Page 74 of Fundamentals in Flirting

“You smell delicious, like spicy oranges and pheromones.”

Teddy laughed. “To bed, my inebriated little hedgehog of a friend.”

“At last, Teddy the sex god has shown up and is taking me to his bed!”

I giggled, feeling my body bounce against him as he carried me upstairs.

“You really are drunk, and on so little alcohol too. Impressive.”

He placed me down gently on my back, and I was immediately enveloped in fresh-smelling sheets. I burrowed down into the soft warmth of the bed and felt myself relax.

“Get some sleep, you gorgeous little weirdo,” he continued, placing a gentle lingering kiss on my forehead and turning out the lights.

ChapterTwenty-Two

The thickened, befuddled mess of waking up was worse this morning, compounded by the taste of what could only be the remnants of a dead ferret in my mouth and a hyperactive woodpecker trying to bore a hole into my brain. Through my eyeballs. Stomach churning, I groaned and turned onto my back, an intense feeling of doom seeping into my body as awareness started to really take hold and some sketchy goat memories lit up in a hazy movie reel behind my eyes.

The sheets surrounding me were unfamiliar and I tentatively explored the bed, searching for any other limbs or the hint of having spent the night with another person. But other than my warm little cocoon, the rest of the bed was cool and unruffled. Bravely lifting the covers from over my head, I squinted into the brightly lit expanse of Teddy’s bedroom, but there was no sign of anyone. The large house was surprisingly quiet, only the chatter of sparrows outside the window filtering through the fug of my hangover. Haphazardly thrown over the chair by the wardrobe were the clothes that Teddy had been wearing yesterday, the bedroom door was ajar, and the curtains were open.

I held my breath and listened, and it was with some mixed emotions that I deduced I was entirely alone. The instant relief of not having to face Teddy began to dissipate and the sleezy, slimy crawl of mortifying humiliation slithered over my body. He’d run away, and who could blame him? My mind was now replaying the Miss Whiplash seduction trainwreck I’d instigated on the couch, and it was a cringe-inducing horror show. Groaning again, I buried myself back under the covers. How could I have been so stupid and reckless? Thank God Teddy had some sort of moral code about not sleeping with drunken women who hurled themselves at him. Although, to be fair, he’d probably had a lot of practice at deflecting unwanted attention from wanton hussies in his lifetime.

Wallowing in self-pity and regret, I didn’t notice the shadowy presence at first, a dark shape creeping across the window as I sank deeper into the murky recesses of my own mind. But a chirrup and a crash finally shook me back to reality in time to see the fuzzy mottled shape of Aphrodite launching herself from the sill towards the bedside table. In an explosion of claws, paws, and fur, she skidded across the polished wood, sending everything in her path flying including a precariously placed full glass of orange juice, which teetered and spun in her wake before finally spilling its contents over everything.

“Shit! Aph?—”

But I was cut off as she landed on me, sliding over my mouth so that I briefly choked on her belly fluff, before landing in a heap on the pillow. With a happy little feline noise, she began purring and bumping her head against mine in delight.

Shaking her off, I surveyed the carnage she had created. Orange juice was seeping into the well-thumbed pages of a thriller novel, dripping off the table and onto the newly sanded floorboards by the bed. Luckily the bedside lamp had avoided the spillage, but a foil blister packet of paracetamol was swimming about in the orange lake, and a spiral notepad was the final juice-related victim.

“Christ!”

Leaping up from the bed was a bad idea. My brain swished about sloppily, like a cork bobbing in a sea of residual alcohol, making the room spin and my head thump, but the pressing need to tidy up drove me downstairs and into the kitchen to gather cleaning equipment.

Once I’d mopped up the juice and cleaned the table and floor, I placed the thriller novel into the bin bag of crime-scene evidence and decided to buy him a replacement copy, then reached for the pad. While it too was soaked right through, having taken the brunt of the flood, there was the beginnings of a note on the first page, but I could only make out my name and “sorry about” before the handwriting disappeared, the blue ink running in swirling patterns that rendered it entirely indecipherable.

Sitting on the edge of the bed and staring at the soggy paper, I wondered what else he had written. Was he apologising for not sleeping with me? Was he apologising for something else? Something I didn’t remember? Had we actually done anything he needed to apologise for? I remained fully clothed so it was unlikely. I racked my brain, but nothing other than the couch snog and being carried upstairs came to me. Perhaps he was apologising for leaving this morning? That seemed unlikely – rakes infamously snuck out and left women in their bed, didn’t they? So that would be nothing new to him. Perhaps he was saying sorry for inviting me in. Perhaps he regretted having me in his home at all.

If I was being honest, it was quite clear that I had made a total fool of myself with Teddy last night, and he’d realised that he needed to distance himself from me and that it was a mistake to carry on with this friendship in whatever form it had taken. And who could really blame him?

Sensible me – the one who could rationally control her emotions and who could dispassionately deliver bad news to devastated people when they lost their beloved companions – she knew this was for the best. She knew it should never have got this far. Yeah, she was already squirrelling away the stinging hurt and shame, putting it in a box to deal with later (never). But the quiet, squidgy marshmallow part of me, the part that had been bruised before, the part that yearned to be loved and accepted, well, that part imploded, releasing a surge of feelings that I was struggling to place, struck by a painful and suffocating blow to my already fragile heart.

Aphrodite quietly slunk onto my lap, rubbing her head against my hand and tentatively kneading my denim-clad leg. When a solitary tear slid down my cheek, I dashed it away crossly.

“This is no bloody good, is it?”

Stroking the thick fur of the cat, her purr now rumbling like a diesel engine, I felt my inner equilibrium start to stabilise. Slowly, piece by piece, I began to resurrect the armour I usually wore around myself, stiffening my spine and coating myself in prickles. Getting ready to face the world again.

“Let’s take you back to Agnes, shall we?” I said, lifting Aphrodite off my knee and standing up.

Outside, the air was still and already warming with the new morning sunshine, a reminder of the imminent arrival of the summer solstice. In the garden, I made a beeline for the hole in the hedge into Agnes’s overgrown and ramshackle property, catching sight of her in a dressing gown watering some tomato plants on her kitchen windowsill and singing softly to herself.

“Good morning, Agnes. I’ve brought Aphrodite back for you.”

I was greeted by a slightly blank look, devoid of recognition for the briefest of moments, before the light returned to her eyes, and she smiled warmly. “Hannah, so lovely to see you. Thanks for returning the little rascal. I hope she hasn’t been causing trouble?”

I elected not to tell her about the orange juice tsunami incident, just shaking my head with a smile and placing her on the ground by my feet. “No, she’s been her usual angelic self.”

The cat padded off through the kitchen door, tail waving in the air like a flag, and I turned back to look at Agnes, who was trying to lift the watering can higher to reach some hanging baskets whose inhabitants looked very dead indeed.

---