He'll have to break all the rules to keep her, but first she has to break just one and let him in...
It's taken four years, but Anna Fray has finally put the past behind her. Mostly. She fills her days working in a bar and her nights watching bad ro...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
After New Years Eve, and the meeting with Aslo, January passed by cold and dreary, with February nipping at its heels with bitterly cold fangs. Before long, the bar had been decked to the nines for the Bloody Valentine Ball which Kelly threw each year. A homage to every epic rock ballad or alternative serenade throughout the ages. It was the perfect excuse for the house band to play amped up covers of the love songs they secretly adored.
It had been a welcome distraction from the absence I felt.
I wrestled with my coat and juggled the bag of gifts I'd finally remembered to bring home. The Ball tonight had been the climax to a busy week at the bar. One that had seen Valentines Day come and go and with it a handful of gag gifts given to me throughout the week.
Nightmare chirped as I flopped onto the sofa and emptied the bag onto the coffee table in front of the sofa. The thumb sized vibrator Callum had bought both me and Emma, buzzed and bounced across the wooden surface.
I grinned as I reached to switch it off and remembered the way Callum had cackled at Emma's scarlet face when she opened the present.
Callum's gift hadn't been the only crude present. Kelly, too, had flashed a wicked smile as she handed over a packet of Love Hearts, each one customised with crude obscenities in place of the usual sweet phrases.
I plucked the sweets from the pile and smirked at the annotation before savouring the sweet and sour sherbet taste.
As I flicked on the TV to some late night re-run of an American sitcom, I scanned over the cards that had been snuck into my coat pocket. Most were jokey cards, like the Galentine's one from Emma, but another had been marked from a mystery admirer. The calligraphic question mark and 'guess who' had piqued my attention at first, but by the look Keiran had been giving me all night, I could guess fairly easily who it had come from. And knew all too well who I had hoped it had been dropped off by.
It was the same person I'd been thinking of when Emma joined me at the bar at the end of the shift. My elbows had been propped against the stainless steel while my finger swirled through the bowl of Skittles, hunting down the last green one I'd spied earlier. The sugary shells had clinked against the ceramic, as my finger meandered through the sea of red, purple and orange.
"I know it's super cheesy," she'd said. "But I thought he might have come by today. You know like one of those romantic moments in the movies when the guy comes to sweep the girl off her feet."
I'd stopped looking for the green Skittle as soon as she'd said it, because, as I looked down at the bowl I'd been snacking from, and acknowledged the disappointment I'd been ignoring all week, I realised that my sub-conscious had been thinking the same thing. It was why Aslo's words 'gone away for a while' had made me feel the way they did, and why my heart skipped a beat every time the door rang out across the bar. Not out of fear, like it used to, but out of hope, excitement. Years of having my brain addled by romantic comedies had left me thinking that maybe, just maybe, he'd walk through the door at the bar.
