Page 160 of Power Play
I drive away with a heart that feels a little fuller.
And yeah, maybe love doesn’t look the way I thought it would. Maybe it’s not grand gestures and perfect timing and glitter explosions.
Maybe it’s coffee in a cold rink. A bench in a hallway. A man who learned how to be quiet enough to hear me.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
MURPHY
Moving day.
Otherwise known as the worst cardio session I’ve ever signed up for voluntarily.
The sky’s doing its best impression of my soul; grey, heavy, threatening to break at any moment. Dylan’s already here, holding two coffees and a box of what I assume is fragile kitchen crap.
“You sure this is the place?” he asks, eyeing the block of modern flats with suspicion. “Looks like the kind of building where the thermostat judges you.”
“It does,” I say, pocketing the keys. “The elevator even talks back.”
Dylan grunts. “Figures.”
We don’t say it, but we both know what today was supposed to be. The fact that he still showed up, and brought caffeine, says more than words could.
Jacko and Ollie roll in ten minutes later, wearing matching backwards caps and enough energy to make me want to fake a back injury on sight.
“Alright, lads!” Ollie claps his hands like he’s about to lead a workout class. “Let’s get this heartbreak express on the road!”
Jacko looks at him, deadpan. “You realise this isn’t a road trip, right?”
“Every journey is a road trip if you believe hard enough,” Ollie replies, full of that terrifying optimism that comes with zero planning skills.
I point to the van. “Boxes in the back. Furniture too. Try not to dent anything. Especially my will to live.”
The four of us get to work, and it is chaos from the jump.
“Why do you have so many throw pillows?” Jacko grunts as he hefts a box labelledbedroom non-essentials.
“They’re Sophie’s,” I mutter.
“She moving in later?” Ollie asks innocently.
I glance away. “Not yet.”
Dylan, thankfully, doesn’t say a word. Just shoulders another box and heads upstairs.
The flat’s modern, open-plan, painfully clean. A little too clean.
“This couch cost more than my first car,” Jacko mutters as we wedge it through the doorframe like a couple of cavemen discovering geometry for the first time.
“Don’t scratch it,” I warn. “She picked it.”
Jacko snorts but listens. For all his bark, the guy’s got a soft spot under all that sarcasm.
We get the big stuff in by midday, couch, bed, the TV I definitely don’t need to be that big but bought anyway because I was imagining Sophie curled up beside me for movie nights.
Now it’s just me, an empty flat, and the ghost of a plan that didn’t quite happen.
Lunch break is a pizza box on the kitchen island and Ollie trying to “test the acoustics” by yelling random phrases into the high ceilings.
