Read Online Straight Talking by Jane Green - Free Book Online Page A

fine the day we arrived. We were, I thought, in love, even though neither of us had used the dreaded L word, but I could feel it coming. I really could.
    And then the next day, Saturday, out of the blue, Guy started to ignore me. Not completely, that would have been too obvious, but every time I spoke this intense look of irritation crossed his face.
    So I stopped speaking, unsure of what to do, of what I was doing wrong, of how to make it all right again. I waited until the evening, until we had come back for dinner, where I had done a very passable impression of everything being fine.
    We went to bed, and Guy didn’t reach out for me as he had done every night we had spent together since we met. He lay in bed and picked up a book.
    “OK,” I said, “what’s the matter?”
    “Matter?” he said, nose buried deep into his book. “Nothing’s the matter.”
    “You’re being very distant. Have I done something wrong?”
    “No, no,” he said breezily. “I’m just tired, not really in the mood for sex.” And he put his hand out and ruffled my hair, then gave me a kiss—a highly platonic kiss—on the top of my head.
    You know, don’t you? I suppose I should have known too. The first sign that a man’s going off you is when he finds an excuse not to sleep with you. When someone really fancies you, really likes you, is beginning to fall in love with you, they can’t get enough of your body, of you. When the doubts start setting in, they become tired, they don’t want to have sex, they don’t want to sleep in the same room.
    I crawled into bed feeling absolutely miserable, but maybe the kiss meant it was OK. There was certainly affection, if not passion, in that kiss, and maybe he
was
just tired.
    And then on Sunday he ignored me again, only speaking to me if he had to, and then it was coolly polite. The four of us went to St. Paul de Vence, and I felt like an outsider as the three of them laughed and joked, and bonded, leaving me feeling more and more alone.
    On Sunday night I went to bed, and Guy said he wasn’t coming to bed yet, he wanted to stay up for a while with the others. I crawled into bed and waited, and eventually Guy came upstairs. He sat on my bed and kissed me—a peck on the lips, and I kissed him back—mouth, tongues, full-on—and waited for more. But he didn’t do anything.
    I pulled him toward me, on top of me and he pulled back. “No,” he said. “This is happening too fast.”
    “What is, what do you mean by ‘this’?” I thought he meant sex in his parents’ house in the South of France, but of course the fucker didn’t, he meant what I dreaded. He meant “us.”
    “Look, Tasha. I’m sorry but I’m not in love with you. You’re not the one so I just can’t see the point in carrying on.”
    “And you brought me to the South of France, to your parents’ house to tell me this? Two days before we fucking go home?”
    “I hadn’t planned to do this. It just doesn’t feel right. I don’t feel what I should be feeling toward you. I don’t want to sleep with you, it feels like I’m forcing it.”
    “Oh, and all those times you dragged me into the kitchen a couple of days ago, when you couldn’t keep your hands off me. You were forcing yourself, were you?”
    “No, I don’t know,” he sighed, looking down at his hands. “You’re just not the one. This isn’t right.” This I couldn’t believe. I had no way of getting away and all I could think was, I wish I was at home. I wish I was lying in my bed with Stanley and Harvey to cuddle.
    “Excuse me, I’ll be back in a minute.” I ran to the bathroom and threw up, a combination of too much drink and too much pain. Not pain because I really loved Guy. Jesus, this was only three months after all, but pain because it was happening again. The pattern I thought I’d broken, the pattern that was the reason I went to see Louise in the first place, and it was still happening.
    What can I tell you about that night? That I