The truth was that more than a decade after escaping my parents’ house, I still yearned for the same thing I’d wanted when I’d lived with them in North Manchester—a normal life, a normal family.
But normal girls didn’t exactly run in my circles.
And the few ones I’d manage to encounter seemed more interested in the flash time I could give them than settling down into a nice, quiet life with a rough footballer.
So, yeah, sleep continued to be something I struggled with—until I invited an American who had no clue who I was into my bed.
That night, I fell asleep with Kayla in my arms. Easily. Without even having to pop one of the pills the football club’s doctor had prescribed me.
And this sleep was way better than the usual drug-induced blackness. Peaceful, deep, and filled with dreams of my sexy American riding on top of me, her hips undulating as I played with her heavy breasts.
So, no, I wasn’t surprised to wake up the next morning to find my manhood at full stand. But I was surprised to find my arms empty.
My heart seized, and I immediately rolled my head to see if she’d migrated to the other side of the bed during the night—maybe gotten under the covers like she’d been threatening to do before we fell asleep.
Fuck me, though. There was nothing but white bed linens and the few pillows I hadn’t thrown to the ground last night.
Kayla, the woman who had been responsible for my first non-drug-induced good night of sleep ever, was gone. Just gone.
Or maybe...
I quickly sat up to direct my hopeful gaze toward the open door of the WC, where she’d left her smaller rolling suitcase last night.
But, yeah, that bag was gone, too.
I cursed. She’d done a runner, then. And I couldn’t even blame her.
All that pillow talk last night…
Me confessing my fight history and Johnny-no-mates status before I insisted on snuggling with her—y’know, right after I refused to let her get under the covers.
Yeah, I’d come off like a proper nutter, hadn’t I?
Good job, Atwater,me Dad sneered inside my head.
Was it any wonder she’d run off the first chance she?—
The bedroom door suddenly flew open, interrupting my self-pity fest.
“Oh, yay, you’re up! Sorry for the door bang. My hands are totally full….”
All of a sudden, Kayla was noisily entering the room with a cardboard cup holder filled with two coffees in one hand and a bag with the name of a pâtisserie written on it in refined blue letters in the other.
I blinked at her, my heart draining the fear and refilling with relief. “I thought you’d done a runner.”
“Oh, yeah, I can see how you’d think that. I totally should have left you a note.” She guiltily shifted her eyes away from mine. “But I was afraid they’d cancel my hotel reservation, so I dashed over there with my bag to check in super-early this morning. Then I got us some croissants on the way back—or I guess I’m supposed to saycroissant.”
She set the bag and the coffees down on the dresser underneath the flatscreen TV with a little laugh. “Anyway, it took forever to find coffee because every place I went acted like they didn’t even understand the concept of a to-go cup.Thenthere were these two guys with cameras outside the front entrance of your hotel’s lobby.”
She shook her head and tore the tops off two sugar packets. “They were asking me all these questions in French? Only thing I understood was ‘What’s your name?’ And that’s only because it’s all over my French phrasebook.”
My chest froze. Paparazzi. She was talking about a couple of paparazzi, hanging around outside the hotel. Possibly even following up on the mystery woman plane story.
“What did you say to ’em?” I asked her with my heart in my throat.
“Well, of course, I told them my name was Kasha—like, from sasha x kasha, that American sister singing act?f” She grinned as she poured the sugar into one of the cups of coffee. “I mean, they just assumed I had to be famous. Why? Because I’m a Black woman walking into the front entrance of an expensive hotel?”
Another wave of relief crashed through me, sagging my chest. I was almost grateful to American racism for skewing Kayla's automatic assumptions about the sudden interest from the French press.
