Читать книгу Lily Alone: A gripping and emotional drama - Vivien Brown, Vivien Brown - Страница 14

Michael is nice. More than nice. Michael is handsome, gorgeous, wonderful. Michael is the best thing ever to happen to me. Only he hasn’t happened to me. Not really. Not yet.

He did speak to me today. Only to say thank you. But he said it in such a lovely way. With his eyes, not just his voice. Like he really meant it.

Mrs Castle lets me run errands now. She says that a children’s home is for children and I’m not a child any more, that she is going to give me more responsibility, prepare me for the outside world. When she’s in her office she lets me help her sometimes. A bit of filing, answering the phone. All good practice for when I get a job, that’s what she says. I’m sixteen now, and I have always known I can’t stay here forever.

Today she sent me down to the bank. Not with tons of money. That would be too dangerous. I could get mugged or something. But she’d been collecting up coins in jars for weeks and she let me bag them up and walk them down to the bank to pay them in. Nobody robs you for ten pence pieces, do they? Not worth the effort.

Michael’s long fingers reached across the desk and hooked the bags in, under the see-through dip that separates him from the queue, lifting them one at a time, dropping them onto the scales, ticking them off on the slip with his pen. I know his name is Michael because he wears a badge. Michael Payne. He’s so much younger than the rest of the staff, who all have grey hair and bored faces and look like they’ve been there forever. He’s older than me though. Maybe twenty or twenty-one. So, not by all that much. Not enough to matter. And he has the most brilliant blue eyes. The eyes that said thank you, all by themselves.

In my mind, I can still feel his hand, touching the top of mine, ever so lightly, as he takes the coin bags, making the tiny hairs stand to attention all along my arm. And then, later, touching my cheek, touching my body under my clothes, touching with soft gentle strokes where nobody has ever touched me before. And then it’s gone again. The hand. And suddenly all I can hear is the sound of my own breathing struggling in my throat as the very thought of him stops me in my tracks, sends the blood rushing to my head, to my heart, and almost takes my breath away.

He could charm the birds out of the trees, that one. It’s one of Mrs Castle’s sayings, and it’s as if I can hear her still saying it now. Birds. Trees. My mind’s all over the place, whirling around like I’m in a spin dryer, but I know what I felt. In that one delicious moment at the bank, I felt it. The beginnings of love.

I am in love. Head over heels, birds in the trees love. With a man I don’t even know. And his name is Michael Payne.