Read Online We Are All Made of Stars by Rowan Coleman - Free Book Online Page A

dozing, listening to the sound of children complaining and dogs barking, when he came back, shining with sweat, grinning from ear to ear as he collapsed on the bench next to me.
    â€˜How was that?’ I asked him, letting him take my ice cream and finish it.
    â€˜Like flying,’ he told me. ‘Like launching off a cliff and taking to the air! It’s better than ice cream, it’s better than sex …’
    I saw the teasing glint in his eye as I launched at him, and some of the ice cream was smeared between us, sticky and cold. He caught me and held me and we laughed so hard I had tears running down my face. An old woman walking by took one look at us, tutted and shook her head. You could almost hear her saying, ‘They’ll learn.’
    But I decided then and there that I never would learn. I
could
never learn not to love this man. There would never be anything that would come between us.
    â€˜You look beautiful,’ Vincent had told me, suddenly quiet and still, looking hard into my eyes, that way he often did, when suddenly everything was so intense and so important, especially to me. ‘You are everything that matters, you know. I never knew, I never knew what it was like to be afraid of dying, until I met you.’
    â€˜Poetic for a squaddie, aren’t you?’ I’d said, looking away because for a moment being loved so much felt a little dangerous, as if we were inviting fate to come and punish our joy. Vincent had kissed me hard, leaving his sweat all over me. We were so connected, it felt like every molecule that made us up vibrated in unison.
    Which is maybe why I tried harder, the next time he took me running. It still felt like having my lungs clasped in some great iron clamp, and I told him I thought I might be having a heart attack. He told me I would do, too soon, if I spent my life sitting on my arse. He said he needed me to be alive longer than he was because he wouldn’t be able to live without me, so I kept going – he romanced me into trying. I followed him doggedly, praying for the moment to come when he would let me stop.
    One time after that it rained and I got soaked through to the skin, mud all over me, turning my girly trainers black. When we got home, he peeled my wet clothes off me, pulling me into the shower with him. I’d stood there, too exhausted to feel sexy, while he washed me down, kneeling in front of me, the water cascading over his shoulders, massaging my aching thighs, kissing the places in between. I decided then, I didn’t care how far I ran or how much it hurt. It was worth it because I knew then I’d follow him everywhere; I’d never leave him.
    Then one day, just a few days before he was due to go back overseas, I was following him along the canal towpath, with the spring blossom pouring down from the trees, the sun warm on my back, and I felt
joyful
. It stopped being his thing and my torture, and started being
our
thing. The thing we did together. Oh, what a smug couple we were, out running together every morning he was home on leave. If I even mentioned it to our friends, they’d stuff their fingers down their throats and pretend to vomit. Our friends: we had a lot of friends then; people circled around us. We don’t have the same friends now; we moved when he came out of the army, and he never wanted to keep in touch with any of the old crew, not my friends, anyway. His relationship with his unit is different – they are the family that he never really had.
    Now, Vincent has a lot of wonderful people who are around him all the time, pulling him forward, giving him the purpose, focus and dedication that he displays every day to the world outside our front door. But somehow I don’t have him any more, and he doesn’t seem to want me. And I am not really sure how that happened, except that after the injury everything changed, including him and me. I changed because he did, because when he