I Found You by Lisa Jewell Read Free Book Online Page A

magazine. ‘Can I come?’
    ‘Yeah, sure.’
    She raced to the front door, pulled on her trainers and grabbed a cagoule from the coat pegs.
    ‘Don’t be long,’ Mum called from the kitchen. ‘I’m making a pot of tea and there’ll be cake.’
    Away from the claustrophobia of Rabbit Cottage, Gray felt his temples relax, his jaw loosen, the cool rain freshen his travel-worn skin. She was almost as tall as him now, his sister, all legs and hair, not quite grown into herself but almost there. The resemblance between them was startling enough, he hoped, for it to be obvious that the gawky, scruffy girl in a damp cagoule, patterned nylon jumper and faded baggy jeans walking alongside him was not romantically connected to him in any way. She was a slow developer. She’d worn her hair in a plait down her back until only recently and still didn’t wear make-up. But she was suddenly quite desirable, he could see that, raw and new like a half-blossomed flower, embarrassingly beautiful in fact. He felt a surge of awful fear rise through him, a strange mix of disgust and tenderness. Disgust at himself for being a man, for every bad thing he’d ever thought about a girl, for his base instincts, his low-level throbbing urges, predatory needs, filthy mind, for all of it. Disgust at the knowledge that now men like him would look at his sister and think things and feel things and then purge themselves over her. And tenderness because she did not know.
    They walked in silence for a few moments, Gray absorbing and processing, the rain drying, and there, at last, a blade of sunshine at their feet.
    ‘Have you got any money?’ asked Kirsty.
    He felt his pockets for coins, pulled out a pound and some mixed change. ‘A couple of quid. Why?’
    ‘Sweets?’
    He rolled his eyes, but tipped the coins into her upheld palm. She’d had her braces off a few weeks ago and was celebrating by eating as many hard, chewy sweets as she could. He watched her shuffle into a gift shop, one of those with cone-shaped bags of floss hanging by the door, carousels of postcards, garrotted nets of buckets and spades. He turned and watched the sun filter through the striated clouds over the sea, the light changing from gold to silver, the sea glittering in response. Further ahead he saw the steam fair. It was empty; no one came to the fair in the rain – all those damp seats.
    Kirsty returned, offered him a paper bag of Cola Cubes and some of his coins. He took a sweet. She put her hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the sharpness of the sun. ‘Two weeks,’ she said with a sigh.
    ‘Exactly.’
    ‘Shall we go and see if they’re showing anything half-decent at the cinema?’
    Gray nodded and followed her away from the seafront towards the high road. The cinema was housedin a damp, one-storey breeze-block cave just off the main road. It showed one film at a time and seated a hundred people.
    ‘ Cliffhanger ,’ he read from the poster outside. ‘Fuck’s sake. I’ve already seen it.’
    Kirsty shrugged. ‘I haven’t.’
    ‘Well, I don’t want to see it again. It’s all about not knowing how it ends.’
    Gray looked closer to see if the programme was set to change at all over the next two weeks. Behind him stood his sister, sucking a Cola Cube, one hand in the pocket of her cagoule, entirely oblivious to the young man who’d just stopped on the other side of the street, his eye caught first by her long legs and then by the way her brown hair fell in damp waves around her face, framing high cheekbones and narrow brown eyes, her pretty mouth clamped around a sweet, sucking hard on it, her gaze neutral, placid, soft.
    He continued to stare at Kirsty as she followed Gray towards the high street. He had inventoried everything about her by the time they turned the corner. Her big feet, slightly turned in. Her bust, larger than expected, cocooned beneath her shapeless jumper. Her face, devoid of make-up, natural, unlike so many girls his age.