Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

Will was silent for a moment. I watched him, wondering where he really was.
When we had these conversations he became like the boy in my class, the boy
who had distanced himself from us by venturing away.
‘So where else have you liked?’
‘Trou d’Eau Douce bay, Mauritius. Lovely people, beautiful beaches, great
diving. Um … Tsavo National Park, Kenya, all red earth and wild animals.
Yosemite. That’s California. Rock faces so tall your brain can’t quite process the
scale of them.’
He told me of a night he’d spent rock climbing, perched on a ledge several
hundred feet up, how he’d had to pin himself into his sleeping bag, and attach it
to the rock face, because to roll over in his sleep would have been disastrous.
‘You’ve actually just described my worst nightmare, right there.’
‘I like more metropolitan places too. Sydney, I loved. The Northern
Territories. Iceland. There’s a place not far from the airport where you can bathe
in the volcanic springs. It’s like a strange, nuclear landscape. Oh, and riding
across Central China. I went to this place about two days’ ride from the Capital
of Sichuan province, and the locals spat at me because they hadn’t seen a white
person before.’
‘Is there anywhere you haven’t been?’
He took another sip of soup. ‘North Korea?’ He pondered. ‘Oh, I’ve never
been to Disneyland. Will that do? Not even Eurodisney.’
‘I once booked a ticket to Australia. Never went, though.’
He turned to me in surprise.
‘Stuff happened. It’s fine. Perhaps I will go one day.’
‘Not “perhaps”. You’ve got to get away from here, Clark. Promise me you
won’t spend the rest of your life stuck around this bloody parody of a place mat.’
‘Promise me? Why?’ I tried to make my voice light. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I just … can’t bear the thought of you staying around here forever.’ He
swallowed. ‘You’re too bright. Too interesting.’ He looked away from me. ‘You
only get one life. It’s actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.’
‘Okay,’ I said, carefully. ‘Then tell me where I should go. Where would you
go, if you could go anywhere?’
‘Right now?’