At a Time Like This by Catherine Dunne Read Free Book Online Page A

next.’ He stood, and pulled me up after him. ‘Come with me,’ he said.
    And it was as easy as that. I followed him into what would become my bedroom in a few days’ time. The air was freezing, the bed sheetless, but it didn’t matter. None of it mattered.
Still fully dressed, we huddled under the blankets that the previous tenant had either forgotten or left behind. They were pretty threadbare, anyhow. At first, we clung to each other for warmth and
then, as our bones defrosted, we played a game, whose rules I can no longer remember. What I do recall is how we stifled our laughter as we threw off one piece of clothing after the other. There
was the delicious, intimate shock of skin, finally, on skin. And then there was the sudden ambush of guilt like a sledgehammer, mixed with fear and longing and all the impossible terrors of
pregnancy.
    ‘Paul, I—’
    He kissed me into silence. ‘I’m not going to do anything you don’t want me to do. Relax. We’re not going to go all the way. Trust me.’
    I tried to read his face in the darkness. ‘It’s my first time,’ I whispered. I could feel him grin at that. I saw the contours of his face change as he brushed my hair back
from my eyes.
    ‘Oh, really?’ he said. ‘I’d never have known.’
    I could feel myself blush and I was glad of the darkness. ‘Don’t tease me,’ I said, my breath warm against his ear.
    ‘You’ll have to trust me.’ He stayed very still, resting one hand on my face. ‘We can make this really special, but you’ll have to trust me.’
    I had a sharp snap of memory. My Aunty Kate, standing in her kitchen, fag in one hand, glass of Rioja in the other. She’d been to Spain on holidays and had come back believing that red
wine was very sophisticated. The fire crackled in the grate, late October winds howled in the chimney, forcing the smoke back down into the hazy kitchen. I remember how she shook her head in
disbelief, heard her hiss at Mo, her best friend – whom she called Maureen only if she was very angry – ‘For Christ’s sake, Maureen, how many times do you have to be caught?
You’ve got five kids already and they’re all “trust mes”. Brendan would say High Mass if it’d get you into bed. And you’re expecting again?
    I can’t remember how many seconds it took for me not to care about Kate, or Mo or any of them. To dismiss the village voices and the gossiped tales of ruined women and abandoned babies,
all the backwoods horrors of what would happen to people like me, people who refused to know their place and obey their God.
    ‘I trust you,’ I said.
    ‘Good girl.’
    The first devil-may-care moment of my life. It was almost pure in its recklessness. I managed to brush it all aside: that here I was in bed with a medical student – a definite no-no for
good girls from the country. Their reputation was legendary. They were known to be fast and fickle and dangerous. That I was trusting my whole future to someone I had known for only four or five
hours. That I was being seduced by someone about to become a doctor. The irony was not lost on me, Mother, oh no. Not even then.
    ‘You okay?’ Paul’s kisses paused for a moment. The liquid pleasure that we’d been swimming in for what seemed like hours was suspended gently around us.
‘Happy?’
    ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, pulling him closer. I remember feeling that I would never be able to pull him close enough. ‘Happy and happy and happy some more.’
    It must have been some time around four in the morning. The whole house had grown silent. I couldn’t even hear Marvin Gaye any more. Strangely, my bedroom seemed to have grown brighter and
I remember that I took that as an omen. I know now of course that my eyes had just grown used to the dark. But I didn’t know that at the time. I was thrilled that Paul and I could see each
other, that our faces were real and warm rather than shapes shifting in and out of the shadows. I know that I had been thinking,