Me Before You Read online

  listening to music – while Nathan practised his watersport skills. Will kept telling me to try something too, but at first I said no. I just wanted to stay next to him. When Will insisted, I spent one morning windsurfing and kayaking, but I was happiest just hanging around next to him.

  Occasionally if Nadil was around, and the resort was quiet, he and Nathan would ease Will into the warm water of the smaller pool, Nathan holding him under his head so that he could float. He didn’t say much when they did this, but he looked quietly contented, as if his body were remembering long-forgotten sensations. His torso, long pale, grew golden. His scars silvered and began to fade. He grew comfortable without a shirt.

  At lunchtime we would wheel our way over to one of the resort’s three restaurants. The surface of the whole complex was tiled, with only a few small steps and slopes, which meant that Will could move in his chair with complete autonomy. It was a small thing, but him being able to get himself a drink without one of us accompanying him meant not so much a rest for me and Nathan as the brief removal of one of Will’s daily frustrations – being entirely dependent on other people. Not that any of us had to move much anywhere. It seemed wherever you were, beach or poolside, or even the spa, one of the smiling staff would pop up with some drink they thought you might like, usually decorated with a fragrant pink flower. Even as you lay on the beach, a small buggy would pass, and a smiling waiter would offer you water, fruit juice, or something stronger.

  In the afternoons, when the temperatures were at their highest, Will would return to his room and sleep for a couple of hours. I would swim in the pool, or read my book, and then in the evening we would all meet again to eat supper at the beachside restaurant. I swiftly developed a taste for cocktails. Nadil had worked out that if he gave Will the correct size straw and placed a tall glass in his holder, Nathan and I need not be involved at all. As dusk fell, the three of us talked of our childhoods and our first boyfriends and girlfriends and our first jobs and our families and other holidays we had had, and slowly I saw Will re-emerge.

  Except this Will was different. This place seemed to have granted him a peace that had been missing the whole time I had known him.

  ‘He’s doing good, huh?’ said Nathan, as he met me by the buffet.

  ‘Yes, I think he is.’

  ‘You know –’ Nathan leant towards me, reluctant for Will to see we were talking about him ‘– I think the ranch thing and all the adventures would have been great. But looking at him now, I can’t help thinking this place has worked out better.’

  I didn’t tell him what I had decided on the first day, when we checked in, my stomach knotted with anxiety, already calculating how many days I had until the return home. I had to try for each of those ten days to forget why we were actually there – the six-month contract, my carefully plotted calendar, everything that had come before. I had to just live in the moment and try to encourage Will to do the same. I had to be happy, in the hope that Will would be too.

  I helped myself to another slice of melon, and smiled. ‘So what’s on later? Are we doing the karaoke? Or have your ears not yet recovered from last night?’

  On the fourth night, Nathan announced with only faint embarrassment that he had a date. Karen was a fellow Kiwi staying in the next hotel, and he had agreed to go down to the town with her.

  ‘Just to make sure she’s all right. You know … I’m not sure if it’s a good place for her to go alone.’

  ‘No,’ Will said, nodding his head sagely. ‘Very chivalrous of you, Nate.’

  ‘I think that is a very responsible thing to do. Very civic minded,’ I agreed.

  ‘I have always admired Nathan for his selflessness. Especially when it comes to the fairer sex.’

  ‘Piss off, you two,’ Nathan grinned, and disappeared.

  Karen swiftly became a fixture. Nathan disappeared with her most evenings and, although he returned for late duties, we tacitly gave him as much time as possible to enjoy himself.

  Besides, I was secretly glad. I liked Nathan, and I was grateful that he had come, but I preferred it when it was just Will and I. I liked the shorthand we seemed to fall into when nobody else was around, the easy intimacy that had sprung up between us. I liked the way he turned his face and looked at me with amusement, like I had somehow turned out to be so much more than he had expected.

  On the penultimate night, I told Nathan that I didn’t mind if he wanted to bring Karen back to the complex. He had been spending nights in her hotel, and I knew it made it difficult for him, walking the twenty minutes each way in order to sort Will out last thing at night.

  ‘I don’t mind. If it will … you know … give you a bit of privacy.’

  He was cheerful, already lost in the prospect of the night ahead, and didn’t give me another thought beyond an enthusiastic, ‘Thanks, mate.’

  ‘Nice of you,’ said Will, when I told him.

  ‘Nice of you, you mean,’ I said. ‘It’s your room I’ve donated to the cause.’

  That night we got him into mine, and Nathan helped Will into bed and gave him his medication while Karen waited in the bar. In the bathroom I changed into my T-shirt and knickers and then opened the bathroom door and pottered over to the sofa with my pillow under my arm. I felt Will’s eyes on me, and felt oddly self-conscious for someone who had spent most of the previous week walking around in front of him in a bikini. I plumped my pillow down on the sofa arm.

