The Book of You: A Novel by Claire Kendal Read Free Book Online Page A

profile, so he got in touch. He’s advising me on that memoir I’ve always wanted to write.”
    The blood is pulsing behind my eyes. “He cyberstalked you.”
    “That’s melodramatic. And paranoid.” She apologizes to you. “Clarissa didn’t mean it.”
    “Yes I did.” Everything is in shadows. I shake my head several times to try to clear it, and then I make myself focus on you, the very thing I hate to do. “You don’t know anything about writing a memoir. You’re just a literary critic.” I say the last two words like they’re the worst insult I can think of.
    “I have a number of talents and interests you haven’t yet discovered, Clarissa.”
    There you go again. Punctuating every sentence with my name in your freakish way. Why doesn’t Rowena see how weird it is? A sob comes out of my throat before I can stop it. “You don’t need him, Rowena. You can join a writing group. He’s using you to get at me.”
    “Not everything is about you. That’s so unbelievably arrogant. Not to mention ridiculous. Rafe and I only just discovered a few weeks ago that we have you in common.”
    I squeeze my eyes shut, then open them again, not caring how peculiar I must look. “What a coincidence.”
    “Isn’t it, Clarissa,” you say.
    “We both care about you,” Rowena says.
    “Very much,” you say.
    “Did he tell you about this morning? When he was waiting outside my house? When the taxi driver had to threaten him with the police? When he knew I didn’t want him to be there?”
    You are shaking your head in a pantomime of how wounded and misunderstood you are. Your performance is clear even through the murky vapor of this awful room. “Clarissa,” you say. “Oh, Clarissa. How could you think this way?”
    I can barely stop myself from dashing your face with iced water from the nearby jug.
    Rowena touches your arm. “Rafe’s concerned about you. That’s why I came down.”
    The irony isn’t lost on me that it’s only because of you that she got in touch after two years of silence.
    She is regarding me with disappointment. “He told me you haven’t been yourself lately. That you’ve been acting strange at work. I asked him to keep an eye on you until I could get here. I never dreamed you’d be so unkind to him.”
    A vein throbs in my forehead as I fully grasp how much trouble you took to set this up, how much time you spent plotting and manipulating, how much advance planning you did, how much patience and discipline you exerted over yourself in waiting for tonight. Rowena was the ideal target for you. She is visibly injured, her vulnerability and desperation carved into her new breasts and face. You groomed her. You totally maneuvered her. You actually charmed her.
    If you have friends in common, he may turn them against you by dismissing your worries or claiming you behaved unreasonably to him.
    It’s as if you’ve read the anti-stalker leaflets, too, and you’re using all of their advice against me. We have no friends in common, so you went and made Rowena into one.
    My throat is tight, but my vision is clearing. “That’s not how it was.”
    You’re smirking now, enjoying yourself: two women fighting about you. You’ve put me in a position where I have to talk to you and look at you and pay attention to you. Already you’ve forced me to break the resolution of silence that I made only this morning.
    “You can’t not believe me, Rowena.” If my own friend trusts your story over mine, if she actually thinks you’re plausible, then there’s no hope that the police will ever take me seriously. There’s no hope for Miss Lockyer, either.
    You are sucking on an olive, watching me. You take the stone out of your mouth slowly, sensuously. There’s a sheen of oil on your lips. It makes me shudder, and I tear my eyes away, wishing my vision hadn’t snapped into this new hyperacuteness.
    Rowena pats my hand lightly. “Let’s change the subject, Clarissa, and put the evening back on