Page 57 of Lovers in Lockdown

Honey blinks up at me with doleful eyes and blinks sleepily. ‘You feel like home to me,’ she whispers, her breath sweeping across my chest and spreading warmth through my veins.

And with those six words, I’m done for. My heart is hers. Completely. Unbreakably. Unconditionally.

No matter where I am in the world, she’s it for me. Even if I can’t have her, she’s my one. She willalwaysbe my one.

‘Me too,’ I brush my lips across her forehead. ‘The only home I’ve ever known.’

But she’s already asleep, her chest rising and falling with steady breaths, her eyelids fluttering like fairy wings as she dreams. Of me, I hope, since all I ever dream about is her.

My own eyes are growing heavy, sleep slowly winding its hands around me and pulling me under, when my phone dings quietly with an incoming text message. A text message that shatters my world into billions of tiny pieces, like glass shards that fall like debris and pierce my aching heart.

It’s time for me to go.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Honey

He’s gone.

Didn’t even say goodbye, just left while I was sleeping. Didn’t leave a note either. Left it for me to work out when I woke up and he wasn’t there. Figured he’d nipped to the shops, but when three hours passed with no sign of him, I started to worry. And then I saw the news that China had reopened its borders and when twelve hours came and went withstillno word, I put two and two together.

He’s gone.

Snuck out in the middle of the night like I’m some kind of cheap one night stand. He didn’t leave an address, didn’t even leave his phone number, so I have no way of contacting him. And I’m far too proud to ask my brother to give me Noah’s number. If he doesn’t want me,fine,then I don’t like him.

Except I do.

Except I more than do.

Except I’m the idiot who fell in love with a man I knew all along saw me as just a way of killing time. A way to make lockdown just that little bit less boring. But I ignored it. Convinced myself that I meant more than just an easy fuck, thought I saw something in his eyes that said he felt the same for me as I do for him.

God, I’m so stupid.

Ellie sits beside me, dabbing my wet cheeks with a sheet of tissue. She insisted on coming over after I’d sobbed to her down the phone after realising that Noah wasn’t coming home, said she didn’t give a fuck about social distancing when her best friend’s heart is breaking. ‘Good fucking riddance to him, I say,’ she says, holding tissue to my nose and indicating for me to blow. I do.

‘I need cake,’ I sniffle.

‘We can get you cake,’ Ellie nods.

‘And fries.’

‘Okay,’ she nods again, ‘and fries.’

‘And pizza.’

‘Roger that,’ She takes out her phone and starts typing out a list. ‘Cake, fries and pizza. Want anything else? A curry, maybe, or a Chinese?

‘No!’ my eyes well up for the seventeenth time in an hour. ‘I never want Chinese food again. Ever.’

Her eyes widen in panic as she realises her blunder, ‘Oh shit, Honey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to -’

‘It’s fine,’ I sniff hard and bury my face in her lap. She runs her fingers through my hair soothingly and I sob on her knees, violent sobs that wrench through my body until I’m struggling for air.

‘Right, plan of action. First thing’s first, you’re going to stop crying,’ she pushes me into a sitting position, ’because he’s an idiot who doesn’t deserve your tears. Plus, you’re getting my legs wet and it’s making me itch.’

I wipe away the tears with the back of my hand and nod.

‘Then we’re going to order as much junk food as we can afford, put on some shitty reality TV and gorge ourselves until you’re over that son of a bitch, sound good?’

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