Page 109 of You Float My Boat

‘Anyone?’ I shouted louder.

Of the two of them, I assumed Oz would be home. I’dhopedhe’d be home, because I really needed to talk to someone. Not that he’d been in the talking mood since he stormed off yesterday.

The kitchen was tidy when I walked in, like the type of tidy I left it, so maybe neither of them had been home at all. Dropping my bag on the table, I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and trudged up the stairs while the voices in my head shouted at me.

Idiot.

Scaredy cat.

Shouldn’t have left her.

Idiot.

You would have choked anyway.

Idiot.

She’s perfect.

Idiot.

‘God, shut up!’ I snapped, kicking open the door as I pulled my jumper off. The quicker I got in a hot shower and rinsed away the evening, the quicker I could go to sleep and forget this day ever happened.

Actually, I just wanted to rinse away the part where I’d left her standing, slightly open mouthed and definitely confused. Everything leading up to that moment could stay.

My head was still in the confines of my jumper when I heard a small but purposeful throat clearing. The jumper was yanked off and tossed to the floor, along with quite a few brain cells.

‘I’ve never been in your room before. And I wanted to see for myself.’ Picking up the bottle of aftershave I’d left on my desk, she sniffed it. ‘I like it. It feels like you.’

Well, this was new. I’d never hallucinated a person before.

Bollocks. Maybe it was the voices. It had to be their work.

I squeezed my eyes tight, then opened them.

Nope. It was still there. Maybe I didn’t squeeze them hard enough. Next I tried jamming my fists into my eye sockets and giving them a good rub, but that didn’t make a difference either. Unless you counted the stars I was seeing along with the hallucination of Violet.

This Violet, dressed in trackpants and a hoodie, wasmyViolet. Not the Violet I’d left at her door, the one who looked like she could break me.

‘Charlie, what are you doing?’ the hallucination asked, while I stood there having some kind of blinking fit in case that might jumpstart my brain into working again. ‘Charlie?’

‘Look.’ I said to hallucination Violet, ‘I just left you at your door. There’s no way you got here before me.’

‘I got an Uber and I have a key.’ She held her fistout and uncurled it. Indeed there was a key lying in the centre.

‘But –’

‘I’m not an hallucination.’

Did I say that out loud?

I sat down on the bed, ‘Okay, if you’re real, what did I give you for Valentine’s Day?’

She smiled softly, so softly it made my chest ache. It made me want to sprint back to St Anne’s, take back the peck on the lips and go with my original plan of dragging her inside her room, locking the door and only surfacing for air and snacks. ‘Twenty-one cupcakes asking me to be your Valentine.’

Not snacks. We’d live on the cupcakes.

It had been a stupid question, anyway. The voices would know. But okay … I’d play their game.

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