by Emlyn Rees
‘People can fall in love more than once,’ Michael’s dad had once told him, as part of his own apology, on the day that he’d left.
Michael had despised him for his selfishness at the time, but he now hoped his dad had been right. He hoped his dad was still in love and he hoped his mum was, too – even if they were both now in love with different people. Hope, that’s all he had, but maybe that’s all there was – hope that things would work out for the best.
That kiss, the real kiss, the one that Taylor had given him inside the mine, under the shimmering lights of their own private sky, that was what Michael would remember her for. He still hoped that kiss really had come from her heart. Not like the other kiss, hot with anger, embittered by the poison of vengeance, outside the door of the Thorne house, after he and Taylor had spied on Elliot and Kellie up in the woods.
Michael would keep that first kiss with him instead, because everything else that had happened, and that he’d wanted to happen between himself and Taylor, all their flirting, all their banter, all his hopes of her and him being and staying together, in love and in bed – he no longer knew how much of that had been real, and how much he’d exaggerated to fit with his fantasies. She’d become dreamlike to him already, just like the events of the three days of Christmas.
The further the boat motored out to sea, the smaller it became, and the less real. It soon looked like a plasticine model, set upon a plasticine sea. Michael felt like a giant in comparison, as if he could reach out and pluck the boat and everyone in it from the ocean between his forefinger and thumb. As he stood there, face to the wind, he felt the island shrink around him, like something he’d outgrown. With one step, he thought, he could set foot on St John’s. With another, he’d reach the mainland. He’d overtake the boat and its passengers. He’d leave behind the places he’d grown up in. He’d set out on his own. The world was a big place. He could see that now. He was going to fit into it just fine.
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Epub ISBN: 9781446493908
Version 1.0
Published by Arrow Books 2006
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Copyright © Josie Lloyd & Emlyn Rees 2005
Josie Lloyd & Emlyn Rees have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work.
First published in Great Britain in 2005 by William Heinemann
Arrow Books
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099457831
