The Flavours of Love Read Online Free

returning to her phone, to her important, real life. My tongue hurts from how hard I clamp down with my teeth, reining in the scream that has flared up in my chest. With the scream still bubbling at the back of my throat, I quickly rotate to the chrome kettle and take it to the sink. All the while: I will not scream, I will not scream, I will not scream pirouettes like a clockwork ballerina through my mind.
    13 years before That Day (August, 1998)
    ‘What do you want the baby to be?’ Joel asked, resting his hand on the ever-so-slight swell of my three-month-pregnant stomach. ‘I know we’ll be happy whatever we get, but what, ideally, would you like the baby to be?’
    ‘Human?’ I replied. I placed both my hands over his, pressing him closer to our child and holding onto him at the same time.
    ‘ Human? As opposed to … ?’ he questioned.
    ‘Klingon?’
    He used his free hand to tug me closer as we reclined on our sofa together, then he snuggled his face into the curve of my neck, where he was always pressing his cold lips, which made me giggle and shudder at the same time. ‘Now, what have you got against Klingons?’ he asked, mid-nuzzle.
    ‘Nothing. I’m going to marry you, aren’t I, Mr Ridge Face?’
    He immediately touched his forehead, as if he needed to check, as if I wasn’t always calling him that. ‘I do not have a big forehead.’
    ‘No, course you don’t,’ I giggled.
    ‘Don’t listen to her, baby,’ he laughed. ‘Your dad doesn’t have a big forehead.’
    ‘He doesn’t,’ I conceded, ‘it’s huge !’
    ‘I know what you’re doing, Ffrony,’ he said, suddenly setting aside his laugh, ‘and it’s not going to work. Stop avoiding the question.’
    ‘Sorry.’ I closed my eyes and thought of the future; thought of him and me and a bundle of a baby. Immediately the white-hot fear of uncertainty started to close in around the edges of my thoughts and set off the tumble of worry, about what would come next, what could go wrong, how I could fail, that was always precariously balanced like a stack of fragile teacups inside me. I couldn’t pin down the thoughts, the needs, the wish list of what I wanted for our future, because that might jinx it, that might make it a real thing that could be taken away from me. ‘I don’t know what I want, Joel, I really don’t.’
    ‘Don’t be scared,’ he said. He knew what I was thinking, how I was worrying and wrapped both his arms around me instead of just around the baby. ‘It’s all going to be fine.’
    ‘You can’t know that.’
    ‘I can, and I do.’
    ‘What do you want, then?’ I didn’t want my anxieties to spoil this for him. This was his time, too. Even if I couldn’t completely relax, the least I could do was give him that opportunity.
    ‘A girl, I think. I’ll be as happy with a boy, don’t get me wrong, but I’d love a girl.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Don’t know, really. I …’ He stopped talking and then glided into one of his now familiar and comforting silences as he considered my question from all angles. ‘I don’t know, I guess it’s one of those things you think you want and you have no real reason for wanting it.’
    ‘I see,’ I replied, even though I had no clue what he was talking about.
    *
    I’m standing at the sink, looking out of the window, watching the last of the light outside recede into early evening darkness through the gaps in our curtain of butterflies. When she was ten, Phoebe spent weeks stringing together multicoloured crystal butterflies. Night after night she’d take up her seat on a cushion in the corner of the living room, using a large needle to string butterflies onto jewellers’ wire, before twisting a knot on either side with jewellers’ pliers then adding another butterfly. When she’d finished, her dad tied them to a curtain pole and hung it up over the part of the window by the sink.
    The curtain dots our kitchen with splashes of different-coloured light during the day,