Read Online The Bed I Made by Lucie Whitehouse - Free Book Online Page B

have catching up on missed sleep, but in fact it seemed as though his lack of opportunity for rest had lessened his body’s need for it.
    Near the beginning, though, when we’d been seeing each other for a couple of months, he’d been in Spain for a week. His flight had arrived into Heathrow late on Friday evening and he’d come straight to my flat. He’d looked exhausted when I opened the door and though normally he was up before me, the next morning I’d been first awake. I’d lain quietly for a minute or two looking at the rise and fall of his chest and the muscle in the arm which he’d flung across the bed towards me and then, filled with a sudden enthusiasm, I got up, made some coffee and went to my desk in the sitting room. I liked the idea of working while he was asleep, knowing that he was there, and I also liked the thought of him seeing me working when he woke. His work ethic was inspiring; I was pushing myself harder than I had for some time. The energy I felt now reminded me of the state of strange exultation that I’d had at university and in my early twenties when, strung out on coffee and nicotine and lack of sleep, I’d felt that the world was so full of excitement and possibility that I could go free-running over the rooftops of London without thinking of falling, vaulting from building to building with fearless ease. This, I suspected, was how he was all the time.
    The sun, which rose behind my building and moved slowly round during the day to set behind the block across the street, spilled its light further and further down the red-brick façade of the flats opposite. Their blinds were still drawn. As sometimes happened when I knew I would be interrupted, I immediately found a deep concentration and worked well for the hour or so that passed before I heard Richard’s feet padding softly over the carpet. I carried on working, my head bent over the manuscript, and he came up behind me. My hair was loose, hanging down my back over my new silk nightie, and he took hold of it near the end, gathered it into a ponytail and wrapped it carefully around his fist until his hand was tight on the nape of my neck. Then he’d pulled my head back against his lower stomach. On my shoulders I felt the heat of his skin, still warm from the bed, and in the semi-mirror of the window, I could see us, his bare torso, my face against it. His musky scent was in my nostrils and I wanted to turn around and run my tongue over his skin, kiss his stomach, but my head was held firmly in place. He’d caught the delicate new hair at the base of my scalp and it was pulling, a little painful but not unpleasurable.
    ‘Why do you work so hard?’ he said.
    I tugged my head so that I could turn and answer him but he either didn’t notice or chose to ignore me. ‘I don’t work nearly as hard as you do,’ I said.
    He laughed, tipped my chair on to its back legs and turned it round so that I was facing him. I kissed him, the tip of my nose fitting into the indent of his navel. Then he’d lifted me up and carried me through to the bedroom again. A block of sunlight was falling through the narrow window on to the bed now and I watched it play on his skin as he moved over me. ‘You didn’t tell me,’ he said afterwards.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Why you work so hard.’
    Because I don’t have anything else . The words came into my head straight away and though I’d never thought it before, I recognised the truth of it at once. Richard was watching my face and raised his eyebrows in the manner which was already so familiar to me. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘If you’re going to do something . . .’
    ‘And that’s one of the things I like about you, Katie,’ he dipped his head to kiss my breast again. ‘Why we’re so similar. No half measures.’

Chapter Seven
    Two days after I walked to Totland, I woke to find that I’d been taken over by a dreadful, wrenching anxiety. The night before, lying in bed in the dark, I’d felt an