Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

‘He says you’re trying to poison him. But he said it – you know – in a good
way.’
I felt weirdly pleased by this information.
‘Yes … well … ’ I said, trying to hide it. ‘Give me time.’
‘He’s talking a bit more too. We’ve had weeks where he would hardly say a
thing, but he’s definitely up for a bit of a chat the last few days.’
I thought of Will telling me if I didn’t stop bloody whistling he’d be forced to
run me over. ‘I think his definition of chatty and mine are a bit different.’
‘Well, we had a bit of a chat about the cricket. And I gotta tell you –’ Nathan
dropped his voice ‘– Mrs T asked me a week or so back if I thought you were
doing okay. I said I thought you were very professional, but I knew that wasn’t
what she meant. Then yesterday she came in and told me she’d heard you guys
laughing.’
I thought back to the previous evening. ‘He was laughing at me,’ I said. Will
had found it hilarious that I didn’t know what pesto was. I had told him supper
was ‘the pasta in the green gravy’.
‘Ah, she doesn’t care about that. It’s just been a long time since he laughed at
anything.’
It was true. Will and I seemed to have found an easier way of being around
each other. It revolved mainly around him being rude to me, and me occasionally
being rude back. He told me I did something badly, and I told him if it really
mattered to him then he could ask me nicely. He swore at me, or called me a pain
in the backside, and I told him he should try being without this particular pain in
the backside and see how far it got him. It was a bit forced but it seemed to work
for both of us. Sometimes it even seemed like a relief to him that there was
someone prepared to be rude to him, to contradict him or tell him he was being
horrible. I got the feeling that everyone had tiptoed around him since his
accident – apart from perhaps Nathan, who Will seemed to treat with an
automatic respect, and who was probably impervious to any of his sharper
comments anyway. Nathan was like an armoured vehicle in human form.
‘You just make sure you’re the butt of more of his jokes, okay?’
I put my mug in the sink. ‘I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.’
The other big change, apart from atmospheric conditions inside the house, was
that Will didn’t ask me to leave him alone quite as often, and a couple of