The Blue Book by A. L Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page A

and predictable memories or the fantasies that might defend you from the present, too present, reality of him.
    The tiny idea of naming him darling is almost unsurvivably arousing.
    Which is beyond preposterous.
    You are turning innocent and selfless to such a degree that if your absence would please him, you’d disappear.
    You would have to go.
    But you can’t go.
    You couldn’t go.
    You couldn’t leave while his voice is purring in your skull, purring and curling and thinking your thoughts and you look at your hands and feel his fingers, as if you have become each other’s gloves – and the sound of his breath and when he swallows could set you falling, could take you to a place where you might weep, where you are far out of your mind, but still at home in it, at liberty inside yourself as you have never been.
    Many people take to this, are delighted to be found and lost, possessing and possessed.
    You are not one of those people.
    You were not one of those people.
    But your selves have bled together now, blurred and joined. He has made of you a unified need, a piece of desperation, by being here and existing – effortless.
    And his manner of existing means you will not be having sex with him.
    Which is to say, you will have sex with him, but you also will not.
    You will be complicated.
    You will touch – will begin with touch – will slip and slither and hold and rock and cling. You will fuck – but you wouldn’t, you truly wouldn’t, if it wasn’t entirely impossible to say what you need to in any other way.
    It won’t be sex , it will be speaking .
    And – God help you – it will also be admiration, tenderness, concern – this excruciating list of necessities which are all chained to making love .
    You will make love .
    You are in love .
    You weren’t when he was leaning in the doorway.
    Then he stepped over here and you were.
    You are.
    It isn’t fair.
    It isn’t fucking fair.
    Because you know what it will mean.
    You will lie down with him and be naked – not en route to the usual somethings and, for the sake of practicality, undressed – no, you will be irrevocably naked, stripped – you will be all skin and jolts and talking and – for fucksake – honesty will break out and that’s when you will come unhinged, because you aren’t going to leave him while he sleeps, sneak off and never come back, and you won’t act as if you expect him to smother you in the night, or that you’ll wake up in a quarry later with a head injury and no shoes. And you’re not going to keep it brutal and light in the morning, say you’ll call . You’re going to rest unconscious in the almost unbearable mercy of his arms and want the trust of that and like it – you’re going to stretch and turn into the day for more of the same and for enquiries and delicate smiles and whispers in case he’s not awake, except he is awake – why else would you be talking to him? – he’s awake and listening and whispering as well and you both keep on whispering so you can still dream each other and be not yet in the world.
    And then you’ll have breakfast when it’s time for lunch.
    And suddenly, unforeseeably, how much you will have to do: memorising mutual preferences, habits, frustrations, ticks – and you’ll discuss – you will have to discuss – God knows – futures and kittens, or dogs, or stealing a baby from outside a shop – you probably won’t have the time to make one of your own – and, if not that, then certainly there will be carpets and curtains to consider and accommodation, gardens, flats, renting, mortgages, life insurance, drawing up your wills – and what if he dies before you? – then you’ll be upset – and planning how many you’ll have at the wedding breakfast – although you might want something quick, a quiet affair with