Recipes for Melissa Read Online Free PDF Page B

bit of him. The mad hair. The slightly dodgy shorts. The huffing. The puffing.
    Max did not realise that she watched from the window as he did this – tried to recover his breath, and with it his pride, before he came inside. He had taken up running soon after her diagnosis. At first he ran to burn off his anger. Now he ran every single day, setting off earlier and for longer during the spells when chemo put the physical side of their marriage on hold.
    It wasn’t rocket science.
    Eleanor badly missed making love too. Only now – watching him and wishing that she could run it off also – did she feel it properly. The realisation there was only one thing worse than imagining Max with someone else.
    And that was imagining him alone.

7
MELISSA - 2011
    They met as children – Sam and Melissa – a story that so polarised people that on that long flight Melissa again watched Sam sleeping and did what she could never help. Overthinking.
    Turns out he had been mesmerised by her from the very beginning. He had watched her and befriended her and quietly looked out for her right through their schooling – Melissa blissfully unaware it was anything more than friendship until very much later.
    One camp of friends saw this as romantic. Others not so much: ‘So you two took precisely how long to get together?’
    One of Melissa’s journalist pals had just a month back said out loud what others were clearly thinking. ‘Are you sure you haven’t – you know – settled for Sam?’
    Melissa was thrown, not because she cared a jot what other people thought but because she suddenly worried that, deep down, this might be precisely what Sam thought. The upshot was she had in recent weeks made a point of at least trying to say more often how much he meant to her.
    ‘ You do know that I love you, Sam...’
    Small wonder he had suddenly proposed.
    Melissa crossed her legs, adjusting the lever holding the food tray in place to a perfect 180 degrees and then reaching across quietly to do the same to Sam’s. Shit. She had wanted to reassure him and ended up doing precisely the opposite. She took out the flight magazine from the pocket and again began to not read it.
    She was trying now not to think about the dreadful kerfuffle at the check-in desk. Melissa closed her eyes. All her fault – the giant suitcase rejected on the grounds it exceeded the maximum weight for a single item of luggage. Her swearing and distraught then – certain the holiday was now off. Sam rolling his eyes but then quickly solving the crisis by buying a soft bag from the nearest kiosk and transferring all the heaviest shit from the case. This had, alarmingly, included the grey silk zipper pouch containing her mother’s book, and Melissa had panicked. Almost told Sam about it on the spot because she didn’t want the journal crushed in the smaller, bright pink bag. But no. She very much needed to read it on her own first. To work out, also on her own, how the hell she was going to tell her father…
    The words on the in-flight magazine now blurred. A metallic jangling sound then drew Melissa’s eye to the end of the aisle where the cabin crew were setting up the drinks trolley.
    Four and a half hours…
    The other shock. She had no idea the flying time to Cyprus was so long. That had amused Sam also, as she had grabbed the flight magazine for the map when the pilot confirmed it over the intercom.
    Did you not check the map when we booked this, Melissa?
    Of course I checked…
    Melissa glanced again at Sam, now so deeply asleep that even the noise of the trolley did not stir him.
    The truth?
    Her reaction to the whole proposal thing was irrational, confusing and a bloody mess. Melissa did not understand herself why she was so unsure about getting married and so had not the foggiest chance of explaining it to anyone. In the restaurant, she had argued that it shouldn’t matter. Only a piece of paper . But she could see this now stirring the same old doubts about