The Amateur Science of Love Read Online Free PDF

ask if she’d got close to it with me but decided she would have said if she had. I worried I was just another Lionel. Or was I to take the lead more? Get her going with my tongue perhaps, like an experienced animal-man?
    She put her head on my chest. ‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘That’s my excuse for the wilder stuff I’ve done.’
    ‘What wilder stuff is that?’
    ‘Experimenting. With men.’
    She made it sound scientific, as if test tubes and white coats were involved. She had slept with an electrician who fixed the lights in her kitchen; and an art lecturer who reckoned sex with him would ‘radicalise her to extrapolations of linear impulse’. Whatever that meant.
    ‘Enough,’ I said. I put my hand gently over her mouth. I didn’t want to hear about her wilder stuff, her fleeting lovers. It brought on more nausea.

Chapter 12
    They say we fall in love. But really we fall in sickness. I lost appetite for food when I was with Tilda. We spent a third night together and my stomach was sunken in its wishbone cavity. Me, I was never sick, but I was sick now, the strangest sickness that made my eyes gleam green with excellent health. They had shiny white edges. My cheeks were glossed in a fresh oil of pink. My brow skin was cleansed suddenly of its pimple dots and squeezings like a miraculous washing from within.
    The thought of other men with her angered me. They had no right to have touched her, their butting cocks and loose belly hairs sticking to her. I could have murdered them in my imagination. If they no longer existed on this earth then Tilda’s past would die with them. So goes the sickness.
    I thought a cure might be found in countering her past by laying out mine. Not just details about Caroline, but the local farm girls—‘ they let me go inside them and I would time pulling out to perfection.’
    Tilda moaned. ‘Don’t tell me all that.’ She covered one ear with her palm and blocked the other by leaning harder into my armpit. It was happening to her too, the sickness.
    She turned onto her back. She tapped my waist to urge me onto her, into her. ‘Go inside, then,’ she whispered.
    ‘No condom?’
    ‘I trust you.’
    ‘Seriously?’
    We consummated us. Properly. Flesh to flesh.
    I did pull out, though for a paralysing instant the bliss was almost too much fever to resist.
    Tilda got paralysis too: she lost control of her Ss in the reverie. She whispered, ‘Tho good.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I juth had one.’
    ‘Had what?’
    ‘Came.’
    ‘You did?’
    ‘Yeth. A quiet one.’

Chapter 13
    Dawn next morning she was packing when I woke, buttoning her orchard shirt so hurriedly she missed holes. ‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘Sorry, but it’s best.’ She flicked her messy hair through her fists—in, over, in, over, plaiting, two elastic bands in her teeth.
    I stomped away blankets. The off-smell of our sleeping bodies hung in the stuffy air. ‘Why do you have to go?’
    ‘I have to go, and that’s that.’
    She broke a band in her haste and mumbled a series of contradictions: no, there was nothing wrong. Yes, of course there was something wrong. These have been the most superb few days for her. They have also been disastrous. ‘This is an art trip. Art is not this .’
    My wishbone sent a burp into my mouth. I wanted to sweeten my breath with toothpaste before holding her and kissing her to please stay, but there wasn’t time. ‘Let me bring you breakfast. Let’s have breakfast here in bed,’ I said.
    She stroked my chin with the inside of her fingertips, then the knuckle side. I kissed her fingers, their faint ink odour. Forever ink is her scent to me, the personal perfume of her skin. She said, ‘You’re a beautiful boy. But you are just a boy.’
    ‘I’m twenty-one. I am not a boy.’ I did not feel a boy. I did not feel a man. I was me. I did not feel any age.
    Tilda stroked some more. I flinched from her touch. ‘Three days ago I was free,’ she said. ‘I was free and open to