Page 50 of Doc Hollywood

“Taylor, I—“

He cut her off. “I know. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

Clara nodded, whispering, “Yeah. And we live very different lives.”

“I know. But it’s the first time in a long time I’ve met someone who sees me and not the image of me that you see on screen. Everyone thinks that’s the person they’re going to meet.”

“That’s not you?” She squeezed his hand.

“It is, and it isn’t. I am way cooler in my movies.” He chuckled, but looking at his eyes, she could see no humour in them. “Clara, I want to see—“

He trailed off when Clara shook her head at him; she couldn’t let him say anything that might make her treacherous heart skip any more beats than it already was.

“Clara, we could meet—“ he tried again, breaking off when she shook her head.

Closing his eyes for a long moment, he eventually angled his body more to face her and, to Clara’s relief, changed the subject from what she had been so afraid of but so hopeful of at the same time.

“Anyway, I feel I’ve spent far too long sounding like a narcissist who only wants to talk about themselves. Shall we trash your horrible ex for a while?” Taylor said, a broad conspiratorial smile breaking over his face.

Clara was about to say no. Since she had split up with Jack, she hadn’t spoken about him to anyone. Her mum asked and was concerned about her daughter’s wellbeing, but Clara hadavoided the subject and initially told her parents that the break up was mutual and they had grown apart. And now, when articles about Jack were in OK and Hello magazine, her mum would tell Clara all about the latest wonderful things happening in Jack’s life.

She knew her mum wasn’t trying to be cruel; she was just excited about knowing someone in a magazine. But it meant she only spoke to her mum every few weeks, not wanting to hear the latest version of ‘what Jack had done’. This was always followed by a musing of her mum’s inability to work out how Clara could have split up with such a nice young man.

When she was finally ready to talk and tried to tell her mum that Jack had cheated on her, her mum said that she must be mistaken and that he wouldn’t do that to Clara. Jack was that good at showing other people what they wanted to see, and her parents believed he was a good man.

So she hadn’t told her parents he was where the bruises they had noticed whenever they visited Clara and Jack came from. And that she hadn’t knocked herself on the door, fallen off her bike—the one she had sold to pay back some of Jack’s debt—stumbled while hiking, or one of the many excuses she had used over the years to explain where all her injuries came from.

Breathing deeply, she realised that it was the first time in a long time she felt strong enough, brave enough to talk about Jack, obviously not about everything, but it would be nice to be rude about the man who had ruined her life.

Glancing down at their entwined fingers, she wondered if that was where her courage came from. Then her eyes strayed to her nearly empty pint, and she realised that alcohol was the more likely answer.

“Yeah, we should,” Clara said with determination. “He was a total shithead.”

“As bad as the girl who attacked herself?”

“Yeah. Although he preferred to attack me.” The words were out before she could stop them.

Taylor’s fingers tightened on hers as he asked quietly, steel in his voice. “He hit you?”

“Oh, shit. I, umm, no, well, I mean,” Clara faltered and tried to pull her hand away from Taylor’s.

She couldn’t believe what she had just said and wanted to run. She wanted to slag off her ex, not admit she had been a victim of domestic violence.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Taylor’s voice was barely above a whisper.

Clara shook her head, trying to blink back the tears that had sprung into her eyes. “No.”

“Okay.” He nodded. “Nothing heavy, but shall we still trash him? Or shall we change the subject?”

Clara brought her hand up to brush away the tears welling in her eyes before saying, “Yeah. I desperately want to slag him off. He was very good at pulling the wool over people’s eyes. Most people thought he was fantastic and such a catch. But he wasn’t.”

“Shithead?”

“Total shithead.” Clara agreed.

She looked down at the hand he still held and the scar that his finger ran over. The place she had needed to have stitches because she had ‘fallen’ while she had been holding a glass. Although she wouldn’t have fallen if Jack hadn’t shoved her, then trodden on her hand to make sure the glass pushed into her palm. He had left her bleeding on the floor for a few minutes, then obviously decided he had punished her enough and began acting like a doting boyfriend.

Clara pulled her phone out of her pocket. “This is his latest spread in Hello magazine.” She went to her mum’s texts, clicked on the link, and handed the phone to Taylor.

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