Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

said jazz was mostly pretentious guff. When he saw the contents of my MP3 player one afternoon,
he laughed so hard he nearly dislodged one of his tubes.
3. Sitting in the garden, now that it was warm. Sometimes I stood in the window and watched him,
his head tilted back, just enjoying the sun on his face. When I remarked on his ability to be still
and just enjoy the moment – something I had never mastered – he pointed out that if you can’t
move your arms and legs, you haven’t actually got a lot of choice.
4. Making me read books or magazines, and then talk about them. Knowledge is power, Clark, he
would say. I hated this at first; it felt like I was at school, being quizzed on my powers of memory.
But after a while I realized that, in Will’s eyes, there were no wrong answers. He actually liked me
to argue with him. He asked me what I thought of things in the newspapers, disagreed with me
about characters in books. He seemed to hold opinions on almost everything – what the
government was doing, whether one business should buy another, whether someone should have
been sent to jail. If he thought I was being lazy, or parroting my parents’ or Patrick’s ideas, he
would just say a flat, ‘No. Not good enough.’ He would look so disappointed if I said I knew
nothing about it; I had begun to anticipate him and now read a newspaper on the bus on the way in,
just so I felt prepared. ‘Good point, Clark,’ he would say, and I would find myself beaming. And
then give myself a kick for allowing Will to patronize me again.
5. Getting a shave. Every two days now, I lathered up his jaw and made him presentable. If he wasn’t
having a bad day, he would lean back in his chair, close his eyes, and the closest thing I saw to
physical pleasure would spread across his face. Perhaps I’ve invented that. Perhaps I saw what I
wanted to see. But he would be completely silent as I gently ran the blade across his chin,
smoothing and scraping, and when he did open his eyes his expression had softened, like someone
coming out of a particularly satisfactory sleep. His face now held some colour from our time spent
outside; his was the kind of skin that tanned easily. I kept the razors high up in the bathroom
cabinet, tucked behind a large bottle of conditioner.
6. Being a bloke. Especially with Nathan. Occasionally, before the evening routine, they would go
and sit at the end of the garden and Nathan would crack open a couple of beers. Sometimes I heard
them discussing rugby, or joking about some woman they had seen on the television, and it
wouldn’t sound like Will at all. But I understood he needed this; he needed someone with whom
he could just be a bloke, doing blokey things. It was a small bit of ‘normal’ in his strange, separate
life.
7. Commenting on my wardrobe. Actually, that should be raising an eyebrow at my wardrobe. Except
for the black and yellow tights. On the two occasions I had worn those he hadn’t said anything, but
simply nodded, as if something were right with the world.
‘You saw my dad in town the other day.’
‘Oh. Yes.’ I was hanging washing out on a line. The line itself was hidden in
what Mrs Traynor called the Kitchen Garden. I think she didn’t want anything as
mundane as laundry polluting the view of her herbaceous borders. My own
mother pegged her whites out almost as a badge of pride. It was like a challenge
to her neighbours: Beat this, ladies! It was all Dad could do to stop her putting a
second revolving clothes dryer out the front.
‘He asked me if you’d said anything about it.’
‘Oh.’ I kept my face a studied blank. And then, because he seemed to be
waiting, ‘Evidently not.’