After Felix - Lily Morton Page 0,50

a private secondary school. Then his laughter had lured me closer, and I’d observed a small, thin young man with a mop of dark, wavy hair and a sharp, fine-boned face with a retroussé nose and the fullest, reddest lips. He’d been talking on the phone, and what sealed my attraction was his expression of sardonic amusement and the quick, biting wit of his side of the phone conversation.

I’d wanted him instantly—the effect sudden and powerful—like a punch in the stomach and balls. It’s a shame I never cottoned on sooner that my immediate need to know him meant he was different from anyone who came before or after. He was different, because there has never been anyone like Felix for me.

Everyone else is boring compared to him.

“Hello, anyone in there?” he asks in his clear, posh voice.

“What the fuck are you dressed in?” I ask, completely forgetting what I’d been about to say. “Is it fancy dress and no one told me? I feel so left out when I’ve got a perfectly respectable pirate outfit in the wardrobe.”

“I can well believe it,” he says tartly. “And respectable is almost certainly the wrong word. Use your dictionary, Max. It’s a journalist’s friend.” He looks down at his outfit of blue-and-white striped pyjama pants, a Russian hat with the flaps down (which I’m sure was last seen in my coat cupboard downstairs), and a navy fisherman’s jumper that’s absolutely huge on him. He grins. “It’s fucking cold in this house, Max. I’d forgotten how hot-blooded you are. Scott of the Antarctic would have been happy living here.”

I shift on the bed and then wince at the shaft of pain. “Shit,” I mutter.

Felix is instantly there, propping my arm gently on a pillow. “Don’t move so fast,” he scolds. “You’re hurt, and you need to rest.”

He carries on scolding me, but his voice is warm and almost fond, and the ache in my chest is worse than the one in my arm. This is the way he used to talk to me. Back in the days when he’d looked at me like I’d hung the moon. Back in the days before I ruined everything.

I look at the play of his eyelashes on his cheekbones and catch the scent of his Miller Harris aftershave that smells of oranges. His body against mine is warm and so familiar that it makes tears prick at my eyelids.

“Are you okay?” he asks, concern clouding his face.

I try not to react to his gentle expression. He’s spent the last two and a half years reminding me forcibly that he can’t stand me, so he’d hate to know he’s letting down his guard at this moment.

“Just painful,” I mumble.

He reaches for the paper bag of pills he set on my bed and then checks his watch. “You can have your painkillers now,” he says judiciously.

He picks up the glass of water on my bedside table and then pauses. “Wait. Is this water or vodka? Because one leads to a Russell Crowe sort of existence, which isn’t for you.”

“It’s water. I don’t know where you get the idea that I drink a lot.”

“Probably from the fact that you actually drink a lot,” he says tartly.

“Not anymore,” I say quietly.

He must hear the truth in my voice because he goes still. “Really? Since when?”

Since I realised that I couldn’t get you back or forget you by drinking and shagging random blokes.

I don’t say it, because he would immediately put that cute nose in the air and hightail it back to London quicker than Dick Whittington. “Early New Year’s resolution,” I say smoothly.

“It’s the middle of January. New Year’s Eve is a good few months away now.”

“You know me and how I like to be prepared.”

He shakes his head. “You’d give boy scouts a bad name.” He hands me the glass, and the sleeves of the ridiculous jumper fall over his long, fine-boned fingers.

“Where did you get that ridiculous jumper from?” I demand. “A mutant werewolf?”

He shoots me a wry smile. “Almost. An ex left it on the boat. He was very hairy, bless him.”

A shaft of jealousy sears through me so fast that I jerk. I know there have been others since me. He’s never hidden it. In fact, he’s almost flaunted them, as if daring me to comment. But how could I? I’d done my share of shagging to ease the despair I felt at losing him. Then I wised up and realised that I was never going to