her husband throughout the film. I only knew that he was her husband because at one point she’d muttered into her plastic, foil-topped glass of rosé, ‘I can’t believe I married someone who’s into all of this