Page 39 of Second Chances at the Board Game Café

He had fantasised about this: working with Taylor, upcycling a garment together. He’d imagined it would be like that famous scene in Ghost, only with a sewing machine instead of a potter’s wheel.

He hadn’t envisaged standing in her lounge wielding an iron, trying to cajole a strange and now sticky piece of webbing onto the back of the dragon shape he’d cut out from the pillowcase. The webbing seemed to have a will of its own and was determined to stick to the bottom of the iron, rather than the fabric.

Taylor stood, watching his efforts, a big grin on her face. ‘There! You’ve done it!’

She said it as if he was five years old and had just managed to tie his own shoelaces, but Harry didn’t mind. He felt rather proud of himself.

‘Now you need to cut it out again,’ she said, ‘only right up to the edges of the dragon this time.’

He perched on the sofa again and began to snip. Taylor went to her sewing table in the window and the machine began to whirr. She’d plugged it into an extension cord now, but he’d remind her again to ask the landlord to get the electrics checked. He didn’t like to think of her and her little boy living in a house that wasn’t safe.

The dragon was a fiddly beast to cut out, with its spines and its teeth and the claws on its feet. He glanced at his watch. It was a working-from-home day, not a day off, and he ought to be finishing the Granger accounts. It was one thing popping out for a coffee; quite another to be sitting on the sofa of the woman he admired, cutting a dragon out of an old pillowcase. Harry always had been a stickler for following the rules, in life as well as in board games, so this really did not sit well with him, but he would make up for the hours he missed this evening, even if it meant giving Michael Portillo a miss.

‘Good job,’ said Taylor when he’d finished the cutting out. ‘Now would you like to spray it, or should I?’

She held out the bottle of hairspray.

‘I’ll hold it, you spray,’ said Harry.

He held out the dragon for her and she sprayed around the edges. Chemical clouds filled the air and Harry began to cough. It was a pleasant enough smell – apples, he thought – but it irritated his lungs. Taylor wafted the air around him with her hands.

When he stopped coughing, she instructed him to iron the shirt, paying special attention to the back of the garment where the dragon would be placed.

‘Strictly speaking,’ she said, ‘we should have washed both the shirt and the pillowcase first, because fabrics sometimes shrink a little when they’re first washed and if we stitch the dragon to the shirt and he shrinks but the shirt doesn’t, the fabric will pucker. But I’m pretty sure they’ve both been washed before – they’re in good condition, but they don’t look brand new, do they? So they’ll probably be fine.’

Harry nodded. This whole upcycling business was more complicated than he thought. ‘I hope so. I have someone in mind for this shirt.’

‘Oh?’

‘A friend who’s into Dungeons and Dragons.’ He shouldn’t have said that; she’d think he was geeky by association.

‘Perfect. Is it the right size?’

‘Yes, I think it’ll fit. I’ll have to persuade him to come along to the fashion show.’

Taylor frowned, the worry lines wrinkling her forehead. She still looked lovely though. ‘Do you think people will come? I’m scared it’ll be a total flop. Or that people will come, but they won’t like the garments.’

He wanted to put his arms around her, to give her a big hug. Instead he said, ‘It’ll be brilliant, Taylor. With you at the helm, the garments are bound to be wonderful and everyone will love them. And you’ve got Kate doing the marketing. You’re in safe hands there.’

He hoped he was right, but the board game café launch had been a success, and he’d heard that huge numbers of people had attended that Scrabble Festival in Hebbleswick, thanks to Kate promoting it everywhere.

‘Hope so.’ Taylor held up crossed fingers, then glanced at her watch. ‘Oh no. I didn’t realise the time.’

Harry’s heart sank a little. ‘Do you need me to go?’

‘No, let’s finish what we’ve started, but I can’t be too much longer.’

He hadn’t realised how late it was either; the time had whizzed by.

She helped him position the dragon on the back of the shirt, pinning it in place. As they worked, he marvelled at how soft her hands looked, how perfectly shaped her fingers. He tried to focus on what she was saying – something about zigzag stitches – but all he could think about was what it might feel like if those fingers were touching him. Once her hand brushed lightly against his as she smoothed out the dragon’s tail and popped a pin in, and Harry gave an involuntary gasp, so loud he was sure she’d have heard. But if she did, she didn’t react. She was completely focused on getting the dragon positioned perfectly.

When the pins were all in place, she held up the shirt for him to see. ‘What do you think?’

‘Amazing,’ he said.

She glanced at her watch again.

He could see she was anxious and, much as he would have liked to prolong his visit, he didn’t want to cause her any stress.