Whatever You Love by Louise Doughty Read Free Book Online Page B

had appropriately animal implications – there were two of them, the haunches, and two hands, two eyes – the eyes, the stare, the stare he gave when he held my head between his two large hands, immovable. Round and round they went, my thoughts of him. I wore out my images of him and then had to see him again to get a fresh set, only to find the old ones coming back again the minute we were apart, tumbling together and breaking apart like the shards of colour in a kaleidoscope. I would stop, in the middle of writing a report on one of my elderly patients, my pen lifted, momentarily confused that I was there, at my desk, writing a report, and not with him. My colleagues kept asking me if anything was wrong.
    It was hard not to pester him – I knew enough of him and men in general to realise that would send him running for the hills. So instead I was left, day after day, with my fantasies and my longings and the sick little feeling I felt inside, all the time, at the memory of the way he held my head still while he kissed me. I never once chased him. I waited for him to call me, and when he did, I always experienced a small shock at the casualness of his tone. ‘Hey you, how are you?’ he would say. Was it possible he didn’t realise how much I had been thinking of him? And I would respond, equally casual, ‘Fine, how are you?’ and be doubly shocked at myself. He’s just a man, I would say to myself, while we exchanged news. He gets up in the morning, he showers and shaves and eats breakfast, and the rest of it. There are a million other men like him in the world. It’s ludicrous to make him into something special: what do you know of him except he has a nice line in banter and fucks like an express train? So what?
    He liked to put his hands in my hair when we made love, to hold my head still so that he could stare into my eyes. ‘Give yourself to me,’ he said once, fiercely, and I stared up at him baffled – we were having sex, what did he think I was doing? He hated it if he thought I was holding anything back.
    I hated him sometimes, too – he drove me crazy, sometimes; often. I hated the way he would end a phone call abruptly if it occurred to him there was something else he should be doing. ‘Listen, I’ll call you later,’ he would say, almost mid-sentence, then hang up. If he was busy, his definition of ‘later’ could stretch to several days. I tried it on him once. He got cross. He didn’t like to hear about ex-boyfriends of mine. That made him cross too. He changed the subject irritably and was grumpy for a good hour or two – but he would have died before he admitted he was possessive. Once, in the early days, I caught him with my mobile phone in his hand, punching buttons with his thumb.
    ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
    ‘Checking what ringtones you’ve got,’ he replied. ‘You’ve had that one for ages.’ Just before he turned away, I saw that he was flicking through my call log. I should have been worried or offended – if any of my previous boyfriends had done it, I would have gone berserk – but instead, and this bothered me, I was pleased, flattered.
    He had very good table manners – for a large man, his movements were surprisingly small and neat. He had a strange grace. I never saw him drop anything, or trip over, whereas I did both all the time. He had no physical tics or mannerisms that I could discern and teased me mercilessly when I flicked my hair. He only moved if there was a purpose to the movement, yet beneath his apparent stillness was a sense of coiled energy. He asked questions all the time. I never saw him bored.
    He was only half Welsh, on his mother’s side, but in terms of his personal mythology it loomed far larger than half. He had grown up in a small coastal town not far from Aberystwyth but his family moved to Eastley when he was thirteen, where he promptly got into fights with English boys as soon as he opened his mouth. His accent was slight but became