The Summer Villa. Melissa Hill

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СКАЧАТЬ remembered to turn the tongs off, which was good; it meant that she must have been sober before she went out.

      And yep, this was definitely her room. Thank God for small mercies.

      Annie raised the sheets a little to see she was wearing her pyjamas, which was another good sign – she hoped. Gingerly, she shimmied her way off the bed, grabbed her dressing gown and threw it on.

      She always did this to herself. She’d have a bad week at work, or a fight with her mam, and then she’d go on a binge.

      Eileen called her a slut, floozy or whatever else her angry, inebriated self felt like. Theirs was a hugely dysfunctional relationship, she knew, but it was the only consistent one Annie had ever had. She could just imagine what her mam would have to say about this.

      ‘Nothing else for it,’ she murmured, deciding to bite the bullet and wake up Prince Charming. ‘Hey, sunshine, time to get up!’

      The words sent her bedfellow scrambling to his feet and it seemed to take him a while to realise he wasn’t under attack.

      ‘What the hell?’

      ‘Time for you to get going,’ Annie muttered, unable to meet his eyes. She really had no idea who he was but she figured she must have hooked up with him in the late bar last night. ‘I’ve things to get on with and I need you to leave.’

      It was her day off, Annie recalled (hence the night out in the Dublin hotspots), so she didn’t have anything pressing to do really, she just wanted him out.

      The guy scratched his jaw and took a deep breath before flopping back down onto her bed.

      ‘Another half hour, maybe? I’m wrecked,’ he protested, as he puffed up her pillow and stuffed it under his head, closing his eyes once more.

      ‘Hey! I said I need you to leave, so off you go.’ Annie poked at his exposed leg. He was wearing boxers, another cause for relief in her books. He didn’t seem her type at all, either; he was bone-skinny with a bit of a culchie accent, so she had no idea how or why he’d ended up here.

      But did she even have a type these days?

      Still, if this gobshite thought he could grab a lie-in at her expense, he was sadly mistaken. She’d throw him out on his arse herself if he didn’t skedaddle on his own, pronto.

      Her persistence got his attention and he forced his eyes open once more.

      ‘Hey, why don’t you get back in and we can finish what we started last night?’ he said suggestively, and Annie’s hackles rose even more.

      ‘Are you deaf? Get the feck out!’ She grabbed the end of the duvet and yanked it off him. ‘I mean it.’ Then, grabbing his clothes, she marched across to the door of her flat (which didn’t take long as it was a tiny studio) and flung it open, launching his stuff through. ‘Don’t let it hit you on the way out.’

      Her unexpected guest looked completely bewildered. ‘What the hell? Why are you being so weird? You asked me back, remember? You were all over me.’

      Annie didn’t remember – that was the problem – but she wasn’t about to tell him that. ‘Look, I’m sorry but I told you already that I’ve got stuff to do and you’re getting in the way. So please just go,’ she insisted.

      She watched as her guest jumped up again and stepped out into the hallway, scrambling for his clothes. He pulled his shirt over his head, sticking his arms into the sleeves in one smooth movement, then eyed her angrily from the doorway.

      ‘You’re something else, you know. Pure psycho.’

      ‘I know,’ she murmured airily, as she closed the door behind him, her heart racing a thousand beats a minute. She’d done a pretty good job convincing him of her bravado, but all the while she’d been terrified. A strange man in her bed and in her flat. It wouldn’t be the first time things had gone awry.

      ‘That’s it. No more getting pissed out your head, Annie … No more.’

      She walked to her bed and looked at the sheets with scorn, before yanking them off. She’d be doing a wash today for sure. Once all the bedding was off, she returned to the bare mattress and flopped down on the edge of it.

      Annie O’Doherty was never supposed to live, but she had. Abandoned in the toilets at Connolly train station in the centre of Dublin almost thirty years ago, she’d barely been breathing when she was found by a curious Irish Rail cleaner, who heard a noise from inside the ladies. There he found an infant, scarcely a few hours old, and had called for an ambulance.

      Even before she had a name, Annie was making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

      Placed into the Irish foster system from the start, she eventually found herself part of a family. Robert O’Doherty, her foster father, had doted on her. He was the reason she’d been chosen by them – a real-life orphan Annie.

      He always said he saw something in her eyes, a spark, which told him she was the right child for him and his wife Eileen. They’d formally adopted her when she was five, and over the following twelve years she had the most amazing life she could imagine. They didn’t have much money, just enough to get by, but after Robert suffered a heart attack and died, life was upended.

      That’s when Eileen started drinking and Annie had no choice but to rely on herself. Life had steadily declined after that. The tongue-lashings, accusations of theft, and even the added bonus of being accused of trying to seduce Eileen’s boyfriends. As if she would stoop so low.

      Now she sat on her bed thinking about just how badly her life sucked. She was thirty-two years old, working at a low-budget hairdressing salon for a woman who didn’t know a perm from a curl, paying an exorbitant rent for her tiny Dublin shoebox, and nothing or no one stable in her life whatsoever.

      Most of the friends she had during her teens were by now settled with families of their own, while Annie embarked on a string of disastrous hook-ups with lads who were only after the craic. That had suited her down to the ground all throughout her twenties, but now it was getting old – as was Annie.

      These days she mostly went out on the town with some of her hot young co-workers from the salon, and was already starting to feel (and no doubt look) like the desperate ’oul wan.

      Feeling a fresh wave of hangover-inspired exhaustion, Annie fell back on the bed and lay atop the exposed mattress. She stared at the cracks in the yellowed ceiling as she tried not to cry. She was frustrated and disillusioned.

      Life was supposed to improve the older you got, wasn’t it? Life was supposed to be a series of ups and downs. So when was her up coming? When was it her turn to have something good finally come her way?

      Tears stung her eyes and she didn’t try to stop them. It wasn’t every day that Annie allowed herself to feel her emotions. Pretending she didn’t have any seemed to work best for her over the years, at least for a while, until the flood rose too high, smashed the dam and, like now, she had to release it.

      She hated her life. She hated this dingy kip of a flat. She hated her job, her mother, this stupid city.

      She hated everything.

      ‘No more,’ she said firmly as СКАЧАТЬ