Do you know something?” I could have looked at his face all night. The way his eyes wrinkled at the corners. That place where his neck met his shoulder. “What?” “Sometimes, Clark, you are pretty much the only thing that makes me want to get up in the morning.
Did I imagine it all? Sometimes I think I’ve made what happened between Will and me so much bigger in my head. Like how can I have loved someone that much in such a short time? And all these things I think about the two of us – did we actually feel what I remember? The further we get from it, the more those six months just seem like this weird... dream.
So once upon a time Ed met a girl who was the most optimistic person he had even know. A girl who wore flip-flops in the hope of spring. She seemed to bounce through life like Tigger; the things that would have felled most people didn’t seem to touch her. Or if she did fall, she bounced right back. She fell again, plastered on a smile, dusted herself off, and kept going. He never could work out whether it was the single most heroic thing or the most idiotic thing he’d ever seen.
He smelled of warm, sleepy male. She had forgotten what a weirdly potent scent that was.
Then he told her, in the quiet tones of someone offloading a confession, that she was the most mazing women he had ever met. And when she lifted her swollen eyes to his, Ed mopped her bleeding nose, and he dropped his lips gently onto hers, and he did what he had wanted to do for the past forty-eight hours, even if he had been initially too dumb to know it, He kissed her.
I liked the shorthand we seemed to fall into when nobody else was around, the easy intimacy that had sprung up between us. I liked the way he turned his face and looked at me with amusement, like I had somehow turned out to be so much more than he had expected. On.
I felt the mood shift. And, for no reason at all other than that he didn’t expect it, I climbed fully clothed into the bath and kissed him as he laughed and spluttered. I was suddenly glad of his solidity in a world where it was so easy to fall.
You just destroy the thing you love. By weighing it down.
Life is short, right? We both know that. Well, what if you’re my chance?
Most days now his loss is a part of her, an awkward weight she carries around, invisible to everyone else.
That is the worst thing about being a parent,” she said, as if I were one too. “You’re meant to be this serene, all-knowing, gracious person who can handle every situation.
Had a million things to say and none I knew how. I stepped forward and kissed him, like people kiss at airports, full of love and desperate longing, kisses that must imprint themselves on their recipient for the journey, for the weeks, the months ahead.
Remember, good things happen.
Look outwards, Alice. Not much point worrying what the town thinks about you – nothing you can do about that anyway. But when you look outwards, why, there’s a whole world of beautiful things.
We danced as if we had nothing else to do but dance. Lord, it felt good. I had forgotten the joy of just existing, of losing yourself in the music... I let go of everything, my problems floating away like helium balloons: my awful job, my picky boss, my failure to move on. I became a thing, alive, moving, joyful.
She is the only person I know who actually likes exams.
Do I mind? No! Because that’s the way he is. He’s a human being! Nose hair and all!
I had a vague memory of the intensity of teenage female relationships; more of a passion than a normal friendship.
On evenings like this, when the streets below were filled with couples strolling, and laughing people spilled out of pubs, already planning meals, nights out, trips to clubs, something ached inside me, something primal telling me that I was in the wrong place, that I was missing something. These were the moments when I felt most left behind.
I know the subtlest movements of the city because I no longer sleep.