Read Online Cecelia Ahern Short Stories by Cecelia Ahern - Free Book Online

means nothing. As though your knowledge of their allergy to ginger and their penchant for dancing around in their underwear to Bruce Springsteen isn’t enough to hold you together. The little things you loved so much about a person become the little things they are suddenly embarrassed you know. All that while you’re walking away in that awkward, uncomfortable silence.
    When you return home feeling foolish and angry to a house that’s being emptied you begin to wish all those dark thoughts away. I began to wish that we were still together and feeling miserable rather than having to go through goodbyes. He still felt part of me, I was still his, I was his best friend and he was mine, yet there was just the minor detail of not actually being in love with one another and the fact that any other kind of relationship just wasn’t possible. I begged and pleaded, he cried and shouted, until our voices were hoarse and our faces were tearstained.
    Feeling desolate, I looked around the empty wardrobe with its doors wide open, displaying stray hangers and deserted shelves as though taunting me. It wasn’t supposed to end this way.
The Beginning
    He used to get the same bus as I did. He got on one stop after me and got off one stop before. I thought he was gorgeous the very first day I spotted him outside after wiping the condensation from the upstairs window of the bus. It was dark, cold, raining, seven o’clock in the morning in November, in front of me a man slept with his head against the cold vibrating glass, the woman beside me read a steamy page of a romance novel, probably the cause of the fogged-up windows. There was the smell of morning breath and morning bodies on the stuffy bus, it was quiet, no one spoke, all that was audible was the faint sounds of music and voices from the earphones of Walkmans.
    He rose from that staircase like an angel entering the gates of heaven. His hair was soaking, his nose red, droplets of rain ran down his cheeks and his clothes were drenched. He wobbled down the aisle of the moving bus sleepily, trying to make his way to the only free seat. He didn’t see me that day. He didn’t see me for the first two weeks, but I got clever, moving to the seat by the staircase where I knew he would see me. Then I took to keeping my bag on the chair beside me so no one could sit down and moving it only when he arrived at the top of the stairs so he could sit down. Eventually he saw me; a few weeks later he smiled; a few weeks on he said something; a few weeks later I responded. Then he took to sitting beside meevery morning, sharing knowing looks, secret jokes, secret smiles. He saved me from the drunken man who tried to maul me every Thursday morning. I saved him from the girl who sang along loudly with her Walkman on Wednesday evenings.
    Eventually, on the way home on a sunny Friday evening in May, he stayed on an extra stop, got off the bus with me and asked me to go for a drink with him. Two months later I was in love, falling out of bed last minute and running with him to the same bus stop most mornings. Sleeping on his shoulder all the way to work, hearing him say he had never loved anyone else in his life as he loved me, believing him when he said he would never fall out of love with me, that I was the most beautiful and wonderful woman he had ever met. When you’re in love you believe everything. We shared kisses that meant something, hearts that fluttered, fingers that clasped, and footsteps that bounced.
    Oh, sweet joy, the joy of falling in love, of being in love. Those first few years of being in love, they were only the beginning.

6 The Production Line
    I hated Christmas. Hated every damn song, the sound of the bells, the twinkling lights, every stupid movie and every happy face looking as if it should be stamped with a damn Hallmark sign. It was a time for people either happy or pretending to be. I was neither. So at 10.30 a.m. on 24 December I clocked in at work like any other day. The