‘Well,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘I guess you don’t know everything about me.’
That was a warning shot, he knew. Yet still he wasn’t satisfied. ‘On what day was it that you liked me?’
‘Does it matter?’ Annie was on the move again back to the table.
‘Seriously, when?’ This time it was insistent. He hated himself for it.
Their eyes locked. Annie’s were fierce. ‘Right before you met Paisley,’ she blurted. ‘At the beginning of third year, okay? Happy now?’
She left him standing there, absorbing her words. Not just the words.The tone. Her voice had cracked. She was upset, and she was cross.
He watched her rejoin the others. She looked so incredibly tired all of a sudden.Shit!
He thought of his mum on Friday, still reeling from the news he’d split with Paisley, and telling him not to go upsetting Annie, like she’d instinctively known he somehow would.
Mournfully, he took his seat and listened to Anjali and Kit enthusing about their childhood pets like they were the only two people in the world.
Annie didn’t meet his eyes once, not until they had skipped dessert, said their goodbyes to their oblivious, absorbed dates and made their way silently up the blustery slope, discovering the lights in the bookshop still ablaze when they got there and Jowan dozing with Aldous on his lap by the fire, no sign of anyone else.
‘You’re still here?’ Harri asked him when he jumped awake, and Aldous let out a sharp bark of alarm.
Jowan told them in a whisper how they’d waited all evening for officer Zoë to ring them back with an update, now that they knew the man’s name. ‘But nobody’s looking for him.’
‘No one?’ Annie said, moving closer.
‘There’s no missing person’s report. He hasn’t gone AWOL from a care home or ward, nothing. He doesn’t seem to be from anywhere. And he’s got no ID on him, so,’ Jowan shrugged, ‘he’s being picked up by Social Services in the morning.’
Harri looked around, suddenly suspicious. ‘Where’s he now?’
Jowan tipped his head towards Harri’s bedroom door.
‘He’s in my bed?’
‘Come on, Aldous,’ Jowan said, still whispering. ‘We’ll leave you to it. Mr Sabine’s had his dinner and his antibiotics and is fast asleep after a bath. You’ll have to listen for him waking…’
Harri didn’t know how to baby-sit a grown adult. ‘Do I… go in there with him? Watch him?’
‘No, no, you two get some sleep, an’ keep an ear out for the door in the morning.’
Harri was a few steps ahead. He’d have to sleep out here on the armchair. And after weeks spent sleeping on the couch at Paisley’s. He was ashamed to recognise that he felt sorry for himself. This evening was doing nothing for his sense of selflessness.
Jowan, with Aldous at his heels, bobbed out the door and was gone. Harri thought he might have seen a smirk at the corners of his mouth, and couldn’t account for it until Annie spoke.
‘You’re sharing with me, then?’
Harri stared back blankly.
‘There’s only one bed now,’ Annie said, matter of factly. ‘You’ll freeze to death sleeping in the shop.’
‘Uh…’ He ran through how awful he’d been this evening, showing off how well he knew his friend, trying to spite Kit, probably making Anjali feel rotten, and then he’d pushed and pushed for the grim details about Annie liking him once upon a time when they were basically kids.
‘You comin’?’ Annie was at the foot of the stairs.
Harri meekly followed.
Tucked up, two wide-eyed faces peeped over white covers in the dark, and four hands clutched at the edge of the duvet, as they lay ruminating, listening to the creaking in the rafters as the wind buffeted the Borrow-A-Bookshop.
Annie’s annoyance had ebbed away ages ago. She wasn’t the sort to hold a grudge. Besides hadn’t Harri been through a lot recently? She should have known a date was too much for him to handle, should have put her foot down and protected him. He wasn’t ready to be out there again.
