Read Online How We Met by Katy Regan - Free Book Online

her life.
    ‘Can I say something?’ she said.
    ‘Go for your life.’
    ‘Promise you won’t take offence?’
    ‘No, but I’ll try.’
    ‘Well, it’s just you say that. You say you can’t get out of bed in the morning, but it wasn’t you who died, was it?’
    Fraser frowned. ‘No. If it had, I definitely wouldn’t be getting out of bed, would I?’
    ‘I don’t think that’s my point,’ said Mia, thinking God, he could be facetious when he wanted to.
    ‘So what is your point?’
    ‘My point is, we are still alive, aren’t we?’
    ‘Yeees …’
    ‘We still have our lives so, in a way, all we can do is get on with it. Liv would have wanted that. I know she won’t be able to do all those things on the List but maybe …’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Well, maybe we can do them for her?’
    She looked at him, unsure. Fraser pulled a face.
    ‘If you think I’m making a Roman blind or learning how to meditate, you have got another thing coming.’
    Mia rolled her eyes.
    ‘Well, nobody’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to do, but don’t you think it would be a laugh? A bit of structure at least. A project? We could get everyone else roped in too.’
    Fraser considered this for a second. ‘What, Norm and Melody making a homemade porn film at some dodgy B&B in Morecambe?’
    ‘Yes, if you think that would work for you, put a smile on that face.’ She got hold of his cheeks and tugged them.
    Fraser stuck his tongue out.
    ‘Promise me Spanner will not get the swimming naked in the sea one. She’d love it too much and we’d never get her out – which would defeat the object.’
    ‘If you insist. You can be List secretary if you like.’
    ‘Hey, we could all go to China together! We could all climb the Great Wall together – me and you, what do you reckon?’
    ‘I reckon this is much more like it.’ Mia smiled.
    And so they went on. They ordered more coffee, they stayed at the café and they hatched their plan. Fraser baggsying, ‘Vegas, baby!’

FIVE
April
London
    Fraser stands outside Top Shop on Oxford Street, occasionally craning his neck to see if he can make out Karen coming towards him, out of the crowds. They’ve been seeing one another for five weeks now, although Fraser doesn’t quite know how this happened. One minute, Karen was just a friendly, regular face behind the bar, someone who listened patiently as he got more drunk and morose; the next, she was his girlfriend, all seemingly without him having experienced any cognitive processes whatsoever.
    As he stands there, April blossom scurrying around his feet, Fraser suspects it’s happened simply because he couldn’t come up with a good enough, fast enough reason why it shouldn’t.
    Karen called him the night after he got back from Lancaster, asking him if he fancied going for a curry as she had a two-for-one voucher at the Taj Mahal. Fraser said yes, mainly because he had no food in the house and somehow the voucher thing made it seem more innocuous, and that was that. They went for a slap-up Mexican the week after that, then ‘a beer’ one Monday night that somehow ended up in Karen’s bed, her giving him a back massage to the strains of Enya and, before he knew it, he had himself a girlfriend – as well as, he feared, the onset of heart disease. Karen isn’t really one to pick at lettuce leaves, put it like that, but then he’s always liked that in a girl.
    And it’s nice to have someone to go out for curries with. He likes having another body in the house, someone who calls him at work, who comes round and cooks for him –
finally
, someone who knows what to do with lemon grass. It’s comforting and grounding.
    However, she started, about a fortnight in, to buy him random ‘love gifts’, as she calls them, which makes Fraser feel special and anxious in equal measure: a four-pack of Ambrosia Devon custard, for example, after he said this was his favourite childhood dessert (this is the sort of question Karen likes