Thank You, Next - Sophie Ranald Page 0,12

cat flap and he wiggled his way in through the window, hopped up onto my bed and settled down for a good wash.

‘Where have you been then?’ I asked him. ‘Busy day?’

He glanced at me, blinked, then carried on scrubbing his face with his paw like he was going in for a mega exfoliating session.

As usual after a long day, I felt knackered but also too wired to settle down to sleep. There was nothing I wanted to watch on TV. I would have loved a hot bath but the flat had only a tiny shower cubicle that provided hot water in a way I guess you’d describe as quirky, if you were its mum and wanted to make it feel better about itself. I’d eaten dinner earlier in the pub kitchen, so there was no point in making myself a piece of toast.

Instead I found myself pacing up and down, waiting for the nervous energy that had carried me through the day to dissipate enough to allow me to rest. Not that pacing in my flat got you very far – twelve steps, fifteen if they were small, took me from the front door to the bed, and eight from the bed to the bathroom door. The place was tiny, poky even. I wasn’t naturally a tidy person, but I’d quickly realised that I’d need to clean up my act or risk drowning under a rising tide of my own stuff, so the room was neat, the bed made, most of my clothes folded tidily away in the chest of drawers.

I sat down on the bed next to Frazzle and took out my phone, flicking reflexively through to my astrology app.

It’s okay to admit that you’re a bird who’d be happier in a cage than flying free, it told me.

What? Surely no bird was happier caged?

Today offers challenges in work and creativity, it went on. But let’s be honest, it’s love you’re struggling with right now, Aquarius.

‘You don’t say,’ I told it. Frazzle looked curiously at me.

What would it be like, I wondered, having a man with me in this tiny space? Having someone’s warm body next to mine in the small double bed, someone cleaning his teeth while I had my morning shower? Although I knew the answer to that – it would mean my morning shower would be more of a morning trickle, the water pressure being what it was.

What would it be like to share routines and private jokes with someone who didn’t have four legs and stripy orange fur? What would it be like to hear someone say he loved me?

I flicked back to the app. Although I’d had it on my phone for months, I’d never fully investigated its functionality. The one-line daily readings it gave had been enough for me, up until now. I’d glanced at the push notification when it flashed up on my phone each day, laughed or tutted or wondered briefly what the hell that even meant, and moved on.

But now it was like the pesky thing was getting inside my head, and I wanted to get inside its head, too. But I was a grown-up. I knew, rationally, that my personality and my life’s path hadn’t been determined twenty-seven years ago when I’d entered the world, or nine months before that, when my mum and dad had— Yuck, I wasn’t going to think about that.

If I was going to accept Robbie’s challenge, though, I’d need to understand a bit more about how this whole astrology thing worked, and what the app could do to help me in my mission.

I clicked on the tab that said ‘Love’.

You’re fiercely independent, I read, and you think you can manage just fine on your own. And that’s true, up to a point. But no woman is an island, and sometimes you feel your soul crying out for its twin, its other half, your soulmate. But how do you find that person – and how on earth (or in the stars) are you supposed to know when you have?

Bloody good point, I thought.

Under that little chunk of text was a link that said ‘Find your love match in the stars’. I clicked it.

Cerebral and intellectual, you can come across as emotionally detached. But still waters run deep, and that’s never truer than in your case, water carrier. You have reservoirs of love and passion waiting to be tapped.

Okay, this was getting technical now. And me, cerebral? Come on. I was the woman who spent

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