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

maybe that was a bad thing, but the way he was stroking my hair told me that he was happy to be here with me.
    I spent the whole of the next day reveling in the idea of how womanly and sophisticated I now was—I boughtmy fair-trade common room coffee with a flirtatious smile, I pulled out my library card with a Gallic flourish—the world had a different complexion now I was part of its secret conversation. I couldn’t help wondering if Sally would sense the change in me, even if she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.
    My newfound confidence made me risk finding out. Matt had practice for swimming team, so I had a night to myself, and I gingerly approached her door, tapping on it lightly with the neck of the bottle of wine I held trapped between two glasses. I could hear noises from inside, but she didn’t invite me in.
    “Sally?”
    “I can’t deal with you now,” she shouted, voice shrill, and I felt like she’d hit me.
    “Okay, I’ll just be next door if—”
    At that moment she flung the door open, her face a mess of mascara, her hair a tangled mop. I’d never seen her like this; there was something genuinely frightening about the rawness of her, the lack of veneer.
    “Livvy,” she sobbed, flinging her arms around me so hard she almost winded me. I dropped the bottle, hugged her close, following her into her chaotic room. She was clad in a ratty old sweatshirt, far removed from the polished kind of outfits I was used to seeing her in. I rubbed her back through the fabric, waiting for her gulping sobs to subside.
    “Sally, what’s wrong? What’s happened?”
    “He doesn’t love me,” she wailed.
    “The Nutty Professor?”
    “Don’t call him that! Gabriel. He doesn’t love me.”
    I hadn’t really thought about it as a love affair. Sally seemed so blithe and knowing when she talked about men,and I guess I thought she was living out a rite of passage—the passionate affair with an older man—rather than risking her heart.
    “Did he actually say that?”
    “Yes, I wouldn’t be saying it if he hadn’t! He said that I was very beguiling”—she put this in angry quotation marks that she drew in the air—“but he can’t leave Monica.”
    “What, he’s married?”
    “No. He lives with her, but they sleep in separate rooms.”
    Even I, a virgin twenty-four hours earlier, could smell the whiff of bullshit. How could someone as worldly as Sally have fallen for it?
    “Did you know? I mean, that he was living with someone when it started.”
    “He told me like, the second time, but he cried.” She turned to look at me, big eyes as wide and vulnerable as Bambi’s. “He cried in my arms.” In that moment my heart went out to her, my bruised heart that knew all too well what it felt like to love someone who felt for you, but not in the way that would make sense of everything, that would turn a jumble of notes into a symphony. I put my arm around her shoulder, poured a glass of wine with my free hand.
    “He’s a bastard, Sally. He’s got no right . . .” I felt myself puffing up with outrage at the thought of this smug manipulator taking advantage of my amazing friend. “You’re better off without him.” Unfortunately my lack of life experience meant that most of my advice sounded like a direct steal from the Just Seventeen agony column.
    “But I love him,” she said, a fresh sob erupting from the depths.
    “I know you love him now, but it’ll change,” I said, painfully aware of my own feelings for James. I forced myself tothink of Matt, his mottled arms slicing determinedly through the water, his belief in the importance of committing to everything he signed up to. “It’s got to.”
    “It won’t,” she said, a bleakness about her that made me feel helpless. I could sense she’d gone into terrain that I didn’t recognize, a place where my upbeat appeals to the essential rightness of the world would fall on stony ground.
    “When did you fall in love with him?” I