Wrapped Up in You - Talia Hibbert Page 0,1
picture of Will eye-fucking some glossy American woman next to a palm tree.
Really. Did they have anything other than palm trees over there? Perhaps a nice hedge or two?
Hollywood Will was inescapable and distant and might have been safe to drool over alongside the rest of the world, if it weren’t for the fact that Home Will also existed.
Home Will had lived next door to Abbie since they were ten.
Home Will sent her adorable memes and indie artwork via his secret Instagram account.
Home Will was the lifelong best friend she shared with her twin brother, and that friendship was precious.
“Abs,” snapped the twin brother in question. “Are you hearing me or what?”
“Well, excuse me for concentrating on the road instead of your non-stop mouth,” Abbie said, even though she had actually been concentrating on emotional complications. She shifted gears and slipped into the motorway’s fast lane to add a sprinkle of truth to her white lie.
Jason’s snort filled the car, crackling through her speakerphone. “I call to check on your welfare, and this is what I get? Right, then. Understood. You’re on your own.”
“I’m rolling my eyes right now. I’m rolling them hard.” And that was the truth.
“Mind they don’t fall out of your head,” Jase singsonged. “By the way, I said, since I know you weren’t listening: there is a blizzard. A big one. Drive safe.”
Ah, the joys of the festive season. “Beast from the East?”
“Christ knows where it’s from, but it’s about to end up here, so I say again: drive safe.”
“Don’t worry.” Abbie glanced at the setting sun, then at a nearby road sign. “I’m thirty minutes away from Grandma’s, tops, and there’s no snow up here yet.”
“Well, no. It’s not due to hit Scotland for another day or so. But—”
“So you’re calling me why?”
“But,” Jase repeated firmly, “you never know, and preparedness pays. Anyway, I’ll talk to you later, you ungrateful swine. I have to get back to work.”
“Wait,” Abbie said, before her brother could cut the line and return to the whirl of his atelier. “When are you coming up?”
For the last five years, the Farrell family had made a habit of driving up to Scotland for Christmas. Not because they were actually Scottish, but because Abbie’s bonkers grandmother had decided that living in a Scottish farmhouse in the middle of fuck-off nowhere was her manifest destiny, and Abbie’s three bonkers older brothers had coughed up the money to help her do so.
Will Reid had also coughed up the money, but Abbie tried not to think about that. In fact, she tried never to think about Will unless he was standing right in front of her.
Or DMing her adorable lizards, obviously.
“I don’t know,” Jase hedged, not because he couldn’t leave for Christmas whenever he wanted—he could—but because he was a serial workaholic who didn’t know when to stop. “The twenty-third, maybe?”
“The—? That’s a week away, Jason!”
“Well, no one told you to drag your arse up there as soon as school was out, Abigail.”
“Is anyone going to be at Grandma’s this week, or is it just me and the cats? I—I had hoped to see you, you know.” In fact, Abbie had hoped to spend as much time as possible with her entire family, which was a desire she’d once have taken to her grave. But over the last two years—since the divorce, and the therapy Chitra had forced her to endure—she’d been trying, incrementally, to express her feelings more often.
It was disgusting, but occasionally worthwhile.
There was a pause from Jase before he said, sounding quietly pleased, “Oh. Well. Then I’ll come up a bit earlier. And I think Will’s on his way.”
Abbie froze. “Is he?”
“I’m not sure, I wasn’t paying attention when we talked about it. Call him and ask.”
A shout rang in the background, one that sounded suspiciously like, “Jason, if you don’t get over here and get these pins out of my tits—”
“Ah, for fuck’s sake. Yeah, I’m coming. Listen, speak later,” Jase said. “Don’t die in a snowdrift, don’t let Grandma die in a snowdrift, don’t let Will die in a snowdrift while chasing a chubby robin, goodbye.” The call cut out.
“Why,” Abbie asked the interior of her Volvo, “am I the one responsible for saving people from snowdrifts?”
There was an ice princess joke in there somewhere, but she couldn’t be bothered to find it.
Two
@AbbieGrl: Oh my fucking god that is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen in my life
@DoURe1dMe: … Are we still talking about the Komodo dragon?
@AbbieGrl: YES.
It was sunset