Whatever You Love Read Online Free PDF

given any indication that we were interested in one another. He stared back at me, his gaze both purposeful and blank, and in one deliberate, hot-eyed moment did the work of a whole evening’s worth of flirting. It was a bold gesture and I knew it for what it was. I also knew it was quite beyond most other boys our age. I was impressed.
    I did what I was supposed to do. I returned the stare for a couple of seconds, acknowledged it, then looked to one side with a hint of embarrassment, as if I was flattered but caught off-balance, intrigued but a little nervous. I glanced at the ground, which made my hair tumble in front of my face. As I looked up again, I had to push my hair back with one hand and play with it a bit to get it to stay behind my ear. When I eventually looked at David, he was smiling at me. I smiled back. God you’re cheap, Laura, I thought.
    He stuck his hand into the inside pocket of his bulky coat and pulled out a biro. I took it from him, then took hold of the hand, twisted the palm upwards and wrote my number on the fleshy part of his thumb. He winced melodramatically. While I was engaged in this, the others piled out behind us. They gathered around, watching, blowing white clouds of breath into the cold. When I had finished, Abbie grabbed my elbow and pulled me away. ‘What was that about?’ she hissed.
    I shrugged as we strolled off, arms linked.
    ‘Hey! Don’t you want my number?’ David called after me brazenly.
    The other girls were close either side of me, hustling me off. I turned. Walking backwards, I called out to him, grinning, ‘Well, you’ll call if you want to, won’t you?’ He was staring after me, still smiling.
    Abbie pulled me back round again. ‘Carole will bloody kill you.’
    ‘Not if you don’t tell her,’ I said. ‘And anyway, he doesn’t belong to Carole, does he?’
    ‘I can’t believe you were flirting with David!’
    I hadn’t even asked his name. That’s how little interest I had succeeded in showing during the evening. Oh, I was pleased with myself.
    David. I lay on my poorly sprung bed that night, wide awake, with the orange streetlight glimmering through the thin brown curtains and the shouts of the Saturday drunks ringing softly in the streets around our house. So it was David. I thought of how I had risen from the table that evening, in the cold glare of the fluorescent light, while he was still seated on the stool opposite me. I had to push past his shoulder to get by – my hip had grazed his shoulder. He had not leaned away to make room for me to pass. He had sat completely still. And I had pushed against him, slowly and deliberately. My body had asked his body a question. David. He had my number but I didn’t have his. All I could do was wait.
    *
     
    He never called and I didn’t see him again for over two years. I heard news of him from time to time, and whenever I heard his name in conversation, I felt that small folding motion in my stomach and had to be careful not to ask questions or react. David had made it up with Carole. David and Carole had split up. A group of engineering students, him amongst them, had nearly got expelled from the university because of some prank involving a concrete mixer. One of them had hot-wired it and they had set it going then been unable to brake as it headed towards the riverbank. They had to jump for their lives. Two local cops were standing on the bridge watching as they waded ashore.
    I had two boyfriends during my final year of study but I was going through the motions. Neither of them measured up to the one with the stare – or rather, neither of them measured up to my daydreams of him.
    *
     
    After I graduated, I stayed on at the Royal Infirmary to do my probationary year. Most of my fellow students went off to more glamorous cities but I needed to be able to visit Mum. She was in a nursing home on the outskirts of our home town, thirty miles away – I couldn’t afford to be further from her than that.