Dying for Christmas by Tammy Cohen Read Free Book Online Page B

shadow.
    * * *
    It’s time I dealt with it. The elephant in the room.
    Travis. The boyfriend that, like St Peter, I’d denied.
    The truth is, the path of true love was not running smooth for Travis and me. In fact I was starting to wonder if it hadn’t just detoured around us altogether. We’d met at university, where he was studying medicine and I was studying social awkwardness and a catastrophic inability to cope with deadlines. He was part of a group who came to visit my flatmate in our halls of residence, and when it got to the end of the evening and we were the only ones not either partnered off or being sick in the toilet, we drifted together by default.
    Travis likes to consider himself as someone who thinks outside the box, unswayed by appearances or conventions or passing trends. In that respect I played to his self-image. I was quirky (‘weird’, my brothers would have said). I didn’t dress up to go out or have girlie nights in or pluck my eyebrows. For three years after graduating, I had a series of badly paid, obscure jobs which supported us both in a shared house while Travis was still racking up debt doing his interminable course. Because I wasn’t an obvious choice, I think Travis felt I made him appear more interesting, like he had hidden depths. He thought he’d ‘discovered’ me like an obscure Indie band.
    For my part I liked having a boyfriend. I liked having someone to go to the cinema with at weekends. I liked how people I met would instantly relax when I used the phrase ‘my boyfriend’ as if I’d passed some basic first hurdle. I liked that I was suddenly less of an outsider at home.
    There was affection too, of course. We’d watch University Challenge with me sitting at the end of the sofa with my feet in his lap, yelling out answers and whooping on the rare occasions we got one right. We did the crossword together (cryptic) and I tried not to mind if he got the clue that had been on the tip of my tongue. I loved Travis’ extravagantly curled upper lip with the perfect teardrop between it and his long, very thin nose. I loved the way his pale grey eyes were rendered practically colourless behind his severe black-framed glasses and how he looked as he bent over his textbooks, twiddling his lanky dirty-blond hair around his finger.
    But loving bits about each other isn’t the same as loving each other, is it?
    In the last couple of years, since Travis started earning a proper salary as a junior doctor, he’s become more critical. ‘Are you really wearing that?’ he’d asked the week before when we were invited to one of his medic friends’ houses for dinner and I appeared wearing my usual jeans and baggy top. He’d started socializing more, going straight out after a long shift, texting me to tell me not to count him in for dinner as he’d grab something out. He’d always been accepting of my eccentricities, but recently he’s begun snapping at me when he sees me making what he calls my ‘gormless face’ which means I was listening to something that he couldn’t hear.
    ‘Snap out of it,’ he’ll say, clicking his fingers so close to my face, my cheek will be buzzing. ‘Just think about something else.’
    He thought the voices that sometimes crowded my head were an indulgence on my part – something I could curtail with a bit of will-power.
    When we sit down together in the evening these days, and it’s not often, conversation is no longer an easy flow, but more something that has to be worked on. We stocked up on Scandinavian box sets so we don’t have to talk. We stopped making plans beyond the following weekend because of the tacit fear that we might not still be together by May Bank Holiday, or the summer. Worse, though, was the fear that we would be together, that things weren’t quite bad enough to justify splitting up, that we’d carry on coexisting ad infinitum in this limbo that wasn’t quite loveless but wasn’t love full either.
    Towards the end of