Page 34 of It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas
‘Phew. Okay, let me just grab a towel from the boot and give this seat a wipe…’
He shrugged off his coat and chucked it on the back seat as he set to work on absorbing the turkey juices, revealing long, firm arms contained neatly in a light grey fitted cardigan over the top of a faded black T-shirt. The cardigan-wearing guys at work usually gave me the ick – their ironic charity-shop knitwear looked so contrived, not to mention itchy – but Tom’s cardigan looked soft and practical, as if he’d chosen it for how it felt rather than how it looked. Which made it look all the more excellent. I swallowed the excess saliva that had pooled in my mouth as he tossed the towel into the footwell of the backseat.
‘Right, all done. Your carriage awaits.’
I sank into the luxurious passenger seat, which was still slightly damp with carcass moisture, though I couldn’t bear to tell him that.
‘You know, if someone had told me earlier today that I’d be driving Amelia – sorry, Mally – Allister round to my mum’s, I wouldn’t have believed them.’
‘If someone had told me I’d be sat in a car with Tom Brinton tonight, the words “fuck the turkey” ringing in my ears, I wouldn’t have believed them either.’
He turned to me briefly and grinned with his whole face before turning his attention back to the road. ‘So, what brings you back to Scarnbrook?’
I’d rehearsed an answer for this precise question, but his smile had rendered my brain momentarily useless. I issued a placeholder response to buy me some time.
‘Oh God. It’s a long story.’
‘We’ve got time – my mum’s place is the far side of Scarnbrook. It’s lucky I bumped into you – I normally do her shopping at Morrison’s, but she prefers the Tesco turkeys.’
‘Blimey, where to start. Okay, so I’d usually be at work in London next week, but they’ve given us all an extra week off…’
‘Woah, that’s generous. Where do you work?’
‘Oh, the same place as Elle, actually. It’s—’
‘You work atThe Helix?!’
Explaining my way out of this was going to be way harder than I thought.
‘Yep. You still follow Elle’s movements, then?’
‘It’s hard not to when she’s constantly posting about her high-flying life on social media.’
‘I had no idea she was still in touch with everyone here.’
Elle and I never discussed any of our old schoolmates in Scarnbrook. I’d presumed she’d lost touch with everyone, just like I had.
‘Well, it’s not like she interacts with any of us or anything, but let’s just say she appears to be very keen for everyone to know how successful she is.’
Ha, that sounded like Elle.
‘Sheispretty successful, to be fair.’
‘So are you. But I don’t see you plastering endless photos of your London lifestyle online.’
‘I’m not really on social media.’ I left out the part where I still checked Billy’s Instagram page seventeen times a day.
‘I keep thinking about quitting, myself. Social media has, well, broken the world a bit, hasn’t it?’
My brain lit up and I beamed at him. ‘Omigod yes. Social media is like forbidden fruit; it tastes good to begin with, but ultimately unleashes a torrent of worms from the rotten core that appear to be hellbent on devouring us all.’
‘Yup. But, unlike you, I guess I couldn’t resist taking a deep bite of that tempting apple.’ He smiled as he watched the road, and completely involuntarily I felt myself quiver.Oh dear.
‘Have you ever thought about deleting your accounts?’ I asked.
‘I have, but TikTok and Instagram have been game-changers at work. Our content has really helped to get our name out there. Anyway, we’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent – you were about to tell me why you’re back in Scarnbrook?’
‘Oh. Right. Well, I’ve been meaning to come back for a while, but it never seemed to work out. But with this extra time off work and no other plans it kind of felt like it was finally the right time, you know?’
