A Passionate Love Affair with a Total Stranger by Lucy Robinson Read Free Book Online

grubby pig with women but mostly because, having lived with him so long, I knew he was basically a big child in a beautiful man’s body and that it would be tantamount to paedophilia.
    The day I’d met Sam he was wearing his T-shirt inside out and – apart from his incredibly good looks – he was indistinguishable from the sea of nice boys who were shuffling around my halls of residence. They all had an air of having been cast adrift; lost without their comfortable homes and clothes-laundering mothers (but greatly comforted by the opportunities for unlimited drinking and sexual intercourse that university life was offering). Sam had been suffering a terrible hangover and had exited the lift too early by mistake; when he walked into Hailey’s and my room on floor nine, he’d believed he was walking into his own on floor ten. ‘Oh, hi there,’ he’d said, surprised
but unperturbed to find two girls on the floor, poring over an Edgar Allan Poe poem that they claimed to love but couldn’t really understand.
    ‘Hello,’ we’d bleated, slightly awed by the beautiful man who’d just walked –
voluntarily
– into our room. Sam eventually realized he’d made a mistake but showed no signs of departing. Instead he wandered over and opened the bottle of Glenfiddich that Dad had given me as a going-away present. He drank it on our sofa while trying to figure out – with an expression of genuine puzzlement – how he had slept with so many girls since arriving in Glasgow. ‘I really haven’t been trying,’ he mused, sleepy green eyes clouded with confusion. ‘I even went to the theatre the other night and some girl bought me a drink and pretty much stuck her wangers in my face. It was the weirdest thing …’
    Hailey and I had shaken our heads in surprise, even though we knew full well why the girl had stuck her wangers in his face.
    And yet, awed though we might be by his looks, we both knew instantly that we would never want to Go There. It would just be wrong. Instead we became an unlikely triumvirate: me, a lanky nerd who got twitchy when out of the library; Hailey, leading a more classic life of drinking, occasional lectures and failed romances; and Sam, drifting around studying something called ‘Drama’, growing mad hair for his theatrical productions and leaving a trail of crazed girls in his wake. He picked them up everywhere. I even saw him pick one up in the university Spar shop while wearing an inexcusable pair of ethnic ‘rehearsal pants’. I concealed myself behind a huge display
tower of Haribo and watched enviously, wondering why, when I always made an effort to dress well, I couldn’t so much as muster a smile out of other men. They just ran from me, seemingly terrified.
    Sam popped a chocolate into his mouth while Dad struck an excitable and tuneless chord on his banjo. ‘Well, the gang are all here now. All we need is Nessie and little Katy and then we can have a party! Shall I go out and get some pizzas in?’
    ‘Christian.’ Mum sighed. ‘I … Oh, it doesn’t matter. Come on, let’s give Charley and her friends some space. We can come back later.’
    Dad looked disappointed but gathered up his banjo. ‘OK. Bye, darling!’ he said, planting a smacker on my forehead. ‘I’ll sneak Malcolm in later. Never understood why you can’t bring animals into a hospital.’ He wandered out of the cubicle, whistling ‘You Are My Sunshine’ even more tunelessly than he had sung it. Sam, grinning, took his seat in the corner.
    ‘Dear God,’ Mum said, following Dad out. ‘I really could punch him at times, Charley.’
    I tried to laugh but it hurt. ‘You’re made for each other,’ I croaked. Mum shrugged, blowing me a kiss as she left. However improbable their marriage might seem to an outsider – in fact, even to them – it worked.
    I’d often imagined John and me as a married couple. We’d be busy, of course, with Salutech, but we’d make sure we created time to eat around our large