Candyfloss

On the day I graduated, my father watched me cross the stage and saw everything except me. The diploma was never the point. The point was the list — the right school, the right circle, the acceptable careers picked out for me before I could walk. So I did the one thing his list never included.

I left.

New city, small flat, two jobs. By day I pour coffee and remember strangers' names at a café called the Stone. By night I paint until my fingers forget what they are doing. My mother sends her disappointment wrapped in expensive paper. My sister calls me brave. My landlord calls me late with the rent. All three of them are right, more or less. But the walls are mine, the silence belongs to nobody but me, and I am finally painting the life I want instead of the one that was ordered for me.

Then there is him.

I met Mike outside a club, on the worst possible night, with my headphones in and my guard down. He does not do small talk. He does honesty, which is worse. He asked for my name; I did not give it. So he picked one for me, because of my hair — candyfloss, all volume and density — and it stuck.

"Give me something to work with," he said, close to pleading. "What's your real name? 'Cause I can't keep calling you candyfloss in my head."

Mike works shifts at a café, has dimples that should come with a warning, and grows quiet whenever anyone mentions his family by the sea. He calls me gorgeous like it is my name and candyfloss like it is a promise. He also watches me the way nobody in my old world ever bothered to — like I am the only thing in the room.

Here is our problem: my best friend just started dating his best friend. We cannot meet, greet, or escape each other. Every dinner is a setup. Every party puts us side by side. And somewhere between the teasing texts and the almosts, the almost stops being enough for either of us.

Then he takes me home to Cornwall to meet the chaos. A mum who plans introductions over enormous dinners, the man she has been seeing, a town where everybody waves at everybody. There is a fortune-teller on the boardwalk who looks at me instead of the cards and says my parents have not finished with me yet. She is not wrong. Families like mine do not let go. They renegotiate.

And in May, a museum in London offers me a wall of my own. Three paintings, my name on the featured list, everything I ran toward finally within reach — with my family's shadow falling right across the door.

The tension between us runs slow and runs hot, all banter and almosts until it finally tips over. When it does, the door closes and the morning speaks for itself. This book would rather make your heart race than make you blush.

Candyfloss is a dual-POV, slow-burn contemporary romance about the family you escape and the family you choose — sticky-sweet on the outside, steel underneath. Come for the banter. Stay for the boy who names a girl after candyfloss and means it like a vow.