Free The Accidental Family by Rowan Coleman Page B

was very nervous—this was my moment of truth. I decided to have a drink for Dutch courage, and another one and another one. Four pints of cider on an empty stomach while I was waiting for the right moment, the moment when I felt brave and handsome enough to talk to her. Only, if it ever came, it was lost somewhere between being petrified and incoherent and utterly drunk. I passed out on a bench. When I woke up the party was over, my head was banging like a drum, and I hadn’t said two words to the girl I loved.” Sophie watched as Louis’s gaze slipped from her face, looking instead into his past. “God, I was gutted, I missed my moment, I’d blown it. I realized I’d have to live the rest of my life without her. Eventually I decided to walk home, and out of habit I suppose I took a detour past her house, probably to get one last look at her window. Only, when I turned down her road, she was there sitting on the wall outside her house, smoking a cigarette.
    “ ‘You took your time,’ she said as I walked up to her, really, really hoping I wasn’t going to throw up again. ‘I’ve been waiting here all night, I was just about to go in before my mum and dad realize there are pillows under my quilt and not me.’ “
    Louis grinned to himself. “I was all over the place, not entirely sure I wasn’t still on that bench and dreaming. So I asked her, ‘How did you know I was going to come?’ And she goes all cool as a cucumber. ‘You always walk home past my house, I didn’t suppose tonight would be any different. Never once knocked on my door though, so I thought I’d better sit out here waiting for you or else you’d never get round to asking me out.’
    “ ‘You could always have asked me out,’ I said, because I was a kid and a bit of an idiot.
    “And she hopped off the wall and wound her arm around my neck and said, ‘I’m the girl, girls don’t make the first move.’ And then she kissed me, and we stayed like that, necking on her front wall, until the sun came up.”
    Sophie steeled herself against the disappointment she felt at knowing that Louis had ever spent hours kissing anyone but her, but it was useless, the jealousy swept through like a fire through kindling. She knew he had a past, of course he did, he’d been married to Carrie, but the idea of him ever loving anyone else the way he loved her, even some fifteen-year-old decades ago, hurt her almost more than she could bear.
    “For that whole summer we were inseparable,” Louis went on. “We spent every day together, just us two. I didn’t see my mates for weeks. It was an amazing time, it was like …it was like …”
    “A wonderful dream you didn’t want to wake up from?” Sophie asked him.
    Louis nodded. “Yes, except that I had to. She left, or rather her family left, almost overnight. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know a thing about it.”
    “Even though you saw her every day.”
    “Toward the end of the holiday she didn’t want to see me as much, lost interest in me, I suppose. When I phoned her she was never in. And I never saw her in town anymore. None of her friends seemed to know what she was up to. Then I walked past her house one morning, hoping she’d come out, and it had a Sold sign outside it. It was already empty, they’d gone. I knocked on a neighbor’s door and she told me Wendy’s dad had got a new job up north. He’d moved them all in one weekend, just like that. I never heard from her again.”
    “Never?” Sophie asked him.
    “Nope.” Louis shook his head. “I was heartbroken, destroyed, it took me ages to get over her, I suppose because I really thought we were soul mates …”
    “Soul mates?” Sophie asked. She hoped that Louis was her soul mate, but if he’d already had one in his lifetime she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure exactly how many soul mates a person could encounter in one life, but she got the feeling that if it was more than one, thenthe whole concept was rather less