Eat Your Heart Out by Katie Boland Read Free Book Online

he’s really cool. Maybe it’s too advanced for me or something,” says Grace.
    â€œYou do like Coldplay.”
    â€œWell, I did. I can’t listen to them anymore.”
    â€œWhy?”
    Grace looks down at her drink. She looks up at Sam again and smiles, but her lips, full and red, look stretched and uneven.
    â€œI don’t want to tell you,” she says.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause you’ll make fun of me.”
    Sam knows immediately, instinctively, where this conversation is going, and he doesn’t like it.
    â€œOh no. Not because of—”
    â€œYes. Because of Graham. Because we listened to them together, because we liked them . . . together.”
    â€œOkay, that just proves that I’m right. That guy was a douche.”
    â€œYeah, well, I don’t know.”
    â€œHow is he not?” Sam asks her. He knows he’s right and Grace does too, but she can’t quite bring herself to really know it, in a lasting way. That it’s that black and white; that he was all bad, no good, but she had always held her breath for too a hair long. Blind and suffocating, she could never call anything.
    â€œWell, he loved me, Sam. Like he really loved me. Luke is the douche—he doesn’t really love me, not at all. That’s why we fight, even though he’s home with me for Christmas. He can’t even begin to touch the part of me that Graham touched. He doesn’t even want to try. And it’s embarrassing, but it makes me miss Graham. So there you are. I still miss Graham.”
    â€œGraham didn’t really love you.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œHe cheated on you, all those times.”
    â€œIt must look so simple from the outside,” says Grace.
    â€œSam, he was fucked up, he fucked up, but that doesn’t have anything to do with how much you love people. I know he really loved me.”
    â€œNo, Grace, someone who really loved you wouldn’t be able to do that to you.”
    â€œI don’t know. I thought it was that cut and dried when we broke up. I’m not sure now.”
    Then Sam sees the sadness in her face again and thinks that maybe he’s gone too far.
    â€œYou know what’s fucked? I’d want Luke to cheat on me, if it meant he would look at me how Graham did, even once. I just want to know that someone else will look at me like that. But I tell myself that people love differently and that Luke does love me. I tell myself that it’s not always obvious when people really love you. Maybe it can be under the surface.”
    That’s true, thinks Sam. You can keep it hidden. But it hurts.
    â€œJesus Christ, all this shit is just depressing,” she says.
    The privacy of that kind of love scars.
    â€œYeah.” He doesn’t know why he’s laughing.
    â€œQuestion,” she says.
    â€œShoot,” he says.
    â€œDoes Lily make you more happy or unhappy?”
    He’s thrown off kilter. “Happy! Definitely more happy.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œYeah, she’s really smart, and funny, and, well, you know her.”
    Grace thinks for a moment.
    â€œI don’t know her. She doesn’t talk.”
    Sam met Lily at the beginning of university and has always tried very hard to keep her and Grace apart. Lily is the kind of girl who doesn’t follow politics. She can’t remember the last time she fought with someone. She is studying to be a gym teacher and tries every day to wear one blue item of clothing. Her hair is always remarkably the same, somehow untouched and unmoved from the moment she wakes up in the morning. It took Sam two years to realize that she didn’t wear any makeup at all.
    She told Sam once that she hated the absence of him more than she loved the presence of him and thought that was the mark of a good relationship.
    â€œWell, yeah, it’s hard to know Lily. To really know her, but it’s good between us. I