Page 39 of Confessions of a Christmasholic

How could she have got their friendship so wrong? Or what had she done to make Layla treat her this way? If she knew, she could sort it out and try to make amends. When she’d sent Layla the money, she’d believed their bond was as tight as before, and Layla would pay her back in a week, maybe two. Months later, she was broke, living in a stranger’s house, and Layla was living it up.

InMauritius.

She’d trusted Layla and it was a trust built up over a lifetime, blocks of love and time and faith built into what she thought was an impenetrable wall. No outside forces, she believed, could destroy them. She hadn’t expected the danger to be on the inside.

Furious, Sutton swiped the bag of sugar and the icing bag off the counter and they both exploded, sending a cloud of sugar into the air and splattering yellow blobs of sticky icing over the floor and up the cupboard doors.

Shit. Fuck. Damn.

So Sutton did the only thing she could. She burst into tears.

‘Fuck me,’ Gus said from the doorway.

Well, she wanted to, but not right now, thanks.

ChapterNine

Sutton looked up from her position on the floor and watched Gus drop to his haunches, resting his forearm on his thigh. He smelled of fresh air and snow, of coffee and Christmas. She wanted nothing more than to curl up into his arms, just like Felix did when he was trying to con her into making pancakes the other day. She wanted to rest in the arms of someone stronger than her, who had, she assumed, his shit together. A more adultier adult than her.

This…this eruption had been building up for weeks now, months. She’d been tamping down her emotion, trying to be logical and reasonable, trying to keep her shit together. She’d needed to, because she needed to be sharp, sensible,together.She instinctively knew she had to keep her emotions locked in so she didn’t sink into despair, and to keep herself from making stupid decisions because she was broke, tired and overwhelmed. But the combination of feeling completely safe for the first time in many weeks, being happy and seeing those photos was the emotional equivalent of flipping open her pressure relief valve and allowing all the steam to escape.

She looked around and didn’t see Moira. Gus picked a strand of hair off her sticky cheek and hooked it behind her ear while she dragged her sleeve across her snotty nose and grimaced. She was stickyandsnotty. Marvellous.

‘Good God, Alsop, what the hell did you do to my kitchen?’ Gus asked, but his voice was super-gentle, the audio equivalent of a warm flannel.

She sniffed and rubbed her wet eyes with the back of her hands. ‘The cookie monster came in and puked everywhere.’

‘I can tell,’ he replied, a small smile on his face. ‘Was it his idea to make enough biscuits to feed the county?’

Yeah, she’d thought she’d tripled the ingredients but maybe she’d nine-d it. Nine-d it? Was that even maths?

Gus pulled her to her feet and reached for a roll of kitchen towel. He tore off a couple of sheets and handed them to her and she wiped her eyes. She grimaced at the streaks of mascara on the paper.

‘Where are my kids? Are they in a sugar coma somewhere?’ Gus asked, picking up the crumpled bag of yellow icing from the floor. He held it by the edge and dumped it straight in the bin.

She had to think for a minute. They were in the TV room, watching the pig program with a dog and a pig. ‘The cookie monster ate them,’ she quipped, feeling embarrassed at him finding her in an emotional mess and trying to cover it with humour. She caught the concern in his eyes, sighed and told him they were watching TV. She glanced at the clock on the wall, happy to see her emotional meltdown had been only ten minutes long. It felt like hours.

‘Let me go check on them and I’ll be back,’ he told her, taking huge steps to avoid tracking sugar and yellow bobs of icing out of the kitchen. Sutton looked around at the devastation and sucked in a sob. There were baking bowls and cookie trays piled up in the sink, bowls of icing on the island, all the wooden spoons she could find, and flour and sugar coated every surface with a fine layer of white. Tiny handprints and fingerprints, in pink, blue, red, green and purple icing were everywhere.

Every. Where.

Holy shit. The kitchen would take hours to clean up.

And Gus hated this type of mess. He liked things to be neat, tidy and clean, but how could anyone bake and ice biscuits with four-year-old twins without making a mess? Well, making a smaller batch of biscuits and maybe sticking to just a couple of colours of icing might’ve been a sensible option.

Sutton placed the icing bags in a row, picked up a snowman biscuit and bit off its head. Damn, even with icing it still tasted like bicarbonate of soda. They were, to put it mildly, vile.

She heard the sound of big footsteps behind her and turned to face Gus, who stood in the doorway to the kitchen, his eyebrows arched. He looked, she admitted, a little shell-shocked.

‘Are the kids okay?’

‘Sticky and messy but fine,’ he replied. ‘You didn’t tell me Moira was here.’

Sutton wrinkled her nose. Right, she’d bought mistletoe. She recalled Moira trying to comfort her, asking her how she could help. Sutton responded by pushing her arm off her shoulders and telling her to leave her alone. Great, now it was her turn to say sorry for being an idiot.

‘She must think I’m a madwoman,’ she muttered. ‘I’ll go in and apologise.’

‘She’s on her way out, and she’s taking the twins with her for an impromptu sleepover,’ Gus explained. ‘She said you need a hot bath and an enormous glass of wine, and I am to make sure you get both.’

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