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“Well, you’re taking a turn at being the soppy one right now.”

Alli smiled. “Right, then I’d better give it my best shot.” She took a breath. “Bea, I understand why you didn’t answer my calls. I understand why you didn’t want to speak to me or be with me, and I respect your decision.”

“Alli…”

“Let me finish. I want you to know that I’m changing. I’m working on all of this. And it’s not for you, or not just for you, it’s for me. I need to do this. But I can’t lie and say that a little piece of me doesn’t want you to look at me and see that I’m a better person.”

“Al…”

Alli held up a hand. “Here comes the soppy part. Bea, I have feelings for you. If you can’t reciprocate them, that’s fine. But I can’t carry them around alone any longer. I have to let them out. I want to wake up with you, Bea. I want to see your smile before I go to sleep. I want to hold your hand and argue with you, go on holiday with you. I want to smell your t-shirts when you’re not home because I miss you so much.”

“Okay, that’s soppy verging on creepy.”

Alli laughed a little. “I mean it though, Bea. I mean that a little piece of you will always be with me. I’ll walk away right now if that’s what you need. But I’ll take that little piece inside me for the rest of my life. And there’ll always be a hole inside me, because a little piece of me will go with you too.”

Bea’s heart swelled in size until her chest was so full it hurt to breathe. “Al, you know that I have feelings for you, too.”

“And I know that I scared you, that losing my temper with you was the biggest mistake of my life,” Alli said. “One that I’mnot going to repeat. One that woke me up to how I needed and wanted to live my life. So much has changed around me, so much is still up in the air. I don’t even have a job. The only thing that I know for certainty is that my life is better, brighter with you in it.”

“Al…”

“You don’t have to answer now. You can wait, have time to think,” Alli said.

Bea blew out a frustrated breath. “Al, will you let me speak?”

Alli clamped her mouth shut and nodded.

With a grin, Bea said: “When can we start?”

“Start what?”

“This, us,” Bea said simply. “I’m not complete without you and I don’t want to be. My life is better with you in it, and I want to see where all this goes. I want to know what we can be. Because if I make you a better person, and you make me a better person, just think how incredible we can be together.”

“We can,” Alli said, scarcely believing what Bea was saying.

“I feel like I haven’t taken a deep breath since you walked out of my flat,” Bea said quietly.

“Well, we can’t have that,” said Alli. “Especially since we’ve already decided that deep breaths are the answer to all the world’s problems.”

Bea smiled a little. “In that case, I think the world’s going to be a bit screwed for a minute or two. I hope it can look after itself.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I’m not about to let you take a deep breath for at least the next sixty seconds,” said Bea. She leaned in and brushed Alli’s lips with her own.

“Maybe longer,” said Alli.

“Maybe a lot longer,” Bea agreed.

Epilogue

Alli surveyed the hole in the wall with her hands on her hips. “It’s just not good enough,” she said.

Sid the builder sniffed and scratched his head. “Dunno how it happened, to be honest.”

“It looks an awful lot to me like one of your lads swung a ladder around and punched a hole with it,” said Alli, pointing at the ladder that was propped up next to the hole.

“Yeah, well.” Sid sniffed again. “Gonna take a few days to fix that. Let’s say by the end of the week, just to be safe.”