Me Before You: A Novel

listed as beer, garage chocolate, talking about sport and sex (doing, not talking about), in that order. A good night out for us would probably comprise all four. He was ordinary-looking rather than handsome, and his bum was podgier than mine, but I liked it. I liked the solidity of him, the way he felt when I wrapped myself around him. His dad was dead and I liked the way he acted towards his mother; protective and solicitous. And his four brothers and sisters were like the Waltons. They actually seemed to like each other. The first time we went out on a date, a little voice in my head said:
This man will never hurt you
, and nothing he had done in the seven years since had led me to doubt it.
    And then he turned into Marathon Man.
    Patrick’s stomach no longer gave when I nestled into him; it was a hard, unforgiving thing, like a sideboard, and he was prone to pulling up his shirt and hitting it with things, to prove quite how hard it was. His face was planed, and weathered from his time spent constantly outdoors. His thighs were solid muscle. That would have been quite sexy in itself, had he actually wanted to have sex. But we were down to about twice a month, and I wasn’t the kind to ask.
    It was as if the fitter he got, the more obsessed by his own shape he became, the less interested he was in mine. I asked him a couple of times if he didn’t fancy me any more, but he seemed pretty definite. ‘You’re gorgeous,’ he would say. ‘I’m just shattered. Anyway, I don’t want you to lose weight. The girls at the club – you couldn’t make onedecent boob out of all of theirs put together.’ I wanted to ask how exactly he had come to work out this complex equation, but it was basically a nice thing to say so I let it go.
    I wanted to be interested in what he did, I really did. I went to the triathlon club nights, I tried to chat to the other girls. But I soon realized I was an anomaly – there were no girlfriends like me – everyone else in the club was single, or involved with someone equally physically impressive. The couples pushed each other on workouts, planned weekends in spandex shorts and carried pictures of each other in their wallets completing triathlons hand in hand, or smugly comparing joint medals. It was unspeakable.
    ‘I don’t know what you’re complaining about,’ my sister said when I told her. ‘I’ve had sex once since I had Thomas.’
    ‘What? Who with?’
    ‘Oh, some bloke who came in for a Vibrant Hand-Tied,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to make sure I still could.’
    And then, when my jaw dropped, ‘Oh, don’t look like that. It wasn’t during working hours. And they were funeral flowers. If they had been wife flowers, of course I wouldn’t have touched him with a gladioli.’
    It’s not that I was some kind of sex maniac – we’d been together a long time, after all. It’s just that some perverse bit of me had begun to question my own attractiveness.
    Patrick had never minded the fact that I dressed ‘inventively’, as he put it. But what if he hadn’t been entirely truthful? Patrick’s job, his whole social life now revolved around the control of flesh – taming it, reducing it, honing it. What if, faced with those tight little tracksuitedbottoms, my own suddenly seemed wanting? What if my curves, which I had always thought of as pleasantly voluptuous, now seemed doughy to his exacting eyes?
    These were the thoughts that were still humming messily around my head as Mrs Traynor came in and pretty much ordered Will and me to go outside. ‘I’ve asked the cleaners to come and do a special spring clean, so I thought perhaps you could enjoy the nice weather while they’re all in there.’
    Will’s eyes met mine with the faintest lift of his eyebrows. ‘It’s not really a request, is it, Mother?’
    ‘I just think it would be good if you took some air,’ she said. ‘The ramp is in place. Perhaps, Louisa, you might take some tea out there with you?’
    It wasn’t an entirely unreasonable suggestion. The garden was beautiful. It was as if with the slight lifting of temperatures everything had suddenly decided to look a little bit greener. Daffodils had emerged as if from nowhere, their yellowing bulbs hinting at the flowers to come. Buds burst from brown branches, perennials forcing their way tentatively through the dark, claggy soil. I opened the doors and we went outside, Will keeping his chair on the York stone path. He gestured towards a cast-iron