50 Reasons to Say Goodbye by Nick Alexander Read Free Book Online Page B

managed to get a date on any of those,” I tell him.
    â€œPeople rarely do. You were probably chatting to me,” he laughs. “You know,” he continues, leaning in towards my ear. “I would
love
to take you home and put pegs on your nipples.”
    I raise my hand to protect myself and grin at him in amazement. “Ouch!” I say.
    He grabs my arm. “Come!” he says. “We can talk better outside.”
    I pull my sweatshirt down to cover my stirring interest and follow him to the door. As we push out of the apartment, Pierre snatches a joint from a German woman sitting on the stairs. She says something to us inGerman – something rude probably, but then German always sounds aggressive to me. We head down into the street.
    I sit on a bollard. Above us, from an open window, we can hear the party thumping. Pierre hands me the joint; I take a drag.
    He asks, “Do you live near here? Can we go to your place?”
    I look up at him but his face seems distorted. It strikes me that it is an exceptionally hot evening. My face prickles and my mouth fills with a strange acidic taste. My teeth taste disgusting, my saliva seems electric.
    Pierre crouches in front of me. “Are you OK? God! You’re soaked!” he says.
    Sweat is rolling down my face, dripping from my chin. My head flops forward. For some reason I am crying, tears dribbling from my eyes.
    Pierre lifts my head so that I am looking at him. The joint drops to the floor, seemingly in slow motion, turning and spinning as it falls.
    â€œYou are so white,” he says.
    â€œI don’t feel …” I say.
    And then it happens; it is instant and unexpected. The vomit squirts through my teeth. Pierre leaps back from me, but he’s too late. His eyes look down at his shirtfront in horror, then up at me.
    He says, “Jesus.”
    I sleep until four in the afternoon.
    When I awaken, I feel shaky and vague; I don’t remember how I got home. There is a note on the table, it says, “Hope you feel better. Pierre.” It’s followed by a phone number.
    I eat a bowl of cold pasta from the fridge which I immediately throw up, then climb back into my bed where I sleep, non-stop, for another fifteen hours.
    The next day I’m too embarrassed to call him and the day after that I actually feel too embarrassed that I didn’t call him the day
before
, so I decide to try to forget the whole thing.
    The following Saturday, Yves phones me, and adds me to his list of people who fell ill after smoking the joints supplied by the mysterious German woman.
    â€œShe killed the whole party,” he says. “Between those who smoked her shit and were ill, and those that carried them home, I lost half of the people who were here!”
    I hang up and consider calling Pierre - consider telling him this as some kind of alibi, but as I move my hand over the phone, it rings.
    â€œHello,” he says. I can hear him smiling. “Are you better?”
    â€œYes, a bit,” I say.
    â€œYves tells me that you only vomit on your dates when you’ve been smoking heroin,” he says.
    â€œHeroin?” I gasp.
    â€œUhuh!” he says. “Apparently so.”

Medieval Obsessions
    An hour later we are in a restaurant eating pizza together. He’s as I remember him, witty and cute. “Not a very good start really,” I say.
    â€œThe I-Ching calls this kind of thing,
Difficulty at the beginning leads to supreme success
,” he replies.
    â€œ
Umh
,” I think, “
he reads the I-Ching
.” I always like a bit of mysticism in a man.
    Our knees touch under the table and his physical proximity arouses me. He regales me again with new tales of dialogue from his strange job, tells me he has spent most of the morning talking to a nymphomaniac dominatrix whose husband doesn’t know and wouldn’t understand.
    In the afternoon he chatted to a husband whose wife has lost all interest