Things I Want My Daughters to Know Read Online Free PDF Page B

water, like a toddler, laughing and crying, and gasping. He’d gone in to fish her out, and she’d pulled him down beside her and then they’d both been too wet and too giggly for the night bus, and they’d gone to the cashpoint for money and taken a cab home. She only gave the driver one address.
    At her flat, she pulled him into the hot shower the same way she’d grabbed for him in the cold fountain, and they’d undressed each other there, kissing with drunken abandon and then with something else.
    He wouldn’t have taken it any further. He knew she was completely inebriated, and he’d been to that awkward, short movie with other girls before and determined not to again, but she looked at him through half-closed eyes only partly glazed and told him exactly what she wanted. And then she’d showed him, pushing him back on the soft unmade bed and straddling him, lowering herself onto him gently, but determinedly. When he was buried deep inside her, reveling in how hot and moist and fantastic she felt, Lisa leaned forward and whispered his name, “Andy,” once, into his open mouth, as if to release him from responsibility, before she leaned back, her soft round breasts arching upward beautifully, to ease herself into a fast, powerful orgasm. And Andy couldn’t believe his luck.
    He couldn’t believe it the next day, either, when she brought him coffee in bed. Three sugars in hers, obviously.
    “How come you’re so perky?” he groaned at her, rousing himself from a place far, far away, where he could happily have stayed all day.

    T h i n g s I W a n t M y D a u g h t e r s t o K n o w 27
    “Great sex does that for me.”
    “It was great sex?!”
    She slapped his thigh playfully.
    “Don’t fish for compliments. It was great sex. Least it was for me.
    Think you got left a little behind.”
    He shrugged sheepishly. To be honest, his memory of the night before wasn’t all that detailed.
    “But I’ll make that up to you, if you like. Tonight?” She looked at her watch. “Not quite enough time this morning, I don’t think. . . .”
    He put his own mug down on the bedside table and took hers from her. Then he pulled her down next to him and pushed the dressing gown she was wearing off her shoulders.
    “I suggest we make time. . . .”
    They’d both been very late for the sales meeting that morning.
    And that was how it had been—the first six months had flown by in a blur of wine and sex and laughter. In the next six months they’d calmed down a bit. She said she knew when things got serious, because they took to lingering in restaurants, eating dessert and drinking coffee instead of rushing home after one course, desperate to tear each other’s clothes off.
    She said she lost ten pounds in the first half of their first year, with all the
    “exercise,” and put it all on again in the second half, eating pudding.
    After a year, he wanted more. They went to the Greek Islands on holiday that summer. He lay on his beach towel and watched her lovely lithe figure saunter down to the sea to paddle, and he realized that he felt as happy as he ever had. Emboldened by retsina, later that night he took her hand, told her that he loved her—a sentence he had seldom volunteered—and asked her to move in with him. He wanted to see her every day and every night. Maybe forever. It had taken her another few months, and several more requests, to agree. She’d given up her flat after Christmas and come to live with him.
    So on paper, he had what he wanted. He saw her every day and every night. But he didn’t have her. He knew it and so did she. She was holding 28 e l i z a b e t h
    n o b l e
    herself back from him. It frightened him. He believed himself in deeper than she was and that made him vulnerable. He wanted things to keep moving, but she was always putting on the brakes. He couldn’t keep bringing it up with her. On the couple of occasions when he had tried talking about what might come next, she withdrew a