The Piano Man Project Page 0,67

course I have. If I’m honest, I didn’t think it was a good idea for him to write to his sisters. The last thing he needed was another disappointment.’

Honey had already wished that Mimi had been there several times that day, and she wished it again now.

‘Ernie has never said a bad word about his mother. Do you know anything about her?’

Honey cast her mind back through scattered conversations with Mimi and Lucille over the week since Ernie’s letter had arrived and stirred up long-undisturbed memories. ‘She was a singer, from what I can gather. They haven’t exactly said anything untoward about her, but I get the impression she was hungry for fame and didn’t make it.’

‘Charming,’ Carol huffed softly. ‘Too ambitious to want her first-born.’

‘I honestly don’t know many more details, except she would have been young and unmarried. I suppose a baby out of wedlock would have been a scandal back then, and would have definitely killed her chances as a singer.’ Honey smiled sadly. ‘They didn’t have things like The X Factor back in those days.’

Carol grimaced. ‘Probably a good thing.’

The two women sat companionably in the sunshine, probably both wondering how things were going inside the house.

‘I’ll try my best to get Mimi to come soon,’ Honey said.

Carol nodded, her eyes cast to the ground. ‘Do me a favour. Make it as soon as you can?’

Nodding, Honey glanced away. She would. For both the men she now knew in self-made seclusion, she would.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Friday morning rolled in grey and cool, but Honey woke up early and in a hot sweat.

It was today. Or tonight. Friday. No-date night with Hal. In an attempt to play it down in her head, she hadn’t told a soul. Not Tash, nor Nell, nor Lucille and Mimi, a choice she regretted as she threw up her breakfast five minutes after eating it. Her nerves were off the scale. Tash would have been the perfect person to help her dial it back down with her jokey good humour, but Honey knew that she’d be somewhere thirty thousand feet up at that moment and in no position to offer comfort. Nell … Nell was probably being politely boffed over her muesli, so no joy there either, and it wasn’t a conversation she should have with Lucille and Mimi. That left no one. No one except the one person who was aware of the arrangement. Hal. But what was she supposed to do? Knock on his door, and then what? Ask him if he was still on for casual sex later? She pulled a ‘you idiot’ face at her reflection as she tied her hair back in the hall mirror, shook herself into her mac, and left the flat.

Across the lobby Hal heard Honey’s door open and close, and listened for her footsteps. He was able to discern whether she was heading over to his or towards the front door, and today she paused just outside her own door. Was she deciding which way to go? Had she bottled it? Should he? He had grave misgivings about the whole situation. His body was undeniably turned on by the fact that Honey wanted him, and his head was certain that it was a mistake of monu-fucking-mental proportions. His hand touched the cool lock on his door, ready to open it and cancel. He stood still, bated breath. If she walked his way, he’d open it, call it off because that was no doubt why she’d be coming over. If she went out of the front door, he’d … and then the front door banged, and she left for work, robbing him of the luxury of choice. She hadn’t cancelled, and neither had he.

Hal greeted the pleasurable emotion that surged around his body like an old friend. Adrenalin in his veins. The feeling he’d lived for before the accident, the one where you’re right on the edge of doing something incredibly stupid and have to screw up insane amounts of courage to throw yourself off the ledge.

Except sometimes you didn’t have the safe landing you’d banked on. Sometimes it really was incredibly stupid. Sometimes it could wreck your life. Hal’s problem was that he honestly didn’t know which way this one was going to play out.

He heard her come in as he’d heard her go out hours before, from the front door to her own flat without deviation towards his door.

He could do this. There was a way to give her what she wanted without taking

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