The Chocolate Run Read Online Free PDF

sure you want to do this?’ His voice was throaty with desire.
    What sort of a question is that? I asked silently as our eyes met. Of course I’m not sure!
    Let’s put aside the sex with a friend issue, for a moment. This was a big step. I’d gone eighteen months without sex. And, after eighteen months, you’ve got to be careful about who you go with: leap into bed at haste; fake your own death, change your identity and move countries to get away from him at leisure.
    On the other hand, eighteen months without sex was eighteen months without being caressed, sweet-talked and lusted after. After all those months and months of healthy eating, after more than a year of the sexual equivalent of lettuce and salad and cottage cheese, if you’re offered the most gorgeous tart on a plate, the one with the freshest, gooiest jam, the fluffiest cream, the crumbliest pastry, what do you say? ‘No thanks, I’m on a diet’?
    I got up, bundled my jumper and his jumper under one arm, held out the other hand to him.
    I’d never been good at diets.

chapter four
    movie loving
    It was February.
    Cloudy-skied, dark by six o’clock, air loaded with moisture. A short blast of wind blew right at me, whipping up my bobbed black hair and throwing open my long black winter coat. It’s far too cold for going out for Jen’s birthday dressed like this , I decided as I ran my hand through my hair to flatten it again and pulled shut my coat.
    I was wearing the equivalent to twenty-four carat gold. Amid a need to not let the side down when we went out for a posh dinner, I’d gone shopping for a new dress. It’d stood out, a red and pink shimmer in the blacks, blues and greys in the shop. I’d picked it up and tried it on before I checked the price tag. Once it was on, I turned the price tag over. Even though my heart skipped a beat, I had to have it. It could have been made for me: it emphasised my cleavage, skimmed over my waist, hugged my hips, gently flared out to my ankles. It fit all over. I had to have it. My bottle had almost gone at the till and my hand had started to shake as I signed under the three-figure sum – that’s three figures before the decimal point. (Spending like that went right against the grain. I was earning a decent wage but, at heart, I was a sale rail girl – it was always the first area I headed for in a shop.)
    I’d also re-employed my red wedge-heeled shoes with straps that criss-crossed up to my knees which always left me hobbling for a couple of days after wear. Tights weren’t an option with those shoes and the minute I left the building my bare legs became a mass of painful little goose bumps.
    I should know better. I did know better. I was a thirty-year-old Southerner, I felt even the slightest drop in temperature in every part of my body. I thought I’d moved to Siberia when I first came to college in Leeds twelve years ago. My first winter here I’d called my parents and asked them to post me every jumper I’d left at home; begged them to lend me some money so I could buy two duvets and more knitwear; and wore gloves almost permanently. It was still a wonder that I’d decided to settle up here. Or that I dared leave anywhere centrally heated without thermals and at least three layers.
    Holding my coat close to my shivery body, I picked my way across town towards The Conservatory. Lights from street-lamps and cars shimmered up from the slick streets like the soporific globules in lava lamps; looking at them took me back to Friday night.
    In the movies, when two people get together they make slow, soft-focused, backlit love to a smooth, saxophone sound-track. They lie entwined afterwards, with strategically placed sheets covering their bits, talking in hushed tones.
    Not Greg and me. When we got to the bedroom on Friday night we leapt on each other like hungry lions thrown an antelope’s carcass, almost tearing the clothes off each other. Then doing it in an intense, scary, filthy way. Every time