Read Hobb's Cottage: A Short Story for Free Online

let the memories wash over me. I’d caught the last plane from Cairo in a desperate race against time.  It had been truly awful.  The single carriage that posed for a train had deposited me on an isolated rural railway platform before trundling away into the night, taking with it all light and life.  For a moment I’d stood dazed, numb with exhaustion and the cold, before managing to gather my wits about me sufficiently to drag my case towards a bench.  There I’d shivered and wept while the snow whirled down and distant church bells pealed, summoning the faithful to worship.
    “May I join you?” The flurry of needle sharp wind and swirling snow had snatched my breath away.  Or maybe that was just the sight of him, silhouetted against the night sky; a tall figure with a guitar slung across his back and violet eyes set above the sharpest cheekbones.  It was as though he’d walked straight off the cover of one of the trashy romances that Susie devoured.  I looked away, firstly because I couldn’t trust myself to meet his searching gaze and secondly because I never liked anyone to see me crying…
    “Hey,” he said, sitting down beside me and brushing snowflakes from his leather jacket, “you look sad.  Nobody should be sad at Christmas.”
    I dabbed my eyes with the back of my gloved hand and tried to paste a smile onto my face but I could see that I was failing miserably.  For a moment I teetered on the brink of pretending to be polite, being the usual Cleo Carpenter who just got on with everything and took all life’s blows in her stride, but there was something about the kindness in his face that pulled me back.  It was late. I was jet lagged, half frozen and worried sick.  In the most out of character way I found myself pouring out my heart and telling him everything; how Dad’s frantic phone call had sent me tearing across time zones in the desperate hope that I might make it back in time, how I knew in my heart that Mum wouldn’t last through Christmas, how I should never have gone so far away when I knew she was ill, how I couldn’t believe my father hadn’t called me back earlier.  Before I even knew it I was sobbing in earnest and his arms were holding me close.  It should have felt wrong, he was a total stranger after all, but it didn’t feel that way at all. 
    And I never even asked his name…
    “Sorry!  Sorry!  Sorry!” Susie charges though the coffee shop like a paratrooper and hurls herself next to me on the sofa.  My daydream evaporates and for a split second I’m totally thrown to be back in the coffee shop rather than on the cold railway station.
    “Aren’t these totally worth being late for?” Rummaging through her bags Susie plucks out a pair of platforms that even the Spice Girls in their hey day would have baulked at.
    “Let me go and buy us some lunch,” I say hastily, knowing from experience that she’s about to unpack every single item. “Latte?  Cheese and ham panini?
    “Lovely, but a skinny latte, please!   I’m on a diet.”
    I smile.  Susie lost all the weight she carried at school a long time ago but old habits die hard.  I leave her gloating over her shopping but when I return she’s peering at my notes, her brow corrugated with concentration.
    “Why can’t you read Heat like everybody else?  You’re such a brain box.”
    “Stop talking and eat your lunch,” I order, plonking down my tray. “I’ve got to get back to work soon.”
    “Work?  But it’s Saturday!  Your day off remember?  We’re going to Oxford Street and then clubbing in Ealing.  You promised!”
    “Suze, I can’t afford a day off right now.  There’s an exhibition coming up and the post of Assistant Directorship of the Egyptology Department in the offing.  I’m flat out.”
    “I don’t know how you can bear it in there with those mummies,” shudders Susie.  “It’d creep me out, especially if I was on my own at night.  I’d be pooing myself.”
    Late at