The Chocolate Run by Dorothy Koomson Read Free Book Online Page A

toffee. All right, it was made with the best ingredients – hand-spun butter; thick, gloopy cream from an organically raised cow; top-quality, sun-grown sugarcane sugar – but it was still toffee. It was still unchanging. I liked toffee, I liked Matt, but there was only so much of it you could take.
    I did like Matt, though. And, if I listened to myself, I would hear ‘methinks the lady doth protest too much’, but he was just so one-dimensional. Even now I’d never worked out why Matt and Greg had been friends for so long. Greg was Mr Adventure, Matt was Mr Dull .
    They’d been mates since Matt’s family had moved from Doncaster to Sheffield when they were nine. They’d then gone to all the same schools and applied to college in Leeds together. How they met, neither of them could tell.
    ‘Men don’t find meeting stories important,’ Matt had once said.
    ‘Unless you were knocking off his sister or his bird at the time. Then you generally remember the fight you had,’ Greg added.
    I hadn’t known them long at that point. I still thought of Greg as a tosser who got away with far too much because of his beauty. And Matt, well, I thought, He’s toffee, but I’ll have to get on with him because Jen’s mad keen on him .
    ‘Come on, don’t keep us in suspenders, what’s the score?’ Greg said into the long pause that followed Jen’s statement.
    Jen gazed at Matt and grinned. Matt winked at her then paled a fraction more, while fid, fid, fiddling with his chopstick.
    ‘We’re moving in together,’ Jen said, her face flushed with happiness, her blue eyes sparkling.
    ‘Fantastic!’ I whooped. ‘When did you decide? I want to know everything.’ I would, of course, be receiving Oscar nominations for that performance of ‘Woman Stunned By News’.
    ‘It’s my birthday present.’
    ‘Great present, Matt. Makes everything I bought seem pretty insignificant by comparison. Oh well, I’ll have to get you a creative moving-in pressie.’
    ‘We wanted a cappuccino-maker, I’ve seen a couple in Habitat,’ Matt said.
    ‘You can forget that! You’ll get some paper cups with “congratulations” on them and like them, m’laddie,’ I joked.
    Something was missing. Someone’s voice, opinion, congratulations weren’t there. ‘What do you think, mate?’ Matt asked Greg.
    We all turned to Greg. Greg’s hand had frozen between taking a piece of prawn toast off his plate and putting it into his mouth, his eyes were anchored on Matt.
    ‘Mate?’ Matt repeated.
    ‘Sorry,’ Greg said, lowering his piece of prawn toast, ‘that was a shock . . . um, a good shock. No, it’s cool. I’m really pleased for you, both of you.’
    In stark contrast to my good self, Greg was an appalling actor – he’d be sacked from a ‘Man In The Crowd’ job.
    ‘When are you, um, going to do the deed?’ Greg asked, his voice flat.
    ‘This weekend. I’m working in Paris for ten days starting the following week. I’ve told Rocky and he’s cool. He’s even let me off the last month’s rent.’
    ‘Cool. We’ll have to find a new flatmate,’ Greg said. Again, monotone.
    ‘Get a girl,’ Matt said. ‘Even if she’s not single, she’s bound to have single mates. It’ll be a gold mine of shagging.’ He accompanied this advice with a brief hitch of his left eyebrow.
    My stomach flipped. Greg’s eyes darted to me, I redirected my gaze to my plate. Why don’t you get on the table and say, ‘Actually I shagged Amber over the weekend ’ ? I thought. These were tense times, but even I’d stopped being Cockney Gell.
    Nobody spoke. Each of us stared at our plates or the starters in the middle of the table as silence zigzagged about us until it’d woven a shroud of noiselessness around our table. We sat in our sound-free cocoon, shielded from the restaurant’s buzz of other diners, food being served, dishes being removed.
    If the silence continued, I’d be obliged to say something stupid to lighten it, I realised.