Killing Me Softly by Nicci French Read Free Book Online Page A

five thousand miles ahead, were the terminus, buffers and disaster, but for the moment all I could feel was delirious speed. Adam reappeared around the corner. He looked up at the window and saw me. He didn’t smile or wave, but he quickened his pace. I was his magnet; he mine.
    When we had finished eating I licked the tomato pulp off his fingers.
    ‘You know what I love about you?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘ One of the things. Everybody else I know has a sort of uniform they wear and things to go with it – keys, wallets, credit cards. You look as if you’ve just dropped naked from another planet and found odd bits of clothes and just put them on.’
    ‘Do you want me to put them on?’
    ‘No, but…’
    ‘But what?’
    ‘When you went outside just now, I watched you as you went. And I mainly thought that this was wonderful.’
    ‘That’s right,’ said Adam.
    ‘Yes, but I suppose I was also secretly thinking that one day we’re going to have to go out there, into the world. I mean both of us, together, in some way. Meet people, do things, you know.’ As I spoke the words, they sounded strange as if I were talking about Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden. I became alarmed. ‘It depends what you want, of course.’
    Adam frowned. ‘I want you,’ he said.
    ‘Yes,’ I said, not knowing what ‘yes’ meant. We were silent for a long time and then I said, ‘You know so little about me, and I know so little about you. We come from different worlds.’ Adam shrugged. He didn’t believe any of this mattered at all – not my circumstances, my job, my friends, my political beliefs, my moral landscape, my past – nothing. There was some essence-of-Alice that he had recognized. In my other life, I would have argued vehemently with him over his mystical sense of absolute love, for I have always thought that love is biological, Darwinian, pragmatic, circumstantial, effortful, fragile. Now, besotted and reckless, I could no longer remember what I believed and it was as if I had returned to my childish sense of love as something that rescued you from the real world. So now I just said, ‘I can’t believe it. I mean, I don’t even know what to ask you.’
    Adam stroked my hair and made me shiver. ‘Why ask me anything?’ he said.
    ‘Don’t you want to know about me? Don’t you want to know the details of what my work involves?’
    ‘Tell me the details of what your work involves.’
    ‘You don’t really want to know.’
    ‘I do. If you think what you do is important, then I want to know.’
    ‘I told you already that I work for a large pharmaceutical company. For the last year I’ve been seconded to a group who are developing a new model intrauterine device. There.’
    ‘You haven’t told me about you,’ Adam said. ‘Are you designing it?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Are you doing the scientific research?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Are you marketing it?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Well, what the fuck are you doing?’
    I laughed. ‘It reminds me of a lesson I had at Sunday School when I was a child. I put up my hand and I said that I knew that the Father was God, and that the Son was Jesus, but what did the Holy Spirit do?’
    ‘What did the teacher say?’
    ‘He had a word with my mother. But in the development of the Drakloop III, I’m like the Holy Spirit. I interface, arrange, drift around, go to meetings. In short, I’m a manager.’
    Adam smiled and then looked serious. ‘Do you like that?’
    I thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know, I don’t think I’ve said this clearly, even to myself. The problem is that I used to like the routine part of being a scientist that other people find boring. I liked working on the protocols, setting up the equipment, making the observations, doing the figures, writing up the results.’
    ‘So what happened?’
    ‘I suppose I was too good at it. I got promoted. But I shouldn’t be saying all of this. If I’m not careful you’ll discover what a boring woman you’ve