  ‘Clark?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You really don’t have to sleep over there. This bed is large enough for an entire football team as it is.’

  The thing is, I didn’t really even think about it. That was how it was, by then. Perhaps the days spent near-naked on the beach had loosened us all up a little. Perhaps it was the thought of Nathan and Karen on the other side of the wall, wrapped up in each other, a cocoon of exclusion. Perhaps I did just want to be near him. I began to walk towards the bed, then flinched at a sudden crash of thunder. The lights stuttered, someone shouted outside. From next door we heard Nathan and Karen burst out laughing.

  I walked to the window and pulled back the curtain, feeling the sudden breeze, the abrupt drop in temperature. Out at sea a storm had exploded into life. Dramatic flashes of forked lightning briefly illuminated the sky, and then, as if in afterthought, the heavy drumbeat roll of a deluge hit the roof of our little bungalow, so fierce that at first it drowned out sound.

  ‘I’d better close the shutters,’ I said.

  ‘No, don’t.’

  I turned.

  ‘Throw the doors open.’ Will nodded towards the outside. ‘I want to see it.’

  I hesitated, then slowly opened the glass doors out on to the terrace. The rain hammered down on to the hotel complex, dripping from our roof, sending rivers running away from our terrace and out towards the sea. I felt the moisture on my face, the electricity in the air. The hairs on my arms stood bolt upright.

  ‘Can you feel it?’ he said, from behind me.

  ‘It’s like the end of the world.’

  I stood there, letting the charge flow through me, the white flashes imprinting themselves on my eyelids. It caused my breath to catch in my throat.

  I turned back, and walked over to the bed, seating myself on its edge. As he watched, I leant forwards and gently pulled his sun-browned neck towards me. I knew just how to move him now, how I could make his weight, his solidity, work with me. Holding him close to me, I leant across and placed a fat white pillow behind his shoulders before releasing him back into its soft embrace. He smelt of the sun, as if it had seeped deep into his skin, and I found myself inhaling silently, as if he were something delicious.

  Then, still a little damp, I climbed in beside him, so close that my legs touched his, and together we gazed out at the blue-white scorch as the lightning hit the waves, at the silvered stair rods of rain, the gently shifting mass of turquoise that lay only a hundred feet away.

  The world around us shrank, until it was just t
he sound of the storm, the mauve blue-black sea, and the gently billowing gauze curtains. I smelt the lotus flowers on the night breeze, heard the distant sounds of clinking glasses and hastily drawn-back chairs, of music from some far-off celebration, felt the charge of nature unleashed. I reached across for Will’s hand, and took it in my own. I thought, briefly, that I would never feel as intensely connected to the world, to another human being, as I did at that moment.

  ‘Not bad, eh, Clark?’ Will said into the silence. In the face of the storm, his face was still and calm. He turned briefly and smiled at me, and there was something in his eyes then, something triumphant.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not bad at all.’

  I lay still, listening to his breathing slow and deepen, the sound of the rain below it, felt his warm fingers entwined with mine. I did not want to go home. I thought I might never go home. Here Will and I were safe, locked in our little paradise. Every time I thought about heading back to England, a great claw of fear gripped my stomach and began to tighten its hold.

  It’s going to be okay. I tried to repeat Nathan’s words to myself. It’s going to be okay.

  Finally, I turned on to my side, away from the sea, and gazed at Will. He turned his head to look back at me in the dim light, and I felt he was telling me the same thing. It’s going to be okay. For the first time in my life I tried not to think about the future. I tried to just be, to simply let the evening’s sensations travel through me. I can’t say how long we stayed like that, just gazing at each other, but gradually Will’s eyelids grew heavier, until he murmured apologetically that he thought he might … His breathing deepened, he tipped over that small crevasse into sleep, and then it was just me watching his face, looking at the way his eyelashes separated into little points near the corner of his eyes, at the new freckles on his nose.

  I told myself I had to be right. I had to be right.

  The storm finally blew itself out sometime after 1am, disappearing somewhere out at sea, its flashes of anger growing fainter and then finally disappearing altogether, off to bring meteorological tyranny to some other unseen place. The air slowly grew still around us, the curtains settling, the last of the water draining away with a gurgle. Sometime in the early hours I got up, gently releasing my hand from Will’s, and closed the French windows, muffling the room in silence. Will slept – a sound, peaceful sleep that he rarely slept at home.

  I didn’t. I lay there and watched him and I tried to make myself think nothing at all.

  Two things happened on the last day. One was that, under pressure from Will, I agreed to try scuba diving. He had been on at me for days, stating that I couldn’t possibly come all this way and not go under the water. I had been hopeless at windsurfing, barely able to lift my sail from the waves, and had spent most of my attempts at water-skiing faceplanting my way along the bay. But he was insistent and, the day before, he arrived back at lunch announcing that he had booked me in for a half-day beginners’ diving course.

