Read Online The Last Time I Saw You by Eleanor Moran - Free Book Online Page A

clumsy question at her. I’d find her and Lola sloshing back wine in the kitchen, snorting it down their noses as they creased up about the “Nutty Professor,” and I’d somehow feel like the fun police. “What?” I’d say, and they’d try to fill me in, but the joke always fell pancake flat once they tried to translate it.
    The fact that they didn’t try very hard made me guiltily aware how blasé I’d been when it was Lola making the bedsag in the middle. Insights crept up on me unbidden, like an evening tide making its slow progress up the beach. The truth was that when you were cosseted inside Sally’s warm, seductive inner sanctum there was no advantage to looking at the shadow that it cast, but now, condemned to stand outside in the cold, my nose pressed against the glass like a Victorian urchin, I could see how she kept the furnace burning so fiercely. It needed someone to be wrong, to be the stooge: it was the intense, silent conflict that kept the energy fizzing and spitting. What frightens me is that the realization didn’t make me run for my life like a cat with a burned tail. Instead I resisted applying my brain too closely to the problem, trusted my instincts, which told me that before too long the merry-go-round would come full circle and deliver me back to my rightful place. I was like an addict, only capable of thinking about the next fix, not where that fix would ultimately leave me.
    The wilderness had its own charms; it was far enough away from Sally’s all-seeing eye to give my new relationship a fighting chance of survival. I’d never had a proper boyfriend before, only a crippling crush on James, and I had no idea what it was supposed to feel like. Most of my ideas about love came from books—Nancy Mitford and Jane Austen—so poor old Matt was subjected to quite a few dates that lacked much action. Obviously none of the Bennetts got taken out for crispy potato wedges with a ten percent student discount, but the sentiment was the same: I wanted to be wooed. We’d kiss on my bed, almost fully clothed, but if Matt tried to take it any further a bolt of fear would strike me and I’d roll away. Was it really fear? When I track back to those emotions now, they feel more like misplaced loyalty—something far more destructive and complicated, much harder to decode. Eventually his patience started to wear thin.
    “Are you just not that into it?” he asked, trying to mask his wounded pride. “You can just say it if you’re not. I’d prefer it if you did, to be honest.”
    “No I am . . .” I said, clutching his arm, suddenly frightened I would lose him. Here was fear, real fear, and it told me what we had was worth fighting for. His face automatically melted and softened, transformed by his relief, and I saw in that moment what he felt for me. I’d felt my own face do that in the past, had hidden it behind my A-level textbooks so it wouldn’t give me away. I really liked Matt, really liked having a boyfriend, but I knew my heart had some catching up to do in this particular race.
    “Then . . .”
    “I just, it’s just I haven’t actually . . .”
    “That’s okay,” he said, smiling down at me, and I knew that with him it would be. There was never an agenda with Matt, never a complicated subtext lying beneath what he told me. It was something I should have held dearer for longer, but I was too young to know how rare and special it was.
    I lost my virginity to the strains of Tapestry, worried that otherwise someone might hear. I don’t know what I expected—perhaps I thought he’d howl like Heathcliff on the wilds of the moors—but it was totally unnecessary. I lay there afterward, my head on his pigeon chest, wondering what the fuss was about (does everyone think that the first time?) and yet deeply relieved that the deed had finally been done. I wasn’t a virgin anymore! He hadn’t run screaming from my clumsy attempts at foreplay! He hadn’t screamed at all, and