Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

his four brothers and sisters were like the Waltons. They actually seemed to like
each other. The first time we went out on a date, a little voice in my head said:
This man will never hurt you, and nothing he had done in the seven years since
had led me to doubt it.
And then he turned into Marathon Man.
Patrick’s stomach no longer gave when I nestled into him; it was a hard,
unforgiving thing, like a sideboard, and he was prone to pulling up his shirt and
hitting it with things, to prove quite how hard it was. His face was planed, and
weathered from his time spent constantly outdoors. His thighs were solid
muscle. That would have been quite sexy in itself, had he actually wanted to
have sex. But we were down to about twice a month, and I wasn’t the kind to
ask.
It was as if the fitter he got, the more obsessed by his own shape he became,
the less interested he was in mine. I asked him a couple of times if he didn’t
fancy me any more, but he seemed pretty definite. ‘You’re gorgeous,’ he would
say. ‘I’m just shattered. Anyway, I don’t want you to lose weight. The girls at the
club – you couldn’t make one decent boob out of all of theirs put together.’ I
wanted to ask how exactly he had come to work out this complex equation, but it
was basically a nice thing to say so I let it go.
I wanted to be interested in what he did, I really did. I went to the triathlon
club nights, I tried to chat to the other girls. But I soon realized I was an anomaly
– there were no girlfriends like me – everyone else in the club was single, or
involved with someone equally physically impressive. The couples pushed each
other on workouts, planned weekends in spandex shorts and carried pictures of
each other in their wallets completing triathlons hand in hand, or smugly
comparing joint medals. It was unspeakable.
‘I don’t know what you’re complaining about,’ my sister said when I told her.
‘I’ve had sex once since I had Thomas.’
‘What? Who with?’
‘Oh, some bloke who came in for a Vibrant Hand-Tied,’ she said. ‘I just
wanted to make sure I still could.’
And then, when my jaw dropped, ‘Oh, don’t look like that. It wasn’t during
working hours. And they were funeral flowers. If they had been wife flowers, of
course I wouldn’t have touched him with a gladioli.’