Me Before You: A Novel

(my skin had coloured now, so that wearing white didn’t automatically make me resemble a corpse wearing a shroud) and a pair of silvery strappy sandals, and when Nadil gave me a scarlet flower and instructed me to put it in my hair I didn’t scoff at him as I might have done a week earlier.
    ‘Well, hello, Carmen Miranda,’ Will said, when I met them at the bar. ‘Don’t you look glamorous.’
    I was about to make some sarcastic reply, and then I realized he was looking at me with genuine pleasure.
    ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’re not looking too shabby yourself.’
    There was a disco at the main hotel complex, so shortly before 10pm – when Nathan left to be with Karen – we headed down to the beach with the music in our ears and the pleasant buzz of three cocktails sweetening my movements.
    Oh, but it was so beautiful down there. The night was warm, carrying on its breezes the scents of distant barbecues, of warm oils on skin, of the faint salt tang of the sea. Will and I stopped near our favourite tree. Someone had built a fire on the beach, perhaps for cooking, and all that was left was a pile of glowing embers.
    ‘I don’t want to go home,’ I said, into the darkness.
    ‘It’s a hard place to leave.’
    ‘I didn’t think places like this existed outside films,’ I said, turning so that I faced him. ‘It has actually made me wonder if you might have been telling the truth about all the other stuff.’
    He was smiling. His whole face seemed relaxed and happy, his eyes crinkling as he looked at me. I looked athim, and for the first time it wasn’t with a faint fear gnawing away at my insides.
    ‘You’re glad you came, right?’ I said, tentatively.
    He nodded. ‘Oh yes.’
    ‘Hah!’ I punched the air.
    And then, as someone turned the music up by the bar, I kicked off my shoes and I began to dance. It sounds stupid – the kind of behaviour that on another day you might be embarrassed by. But there, in the inky dark, half drunk from lack of sleep, with the fire and the endless sea and infinite sky, with the sounds of the music in our ears and Will smiling and my heart bursting with something I couldn’t quite identify, I just needed to dance. I danced, laughing, not self-conscious, not worrying about whether anybody could see us. I felt Will’s eyes on me and I knew he knew – that this was the only possible response to the last ten days. Hell, to the last six months.
    The song ended, and I flopped, breathless, at his feet.
    ‘You … ’ he said.
    ‘What?’ My smile was mischievous. I felt fluid, electrified. I barely felt responsible for myself.
    He shook his head.
    I rose, slowly, on to my bare feet, walked right up to his chair and then slid on to his lap so that my face was inches from his. After the previous evening, it somehow didn’t seem like such a leap to make.
    ‘You . … ’ His blue eyes, glinting with the light of the fire, locked on to mine. He smelt of the sun, and the bonfire, and something sharp and citrussy.
    I felt something give, deep inside me.
    ‘You … are something else, Clark.’
    I did the only thing I could think of. I leant forward, and I placed my lips on his. He hesitated, just for a moment, and then he kissed me. And just for a moment I forgot everything – the million and one reasons I shouldn’t, my fears, the reason we were here. I kissed him, breathing in the scent of his skin, feeling his soft hair under my fingertips, and when he kissed me back all of this vanished and it was just Will and me, on an island in the middle of nowhere, under a thousand twinkling stars.
    And then he pulled back. ‘I … I’m sorry. No –’
    My eyes opened. I lifted a hand to his face and let it trace his beautiful bones. I felt the faint grit of salt under my fingertips. ‘Will … ’ I began. ‘You can. You –’
    ‘No.’ It held a hint of metal, that word. ‘I can’t.’
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    ‘I don’t want to go into it.’
    ‘Um … I think you have to go into it.’
    ‘I can’t do this because I can’t … ’ he swallowed. ‘I can’t be the man I want to be with you. And that means that this –’ he looked up into my face ‘– this just becomes … another reminder of what I am not.’
    I didn’t let go of his face. I tipped my forehead forward so that it touched his, so that our breath mingled, and I said, quietly, so that only he could have heard me, ‘I don’t care what you … what you think you