Junction X Erastes (best motivational books of all time TXT) 📖

“And me? What am I?”

This time the silence didn’t work. The kisses I attempted to give him didn’t work. He lay beneath me immobile, unyielding. Every inch of him hard. Then he pushed me off and was out of bed in a flash, and the words I hadn’t said couldn’t be said. I tried to catch at his arm but he turned away.

“Alex.” I said, forcing out a calm tone, calmer than I felt. “Alex. What use would it be if I said it? Haven’t we got enough—not enough, but as much as anyone like us can hope for? What good would it be to you? Or me? Why build it up into something we can never have? What would you do with it? Who could you tell?”

He turned towards me, and dropped his shirt on the floor. His eyes seemed crazy. Not hurt, but a little mad. He hit himself hard in the chest with his fist, and his whisper came like a shout.

“I could tell me. Don’t you get it? Every day. Every second of the rottenness—out there. I could tell me.”

I hadn’t told him when I first realised it. I hadn’t told him when I’d taken him. How could I tell him then, at that moment? It would have seemed like I was just saying it—a boy’s lie to get a girl into bed. All I could do was sit there on that horrible brown bed and watch him getting dressed, praying that this wasn’t going to be the last time I saw him like this. I was selfish in my idiocy, too. How was I to know he felt the same?

“Alex.”

“I have to go; it’s late.” He picked up his satchel and I was out of the bed, uncaring that he was fully clothed and I wasn’t. His face was flat and he wouldn’t look at me.

“Don’t go.”

“It’s late. Dad will be waiting.”

“It’s no later than normal.” I pulled the satchel from his shoulder, and set it down. He didn’t resist; he just stood there his face closed off, head down. The words were there in my head, everything I wanted to say—but I’d left them too late to mean what they should.

“Do you doubt it?” I pulled him close and he didn’t resist. Finally, his arms went around me and I knew I could keep it from ending. “Alex. Do you?”

His face was buried against my shoulder and it seemed forever before he spoke. “Not all the time. But I don’t want to be nothing.”

I pulled him back to the bed, sitting him on my lap and stripping him between the kisses and promises and lies. His eyelashes tasted of salt. I told him he could never be that. I should have kept my mouth shut.

Chapter 21

He breezed through his exams, as I’d expected he would, but while he was sitting them he was damned near impossible to cope with, and for a brief few weeks I discovered a harder and far more brittle young man than I had ever encountered. He had a temper, too, fuelled by a lack of faith in himself, lashing out when anyone told him that he’d ‘do fine.’ He understood numbers; he had a talent for seeing and grasping concepts faster than I could. However, he constantly doubted his own abilities, which surprised me, as he was so confident in other ways. I think his parents’ expectations drove him almost to the breaking point. I watched him chew his nails and try to keep a calm exterior, and I took the flak when his casing fractured and his self-belief shattered into a million pieces.

Three weeks before the actual exams he withdrew completely, and my reasoning with him—begging him—to maintain some contact made him angry. The glimpse of stubborn temper I’d seen from him came flashing to the fore. It was selfish of me, but imagining a month away from him cut me in ways I’d never been hurt. It felt like talons.

“I can’t,” he kept saying. “It’s important. Don’t you see? It’s so important. You don’t, do you?”

“I do see that making yourself blind with study and frantic with worry isn’t going to help.”

“You don’t understand. If anything is going to help, then it’s this. It’s got to be A grades or the whole bloody thing is a waste of time.”

“So you are going to make yourself sick. Keeping away from me.”

He glared at me, which put me off a little. “It’s because of you.”

I behaved badly at times, too, matching childishness with childishness, but we always made it up.

Then, stubborn, determined and infuriating, he was gone from me, as suddenly as an axe falling. And my marriage continued to fall apart.

Well, that’s hardly true—it would be fairer (and truer) to say that in his absence, I used the intervening time to tear apart what was left of my marriage with my bare hands. Val and I had progressed, by way of interrogation, to an edgy armistice. She questioned almost everything I did. In idiotic retaliation, I had stopped telling her anything without being asked, which did nothing but to draw the circle of suspicion tighter around us. Cut loose from Alex, I was trammelled and trapped in some pathetic game of self-loathing.

And so, from time to time throughout my separation from Alex, I found myself walking out into The Avenue without any announcement to anyone, blazing in anger (mainly at myself) and seeking refuge in the one place I had to myself, even if it was missing the one person who made it a refuge. It felt cavernous without him, and the bed was cold. And it was there, as I was coming out of the lift, that I bumped into Phil, who was waiting to get in.

“Christ, you made me jump!” I looked accusingly at the door behind him. “This is supposed to be secure. You told me. How the hell did you get in?”

“I know the station master as well