Boyfriend in a Dress Read Online Free Page A

tooth. I still have a lump on the back of my head from that one, which I should probably get checked out. The tooth got fixed the next day obviously; you can see that.
    I wake up early the next day, another wild warm day when you feel like big things are supposed to happen. The sky is bright blue, even at eight in the morning, dusted with fairy-tale clouds, and the air already smells of cut grass – the community servicers have been out early – and I fight the urge to have ice cream for breakfast.
    I wake up on my own. I spend the first twenty minutes breathing in the heat and the sun and the silence. The phone doesn’t ring, I am left alone, the way it should be on a day like this. Everybody is praying for something to happen to their lives, to whisk them away on the sunshine express to a much better time.
    Instead of ice cream, I light a cigarette, and hang over my balcony which overlooks the communal gardens that nobody uses, in case they have to sit twenty feet from somebody they don’t know. A breeze creeps up, and everything sways, including me. A spider stuck in the middle of its cobweb rocks to and fro, and seems to enjoy it, and the hairs on my arms search up for the sun. I feel it, where I always feel it, in the small of my back, and the heat closes my eyes, and I dream, standing. I breathe warm air, think I hear music somewhere, not here. It is a small bliss. It is a beautiful day. I knowsomething should happen today. It makes me feel giddy. I should do something. This thought snaps me back to reality, and the moment is gone.
    ‘I don’t want to go to fucking work,’ I complain to myself, in a staccato voice, accentuating every word, as if somebody, God, maybe, might hear me and say ‘that’s ok, you don’t have to – take your passport and run away!’ It doesn’t happen, nobody says anything to me, and I sigh, facing the inevitable, and move back into my flat to get dressed.
    The doorbell buzzes while I am pulling on yesterday’s jeans, having the age-old footwear debate in my head as I look at my strappy sandals sitting prettily next to my starting-to-reek trainers: longer legs, or still being able to walk by lunchtime?
    ‘Package for you,’ my intercom says.
    ‘I’m coming down.’
    I button up my shirt as I run down the stairs. The delivery boy is waiting by the door – a kid really, maybe five years younger than me, but a world away. He looks like he has fun in the evenings. He likes his job in that it gives him no hassle, but it is the evenings that are his. A young black guy, good-looking and charming. He smiles, I smile back.
    ‘Do you need me to sign for it?’
    ‘Nah, it’s fine.’
    He walks off as I shut the door, saunters back to his van. He looks like he gets a lot of sex. He looks like he has them queuing up. You can tell he is good in bed, in a young excitable way.
    I thought my parcel would be from the book club, but it’s not. It’s the organic meat my father keeps ordering for me and having sent directly to my house. He is worried about contaminants, about what they put into beef these days. If I refuse to become a vegan, like my dad, he is going to keep ordering me ‘clean cow’ as Charlie calls it, which just makesme want to chuck it straight in the bin. Somewhere deep inside of me I know I don’t want to eat meat any more. If Charlie calls our bacon sandwich ‘pig’ I retch. I can’t eat the animal, and hear or say the animal’s name at the same time. Unfortunately I just really like the taste. It’s yet another issue I’m avoiding, I know, but today isn’t a day for confrontations, especially with myself. I just put the meat in the fridge, in the knowledge that it will probably have gone bad, organic or not, by the time I get around to cooking for myself in my own flat. Cooking for one demands minimal effort, and therefore the use of either the toaster or the microwave, and I don’t think I can put steak in either of them. Of course I don’t know for