Sweet Agony by Charlotte Stein Read Free Book Online Page A

want an extra second to gather myself before I have to face whatever this is. One more moment before I get eaten by God knows what. Most likely his terrible proclivities, I know.
    Then I open my eyes, and see the most beautiful thing in all the world.
    Not a torture room for disobedient employees who break the rules.
    He has a library, a goddam library, a real honest-to-God library, right here in his house.
    And not just any old library. This is a gigantic, amazing, brilliant repository of books, like nothing I’ve ever seen or even hoped to. It spans two fucking floors. Somehow, he has hollowed out two floors of his seemingly small house and made this cavernous room of wonder. And I know he did make it, too, because every part of it is so him that I could put this picture under his name in the dictionary. Every book in here is terrifying or beautiful or ancient-seeming or all three, and whatever order they might once have been in has long ago dissolved into chaos. There are tomes piled on pamphlets piled on paperbacks, and none of them at normal angles.

    One shelf has been divided into triangles. Another is crammed so full I doubt anyone could ever pull anything out of it, though, by God, I am going to try. My very bones are already itching to do it. No force on earth could prevent me, not even him telling me that as punishment for my snooping I must spend all my days in here tidying up. After all, most of me knows what he really means.
    It comes over me in a great relief-filled rush, telling me all the things the letters and the open doors and the left-behind Dickens tried to. This is not my imagination. I didn’t see something that wasn’t there. If I had, he would never do this in a million years, because he has to understand what it is to me.
    I know he understands what this is to me.
    He saw me reading.
    And so gave me books.
    He can pretend all he wants but anyone would understand that much. He even tells me he expects some improvement when he returns in a week’s time, then begins to leave me amidst all this glorious wonder. He is going to leave me for a week, as though that is going to seem like some awful punishment. But to someone like me it never could. He overplayed his hand, and now I can see.
    Yet, when I thank him, he reacts almost strangely as he did before.
    ‘Why are you like this?’ he asks, voice so cold and faint I could almost believe I have it wrong. I say, ‘Like what?’ and brace myself for a blow. As it turns out, I was right to, just not in the way I thought. I expected a quick knife under the breastbone, bloody and brutal.
    And instead I get something that swells my heart.
    ‘So utterly forgiving and endlessly kind,’ he says.
    But here is the best part: he means it. He really and truly means it – I can see it all over his face. His expressions are usually so devoid of human feeling that any evidence of sincere emotion stands out like a stone in the middle of a field full of confetti. It takes everything I’ve got to pretend to be incredulous.

    But, damn it, I do my best.
    ‘You think I am forgiving and kind.’
    ‘Yes, of course. What else could I possibly think?’
    ‘Judging by your reaction in the piano room: that I am an intrusive, delusional arsehole,’ I venture, still expecting him to nod and utter some dry quip.
    ‘Well, yes, you are that too, I imagine.’
    But he refuses to give me even that much.
    ‘From the moment you walked up to my gate I have been nothing but a hideous nightmare to you, yet somehow you believe that you are the arsehole,’ he says, after which I have to do something. He honestly seems to think he is treating me so terribly that I should hate him – despite what I just realised and what he just did.
    Does he think I don’t know what he just did?
    I think he might not. I think I might have to explain.
    ‘I wouldn’t call you a hideous nightmare, exactly.’
    ‘Quite probably because you are utterly forgiving and endlessly kind.’
    ‘I was