Chocolate Box Girls: Bittersweet Read Free

at any given football match. All he has to do is smile and reel them in. He has a girlfriend fromuni, but she lives miles away in Sheffield, and that’s probably a good thing. At least she’s not around to watch my brother flirting with every female within a fifty-mile radius.
    I do not have an athletic build or a budding career in football, but I have the wheat-blond hair and the sea-green eyes and the tan. It took me a while to suss that not every girl who asked me if I was Ben Fletcher’s little brother was angling for his mobile number. Some of them were actually interested in ME.
    ‘Way to go, little brother,’ Ben laughed, when I started dating Honey Tanberry back in Year Nine. I had my brother’s approval at last.
    I probably wouldn’t have dated Honey for half as long as I did if it hadn’t been for that. She was hard work – behind the party-girl facade, she was all anger and hurt and hopelessness. Neither of us got along with our families, and for a while that kept us together. I thought I could make her happy, but it turns out I was wrong about that, and after a while her drama-queen stuff started to get to me a bit.
    I couldn’t see why Honey lashed out against her mum, why she hated her new stepdad. They both seemed pretty cool to me, but when I said that she called me a traitor. After a while I started to feel like I was just some kind of cool accessory she liked tohave in tow, a boy with a guitar who was good for her image.
    The two of us were just marking time, hanging out together until something better came along … at least, that’s what I thought.
    It ended badly, of course.
    I met Cherry, and that was it –
ka-boom
, it blew everything I’d felt for Honey right out of the water. Honey would never have forgiven me anyhow for ditching her for someone new, but I guess I didn’t make it easy for her. As far as she was concerned, I’d chosen the worst possible girl to fall for. I might as well have stabbed her through the heart, she raged at me – that was how cruel, how callous I’d been. It was bad, I admit – about as bad as it was possible to get.
    Cherry was her new stepsister.
    The whole thing was a nightmare, a mess, a massacre.
    Honey screamed and yelled and threw stuff at me, and even now, more than a year on, she looks at me with such coldness I can feel icicles form in my hair, frost chilling my skin. Like I said, it’s a nightmare.
    I finish painting the last dinghy, press the lid down on the paint and walk across to the storeroom to clean the brush. Over the last few years, I have turned the storeroom into a kind of den – there’san ancient, paint-spattered sofa and a kettle to boil water for a pot noodle or a hot chocolate. It’s a good place to curl up with my guitar, a place to think and dream and write songs in the evening without Dad breathing down my neck.
    There are plenty of pot noodles on the shelf and half a bar of Dairy Milk left over from the weekend. I reckon I’ve missed supper already, and it’s not like I’ll be missing much if I stay out another hour or two. Just the odd cutting remark from Dad, a few frosty silences, the occasional pitying glance from Mum or Ben.
    It’s almost sunset, and the September sky is streaked with pink and gold, but the storeroom is dark and shadowy as I step inside. I don’t notice her at first, and when I do I just about jump out of my skin.
    Honey is perched on the worktop in the corner, half hidden in the shadows, her long legs swinging, her jaw-length blonde hair rumpled. Her eyeliner is smudged and the lashes that fringe her wide blue eyes are damp, as if she’s been crying.
    ‘Shay?’ she says, her voice small, uncertain. ‘I need your help. I’m in trouble – big trouble.’

Honey is no stranger to trouble, of course. It’s her talent, her skill. If there was an exam in it she would get an A* without even trying … she’s a natural.
    I got used to mopping up the fallout, back when we were together; Honey