  It didn’t get off to a good start. Will and Nathan sat on the side of the pool as my instructor tried to get me to believe I would continue to breathe underwater, but the knowledge that they were watching me made me hopeless. I’m not stupid – I understood that the oxygen tanks on my back would keep my lungs working, that I was not about to drown – but every time my head went under, I panicked and burst through the surface. It was as if my body refused to believe that it could still breathe underneath several thousand gallons of Mauritius’s finest chlorinated.

  ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ I said, as I emerged for the seventh time, spluttering.

  James, my diving instructor, glanced behind me at Will and Nathan.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, crossly. ‘It’s just not me.’

  James turned his back on the two men, tapped me on the shoulder and gestured towards the open water. ‘Some people actually find it easier out there,’ he said quietly.

  ‘In the sea?’

  ‘Some people are better thrown in at the deep end. Come on. Let’s go out on the boat.’

  Three-quarters of an hour later, I was gazing underwater at the brightly coloured landscape that had been hidden from view, forgetting to be afraid that my oxygen might fail, that against all evidence I would sink to the bottom and die a watery death, even that I was afraid at all. I was distracted by the secrets of a new world. In the silence, broken only by the exaggerated oosh shoo of my own breath, I watched shoals of tiny iridescent fish, and larger black and white fish that stared at me with blank, inquisitive faces, with gently swaying anemones filtering the gentle currents of their tiny, unseen haul. I saw distant landscapes, twice as brightly coloured and varied as they were above land. I saw caves and hollows where unknown creatures lurked, distant shapes that shimmered in the rays of the sun. I didn’t want to come up. I could have stayed there forever, in that silent world. It was only when James started gesticulating towards the dial of his oxygen tank that I realized I didn’t have a choice.

  I could barely speak when I finally walked up the beach towards Will and Nathan, beaming. My mind was still humming with the images I had seen, my limbs somehow still propelling me under the water.

  ‘Good, eh?’ said Nathan.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I exclaimed to Will, throwing my flippers down on the sand in front of him. ‘Why didn’t you make me do that earlier? All that! It was all there, all the time! Just right under my nose!’

  Will gazed at me steadily. He said nothing, but his smile was slow and wide. ‘I don’t know, Clark. Some people just won’t be told.’

  I let myself get drunk that last night. It wasn’t just that we were leaving the next day. It was the first time I had felt truly that Will was well and that I could let go. I wore a white cotton dress (my skin had coloured now, so that wearing white didn’t automatically make me resemble a corpse wearing a shroud) and a pair of silvery strappy sandals, and when Nadil gave me a scarlet flower and instructed me to put it in my hair I didn’t scoff at him as I might have done a week earlier.

  ‘Well, hello, Carmen Miranda,’ Will said, when I met them at the bar. ‘Don’t you look glamorous.’

  I was about to make some sarcastic reply, and then I realized he was looking at me with genuine pleasure.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’re not looking too shabby yourself.’

  There was a disco at the main hotel complex, so shortly before 10pm – when Nathan left to be with Karen – we headed down to the beach with the music in our ears and the pleasant buzz of three cocktails sweetening my movements.

  Oh, but it was so beautiful down there. The night was warm, carrying on its breezes the scents of distant barbecues, of warm oils on skin, of the faint salt tang of the sea. Will and I stopped near our favourite tree. Someone had built a fire on the beach, perhaps for cooking, and all that was left was a pile of glowing embers.

  ‘I don’t want to go home,’ I said, into the darkness.

  ‘It’s a hard place to leave.’

  ‘I didn’t think places like this existed outside films,’ I said, turning so that I faced him. ‘It has actually made me wonder if you might have been telling the truth about all the other stuff.’

  He was smiling. His whole face seemed relaxed and happy, his eyes crinkling as he looked at me. I looked at him, and for the first time it wasn’t with a faint fear gnawing away at my insides.

  ‘You’re glad you came, right?’ I said, tentatively.

  He nodded. ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Hah!’ I punched the air.

  And then, as someone turned the music up by the bar, I kicked off my shoes and I began to dance. It sounds stupid – the kind of behaviour that on another day you might be embarrassed by. But there, in the inky dark, half drunk from lack of sleep, with the fire and the endless sea and infinite sky, with the sounds of the music in our ears and Will smiling and my heart bursting with something I couldn’t quite identify, I just needed to dance. I danced, laughing, not self-conscious, not worrying about w
hether anybody could see us. I felt Will’s eyes on me and I knew he knew – that this was the only possible response to the last ten days. Hell, to the last six months.

  The song ended, and I flopped, breathless, at his feet.

  ‘You … ’ he said.

