AXEL
‘I’m not sure I like this new you…’
Theo hands me a whisky and I grimace before knocking it back in one.
‘I never liked me in the first place,’ I mutter. ‘About time you caught up.’
‘I meant your sudden taste for my whisky.’
‘You shoved it my way yesterday.’
‘And you usually turn it down.’
‘Yeah, well, beer wasn’t gonna cut it then, and it sure as shit ain’t gonna cut it now.’
I move to his swanky-arse bar, pour another, while he sinks into his even-swankier sofa. I came here straight from Taylor’s, and I’m starting to think I would’ve been better off going home… or hitting a boxing ring.
This place ain’t even a piece of me. Worth a mint, sure, but I’d take my warehouse conversion on the docks over his chrome-and-glass city showroom any day.
And honestly, if it weren’t for Lottie’s toys spilling out of abasket, her drawings slapped on the glossy black fridge, a tiara-adorned fern, you’d never know he had a wife and kid.
But it’s temporary. Not their ‘forever home’, as Sadie calls it. That’s the house in Mayfair they’re gutting. It’s got the garden, the parks, the schools. And they still have the beach house whenever Lottie wants the sea. Every angle covered.
Would Tay have wanted that?
A house with a garden.
Somewhere leafy and quiet.
An escape by the sea. In the country.
I can picture her in every one. Picturethem.Taylor and a dark-haired kid. Happy. Smiling.
And the loss of it – of something that never even existed,ourchild – has my fist landing against the bar before I hit the floor.
It makes no fucking sense.
Unless somewhere in the last two months, I started to care. Started to want. Started to imagine something more.
And more what exactly?
We agreed on a baby.
That’s it.
There was never room formore.
I was never gonna rain on Taylor’s single-mum parade just because I caught feelings I wasn’t supposed to. For a kid I never wanted, and we haven’t even made yet.
‘I take it you had something to do with it.’
Theo’s question hits as hard as everything else in my head.
And I don’t answer. I don’t need to. This is Theo. Like Tay, heknowsme.
Knows the blood under my skin. The violence wired into my bones. The fact that when pushed, I don’t bend; I break things. People, included.
Which is why she never should’ve asked me in the first place,Goddammit.
