Catch Me When I Fall Read Online Free Page B

sex: people write songs and poems and make movies and we swoon and fantasize about it and we all want it or we want it to be better. But in the end when it happens, when you've left the club, when the clothes are off, it's just a spotty back and a stained sheet and an awful flat somewhere in a nasty bit of London you've never been before and a slimy, crinkled-up condom on the carpet, which makes you want to throw up. I thought about going downstairs to the kitchen, sitting down opposite Charlie, telling him what I'd done last night while he'd been peacefully sleeping in our bed. The sheer stupid, squalid, ugly, nasty pointlessness of it. I imagined the way the expression would change on his face as I told him, and I squirmed further into my duvet and groaned out loud in the muffled darkness, sickened by what I'd done. If I could turn back the clock, leave the bar when Meg had done, leave the noise and lights and laughter, and come home to my husband, go to sleep innocently curled up at his side between clean sheets, wake this morning with a clear conscience... If only, if only...
     Part of me knew quite well that I'd changed my life. There was a little voice in my head saying, 'You've committed adultery." I remembered religious education lessons in school, fragments from the Bible about how you could commit adultery in your
    heart just by looking at someone with lust. But I hadn't committed adultery in my heart, or even in my head. I'd committed it with my body, the body I'd scrubbed so ferociously in the shower, as if I could wash it all out of me. I couldn't tell Charlie about it. It would be cruel and, like a great stain, it would pollute everything in our life.
     I'm good at lying. I always have been. Since that autumn day eleven months ago, so blustery and bright and full of promise, when I tugged him into the register office, followed by the two bewildered, shy witnesses we'd grabbed from the street, I've lied lots of times, lied and pretended and faked, but never like last night. That was a first.
     I heard Charlie downstairs, the clink of china, a clatter of mail falling through the letterbox on to the bare boards of the hallway, and I pulled the duvet off my face and squinted out into the room. My legs ached and my eyes ached and there were swollen glands in my neck. Perhaps I was getting flu, I thought hopefully. Then I'd have a reason to hide from the world just a little bit longer. But I knew I didn't have flu, just a hangover and a guilty conscience.
     'Out of bed, Holly,' I ordered myself and, like an automaton obeying its master's command, I sat up, headache clanging round my skull, and put my feet on the floor. I waited for the room to steady, then shuffled into the bathroom where I washed my face in cold water. I stared at myself in the mirror: the darkish blonde hair that Charlie used to say looked like a lion's mane, the grey eyes that gazed back at me candidly from under thick brows, the wide mouth that smiled out at me so brightly. How was it possible that my mind should be covered with a layer of sooty grime while my face looked so fresh and happy?
     'You can't fool me,' I hissed at myself, wrinkling my skin in a hideous grin. "I know you, Holly Krauss. You can't fool me.'
    'Are you going in to work at the usual time?' Charlie pulled a letter out of its envelope, glanced at it, then crumpled it into a ball.
     'I've got to. I'm seeing Meg at nine. And there's someone I need to deal with first."
Charlie looked round. "That sounds ominous," he said.
     "I know," I said. 'And then we're going to be frantic, preparing for next weekend. It's going to be a nightmare. Who was that letter from?'
     "Next weekend? I didn't know about next weekend. What's happening?'
     'I told you. Twelve executives crossing a pond on a raft. To
help them bond. What are you doing today?' 'Stuff, you know. You want breakfast?' "Maybe,' I said dubiously.
     I had woken up thinking I would never need to consume anything more