  ‘What?’ My smile was mischievous. I felt fluid, electrified. I barely felt responsible for myself.

  He shook his head.

  I rose, slowly, on to my bare feet, walked right up to his chair and then slid on to his lap so that my face was inches from his. After the previous evening, it somehow didn’t seem like such a leap to make.

  ‘You . … ’ His blue eyes, glinting with the light of the fire, locked on to mine. He smelt of the sun, and the bonfire, and something sharp and citrussy.

  I felt something give, deep inside me.

  ‘You … are something else, Clark.’

  I did the only thing I could think of. I leant forward, and I placed my lips on his. He hesitated, just for a moment, and then he kissed me. And just for a moment I forgot everything – the million and one reasons I shouldn’t, my fears, the reason we were here. I kissed him, breathing in the scent of his skin, feeling his soft hair under my fingertips, and when he kissed me back all of this vanished and it was just Will and me, on an island in the middle of nowhere, under a thousand twinkling stars.

  And then he pulled back. ‘I … I’m sorry. No –’

  My eyes opened. I lifted a hand to his face and let it trace his beautiful bones. I felt the faint grit of salt under my fingertips. ‘Will … ’ I began. ‘You can. You –’

  ‘No.’ It held a hint of metal, that word. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I don’t want to go into it.’

  ‘Um … I think you have to go into it.’

  ‘I can’t do this because I can’t … ’ he swallowed. ‘I can’t be the man I want to be with you. And that means that this –’ he looked up into my face ‘– this just becomes … another reminder of what I am not.’

  I didn’t let go of his face. I tipped my forehead forward so that it touched his, so that our breath mingled, and I said, quietly, so that only he could have heard me, ‘I don’t care what you … what you think you can and can’t do. It’s not black and white. Honestly … I’ve talked to other people in the same situation and … and there are things that are possible. Ways that we can both be happy … ’ I had begun to stammer a little. I felt weird even having this conversation. I looked up and into his eyes. ‘Will Traynor,’ I said, softly. ‘Here’s the thing. I think we can do –’

  ‘No, Clark –’ he began.

  ‘I think we can do all sorts of things. I know this isn’t a conventional love story. I know there are all sorts of reasons I shouldn’t even be saying what I am. But I love you. I do. I knew it when I left Patrick. And I think you might even love me a little bit.’

  He didn’t speak. His eyes searched my own, and there was this huge weight of sadness within them. I stroked the hair away from his temples, as if I could somehow lift his sorrow, and he tilted his head to meet the palm of my hand, so that it rested there.

  He swallowed. ‘I have to tell you something.’

  ‘I know,’ I whispered. ‘I know everything.’

  Will’s mouth closed on his words. The air seemed to still around us.

  ‘I know about Switzerland. I know … why I was employed on a six-month contract.’

  He lifted his head away from my hand. He looked at me, then gazed upwards at the skies. His shoulders sagged.

  ‘I know it all, Will. I’ve known for months. And, Will, please listen to me …’ I took his right hand in mine, and I brought it up close to my chest. ‘I know we can do this. I know it’s not how you would have chosen it, but I know I can make you happy. And all I can say is that you make me … you make me into someone I couldn’t even imagine. You make me happy, even when you’re awful. I would rather be with you – even the you that you seem to think is diminished – than with anyone else in the world.’

  I felt his fingers tighten a fraction around mine, and it gave me courage.

  ‘If you think it’s too weird with me being employed by you, then I’ll leave and I’ll work somewhere else. I wanted to tell you – I’ve applied for a college course. I’ve done loads of research on the internet, talking to other quads and carers of quads, and I have learnt so much, so much about how to make this work. So I can do that, and just be with you. You see? I’ve thought of everything, researched everything. This is how I am now. This is your fault. You changed me.’ I was half laughing. ‘You’ve turned me into my sister. But with better dress sense.’

  He had closed his eyes. I placed both my hands around his, lifted his knuckles to my mouth, and I kissed them. I felt his skin against mine, and knew as I had never known anything that I could not let him go.

  ‘What do you say?’ I whispered.

  I could have looked into his eyes forever.

  He said it so quietly, that for a minute I could not be sure I had heard him correctly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘No, Clark.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s not enough.’

  I lowered his hand. ‘I don’t understand.’

  He waited before he spoke, as if he were struggling, for once, to find the right words. ‘It’s not enough for me. This – my world – even with you in it. And believe me, Clark, my whole life has changed for the better since you came. But it’s not enough for me. It’s not the life I want.’

  Now it was my turn to pull away.

  ‘The thing is, I get that this could be a good life. I get that with you around, perhaps it could even be a very good life. But it’s not my life. I am not the same as these people you speak to. It’s nothing like the life I want. Not even close.’ His voice was halting, broken. His expression frightened me.

  I swallowed, shaking my head. ‘You … you once told me that the night in the