Wrapped Up in You - Talia Hibbert Page 0,28
it,” she replied. “How drunk are you? Get up,” she ordered, “and walk in a straight line.”
He did, though he knew he shouldn’t. “It’s the middle of the night, and we’re grown-ups.”
“Shut up. It’ll make you smile.” She watched his slightly wobbly walk, then shrugged her shoulders. “That’s good enough.”
“Is it?”
She clearly wasn’t listening. “Put some clothes on and meet me outside.”
Six
Abbie wasn’t entirely sure how she’d ended up here.
Actually, that wasn’t true. She knew how she’d ended up downstairs—couldn’t sleep, needed a cup of tea to silence the warring, worried thoughts in her mind. And she knew how she’d ended up wanting to make Will smile—she’d seen him drowning his sorrows during what sounded like a horrible call with his agent, had seen the sadness in his eyes as he spoke about ending his career, and knew from experience that deciding to cut something off because it was time didn’t stop it from hurting like hell.
She just wasn’t sure what had possessed her to fix things by dragging Will out to play in the snow.
Now here they stood, coats zipped up over their thermal pyjamas, bathed by the flashing red lights of Grandma’s giant SANTA STOP HERE inflatable. She snuck a look over at Will and found him tipping his head back to face the gently falling snow. His eyes were closed, his nose pink, his smile sweet and dreamy. Her heart stuttered. Her carefully muzzled emotions snarled awake. The sheer force of her want, stronger than ever—or maybe just harder to ignore—almost dragged her across the metres between them.
Abbie’s toes curled up in her boots as though she could cling to her spot on the grass.
For God’s sake, she was supposed to be staying away from him. He’d completely shorted out her circuits today, had tangled up so many dangerous emotions in her that she’d had no choice but to compartmentalise herself nearly to death. Will’s attraction to her? Locked up. Her desperate need for him? Chained down. The words “I’m trying to seriously date you” said in that steady, utterly unselfconscious way he had? Run through a shredder and locked in a box and thrown into a volcano.
She knew that wasn’t a healthy approach to coping, but what was she supposed to do? Have a full-blown emotional crisis over lunch? Scare her grandmother by ripping out her own heart and throwing it at Will’s head, which was what the prospect of admitting her feelings felt like? Far better to tie her inner turmoil to a chair, slap some tape over its mouth, and focus on the good, easy, simple stuff—like acting natural, and playing with Haddock, and putting up the last of the Christmas decorations. All of that stuff mattered, because it was immediate and it was familiar and it would stop her getting wrapped up in her own head and examining the way she’d almost dissolved at the thought of intimacy at least seven times today.
Because she realised now that that was exactly what had happened. She’d been … afraid, earlier outside the supermarket. Afraid of vomiting up decades’ worth of pathetic, unkillable, unrequited love, and finally confirming her lifelong suspicion that she wasn’t just too much—she was too much for Will. She’d suspected it all her life. Flinched away from it all her life.
He was so sweet, so easy, so pure. She was so … intense. Tangled. Overwhelmed by herself, or rather, overwhelmed by the things she could feel when he looked at her, things that belonged in fairy tales with bloodied swords and dramatic happy endings, not in real life.
Which is the kind of self-thought you’re supposed to write in your feelings journal and examine thoroughly and objectively for any cognitive distortions.
Unfortunately, Abbie’s feelings journal wasn’t here. Before she could decide if running upstairs to get it would be too weird, something cold and hard and wet slapped her in the left tit. She gasped, snapped back into the moment, and saw the flash of Will’s bright, familiar smile before he slipped behind the trunk of Grandma’s holly tree.
“You bastard!” she called, outraged. “We didn’t even count down!”
“You were so busy staring into space, I could’ve counted down from a hundred and you probably wouldn’t have noticed,” he shot back.
Touché. Squinting through the mess of her glasses, Abbie crouched and gathered a fistful of snow, packing it tight. “Get out here, you coward.”
“Come and get me,” he replied, the words floating to her on a wave of laughter. She felt as if he’d pinched