I Think I Love You Read Online Free PDF Page A

shock and put a protective hand to her own ample bosom. She had gone the same color as the letter.
    “I made up that last bit,” said Bill, with modest pride.
    “Mmm, sometimes,” she said at last, gulping the word out, “I wonder if—”
    “I mean, don’t they
realize
, these daft kids, I don’t even
own
a cheesecloth shirt, let alone a necklace made from puka shells. Whatkind of sea creature is a puka, anyway? Look at me. I’m wearing the bottom half of a brown suit from John Collier that cost eleven quid. I don’t want to wear a suit, but you keep telling me this is a proper job. I want to wear jeans, except that my jeans aren’t like David Cassidy’s. I don’t unbutton the fly at the top so you can see my pu—”
    “William!”
    “Well, I don’t. I do it up properly. And I’m not sure I even have any eyelashes, let alone long ones. He looks like a Jersey calf. And I don’t have mirrored shades because I would look a total spaz and because it’s always dark here anyway, unlike sunny bloody California, and because people would take the mickey and look into the mirrored bits and try to brush their hair. The only thing I can do like David Cassidy is sing. I was in the school choir and I did a solo on ‘Morning Has Broken.’ My aunt made me sing it into a tape deck afterward. Christ almighty.”
    “All of which proves what a good mimic you are. My point in the first place.” Zelda had recovered her composure. “Anyone who can make a girl sit down and write a poem as heartfelt as that must be doing something right.”
    “Heartfelt? Zelda, they don’t
have
hearts. They have a bucket of raging hormones and a need to follow whatever their friends are doing and not fall behind, whether they want to or not. They think they’re in love, but it’s just a projection. They’re like … like illusionists, deceiving themselves.”
    Zelda was out of her depth here. She felt the conversation slip its moorings and drift from her grasp, into areas where she had no experience and even less wish to go. Almost three decades in the magazine business had taught her what worked, and that was that. The year she started as a typist on
Picture Post
, thousands of bobby-soxers had gone crazy for a new kid called Frank Sinatra at the New York Paramount. The girls refused to leave their places between shows, even to go to the lavatory. “Not a dry seat in the house,” one reporter joked. That phrase had stuck in Zelda’s mind, witty yet strangely animal and unpleasant. What did it tell you about the young female that she was prepared to wet herself in order to deny another girl the chance to get near her hero? Poor William was a bit of an intellectual. He hadn’t woken up to the power of what he was dealing with. She would have to send him toa Cassidy concert, where he could observe the little lionesses when their prey came into view. The February concerts had been canceled because David had to have an operation. Roy was furious, of course, what with having a whole vanful of memorabilia to unload. Now he’d have to store it in a lockup on York Way till spring, when there were two concerts penciled in. One for Manchester, one for Wembley.
    Zelda smiled. Imagine William standing like Gulliver with all those teenies surging around him. She loved the idea of the pretend David coming face-to-face with the real one. Wouldn’t mind being there herself actually.
    “Chas will be back with the sarnies,” she declared, and moved away from the features area, in stately fashion, heading for the safe haven of her desk, which indicated its superiority to the rest with a partition made of potted plants. In its bottom drawer was a pack of John Player Specials and half a bar of Old Jamaica, for after the bacon sandwich. Nice cup of Nes. All would be well.
    Bill had not wanted the job with Worldwind Publishing, but when Roy Palmer made him the offer even he could see that he didn’t really have a choice. Eleven months after leaving