Read Online Once in a Lifetime by Cathy Kelly - Free Book Online Page B

merged. When he gently pulled her shirt away from her body and curved his fingers over her breasts, it was like he’d never done it before.
     
    Ingrid let herself melt into this fresh passion. This was his apology, she knew. He was saying sorry for his distance in the only way he could: by making love to her.
    When he finally entered her, his familiar face above hers, Ingrid felt a surge of pure happiness. This was love, she I thought, raising her head to nuzzle his shoulder. Sharing everything with another human being. She knew his body as well as she knew her own, knew when he was close to orgasm, I knew that if she concentrated on the fierce heat and if his fingers reached into her wetness, that she’d explode at the same time as him. And then it came: fireworks inside her, a single explosion searing into thousands of exquisite ripples that made her cry out.
    He fell on to his side of the bed with a groan afterwards, and Ingrid kept the contact between them by reaching one bare leg out over his. She lay there quietly and happily, listening to his breathing slow until she was sure he was asleep. ‘Goodnight, darling David,’ she murmured, kissing him.
    In reply, he muttered something she didn’t quite hear.
    With one last gentle pat, she drew the sheet up around his waist, then got out of bed to go through her night-time routine.
    Cleanse, moisturise and brush teeth. As she stood in the bathroom and carefully creamed her skin with body lotion, she reflected again on how no cosmetic could make a person feel beautiful the way being loved did.
     

Two
     
    Be true to yourself. Sounds mad, doesn’t it? I mean what’s true? But you’ll know when you get there, trust me on this.
     
    The following Saturday night Natalie Flynn sat on a barstool in Club Laguna, letting the music and the noise flow around her, and thought idly of her word for the day. Lodestone. A person or a thing regarded as a focus. Lodestone. Natalie rolled it around in her mouth. She looked up a new word in her dictionary every day. People with dyslexia were liable to have diminished vocabularies and Natalie knew she was one of them, so she’d bought a dictionary when she left school.
    Each day, she closed her eyes, opened a page and pointed.
    When she was a kid, a boy in her school named Ben had dyspraxia. Natalie asked him what it meant.
    ‘I fall over things. Clumsy, they say.’
    ‘You’re not clumsy, you’re just a big person and the world is too small for you,’ she’d said. Ben was massive, with hands like giant hams. ‘They said I was stupid. Not my family, other people did. And it turned out I’m not; I’m dyslexic, that’s all.’
    ‘All the “dy” words are bad,’ Ben said gloomily. At the time, they were sitting outside Miss Evans’s room. Miss Evans
    took Special Education classes. People who didn’t have to go to Special Ed made Hunchback of Notre Dame faces and mouthed ‘special’ as if they had speech defects at people who did. Ben and Natalie were used to it. Natalie sometimes stuck her tongue out at the people involved, but not all the time.
     
    She’d finally worked out that the people who teased about special education were the very ones in need of it themselves.
     
    Ben and Natalie considered the dy words.
     
    Dyspraxia - called clumsy by stupid people.
     
    Dyslexia - word blindness was how Natalie liked to describe it.
     
    ‘Dysfunctional,’ added Joanne, who was in her final year in school, and who went to Special Ed because she kept missing school. Joanne’s father was unreliable, which Natalie realised was some sort of adult code for crazy. During his unreliable periods, Joanne didn’t turn up for school much, which meant she would not be doing her Leaving Cert exams with everyone else in her class.
     
    Natalie sometimes wondered what Joanne was doing now.
    Joanne had seemed so grown up then, yet she’d only been four years older than Natalie. She’d be twenty-seven now.
     
    Yesterday’s word