Page 65 of The Plot Twist

It was the sound of running water which woke Allie the next morning. For a moment she lay in bed and wondered what was happening. She couldn’t normally hear the people in the flat above her but wondered if it was the sound of their shower that had woken her. She stretched and hit her hand on the smooth metal bed frame which gave her pause for thought; she didn’t have a metal bed frame, hers was wood. Slowly she rolled onto her side and eyed the alarm clock that she kept by the side of her bed, except it wasn’t there. Finally deciding that she really needed to accept the fact that she hadn’t slept in her own bed last night, she sat up, pulled her hair into a messy bun and wrapped her arms around her knees.

She’d been here before, not metaphorically speaking, but actually, really, physically speaking. Here being Will’s flat. And the sound she had been woken by was presumably Will doing something wonderfully domestic, like the washing up, hopefully while the kettle boiled. Allie knew that last night hadn’t gone down inentirelythe way that she had promised Jess it would, but she was hopeful, in the way that all Brits tend to jingoistically believe, that a good cup of tea would fix it all. She upped her wishfulness that the noise she could hear was in fact that kettle boiling.

A few minutes passed, during which Allie rehearsed both the conversation she ought to be having with Will, but also the arse-covering one she would inevitably have to have with Jess. She was just in the middle of an impassioned defence of her actions when the door creaked slowly open and Will’s head appeared around it, his face immediately brightening when he saw that Allie was awake. Bringing two cups with him he nudged the door open further and came in. ‘I hope I didn’t wake you.’ He put the cups down on the bedside table and looked down at her.

‘I love your hair pulled up like that. You’ve got that sleepy hot girl look going on.’ He groaned, leaning over her. ‘You have no idea what you do to me.’ He put his hand behind her neck, teasing the tendrils of hair that she had missed and pulled her gently towards him. He was going for a kiss but Allie ducked just at the last minute and he ended up kissing her hairline.

He laughed as she said, ‘I’m not sure I smell so hot.’

‘Here.’ He picked up one of the cups and handed it to her, sitting down on the bed as he did so. ‘I know you prefer tea but you need to try this coffee I picked up when I was away.’

Allie took the cup and watched him, chewing her lip as she did so, wanting to savour both the sensation of being handed a cup of coffee in bed, and the fact it had been handed to her by this excessively good-looking guy who really seemed to be into her. Because she was fairly sure he wouldn’t be quite so into her when she finally confessed everything Jess told her that she needed to confess. She looked down at his hand, where it rested near her leg. Her eyes ran up his arm, seeing the tattoo, which she now knew the whole extent of. She blushed at the memories and cleared her throat.

‘Will, why didn’t you tell me you owned the company?’ She nudged her own inevitable revelations a further five minutes down the line.

Will looked at her sharply. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Well no. But I feel like you let me believe you were waitstaff…’ She trailed off not entirely clear on why she was pursuing this avenue of questioning right now.

‘And that matters because?’

‘It doesn’t. I just, well I guess it feels a bit strange to me that you wouldn’t tell me.’

Will leaned heavily back against the headboard. ‘Don’t tell me, this makes me seem pretty closed off, right?’

Allie gave him a good dose of side eye and then laughed. ‘Sounds like you’ve heard that one before.’

‘Yes, from my ex. Apparently I can come across as not very open. Which makes it kind of ironic that when I tried to be open with her and talk about how the relationship might not be working, she didn’t want to hear it and dumped me before I could say anything substantial.’

Allie bit back a giggle.

‘And before that…’

‘Wait,’ Allie put a hand on his arm, ‘we’re about to enjoy an extended trip through your relationship history? I need to get comfy for this.’ She grinned at him.

‘Enjoy?’

‘Oh hell yeah. I’m going to fully enjoy this. Especially now I know that you find it hard to be open about things.’

‘Well, that’s because my ex…’

‘The one we were just discussing?’

‘No, the one before that one.’

‘Am I going to need a paper and pen to keep tabs?’

‘Very funny.’ He leaned in and nipped her neck, which made her want to abandon all conversation and drag him horizontal again. ‘My ex,’ he began again, ‘turned out to be not the nicest of people. I talked to her a lot about the business when we were setting up. Which she then turned round and used against me by sleeping with one of our key competitors.’

‘No!’ Allie exclaimed.

‘Yup,’ Will said grimly, ‘and I didn’t know for ages, then it all came out when she dumped me because she realised we weren’t going to secure the next level of funding we needed and so therefore I wasn’t going to be the rich boyfriend she was after.’

Allie dropped her smart-arse responses. ‘I’m sorry, Will, that’s really horrible.’

‘Yeah, it wasn’t great. And my business partner thought a lot of it was my fault for being so trusting, and he was probably right. And so after that I kept my cards close to my chest, which was what my last girlfriend didn’t like. Oh, and the tattoo.’

‘She didn’t like your tattoo??’ Allie asked in astonishment, running her fingers up the thing of beauty that was inked up Will’s bicep.

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