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

I turned around and hit the lift switch again, but when we got to the top, I stopped.

“Eddie?”

I didn’t want him intruding. He had too much of my life. I didn’t want him in the room. In that room. “Get back in,” I said. I hit the lift button again and he had no option but to do so.

“Oh—I see.” He was smirking.

“No. You don’t.”

He raised himself on his toes, his hands deep in his pockets as the doors opened again. “Shielding the fair maiden.”

“What did you expect? That I’d let you in?”

He looked a little ashamed at that. I walked away from him, down the corridor and out of the main door. He caught me up as I was climbing the stairs. I could hear the Sunday afternoon ‘Puffer,’ the country-route slow-train rattling the tracks as it laboured its way towards the Junction. His car was in the car park and I got in without even thinking.

“Did Val send you?”

“No. She didn’t.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“She didn’t.”

“But you’ve seen her.”

“No. No—but I rang. She—”

“You don’t have to. I know.”

There was a long silence as he drove. He asked me for a cigarette; after I lit one for him, he pushed his sports car away from the Junction and into the country. I stared out of the window, but I didn’t see the fields. I saw Alex—Alex—Alex.

Finally he pulled up outside a pub and manoeuvred the car into a deserted, tatty car-park at the back. I went to open the door but he took hold of my elbow. “Eddie.”

I tried to pull away from him, but the space was too small and I’d just about had enough in any case. All the fight I’d been harbouring slid away from me and I slumped back into the car.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said finally. I had a sudden memory of broken glass and Phil’s hand wrapped in a handkerchief.

The pub was shut and there was no one around. He put his hand on my knee and I sat and stared at it as if I couldn’t work out why he’d touch me like that. I remember wishing that I still welcomed his touch, that I could put my hand on his, but that seemed to be gone forever. We wouldn’t ever be what I had wanted. Not lovers. We weren’t even friends. He had nothing to offer me.

 After a while, he took his hand away and we had another cigarette in silence. Suddenly he turned the engine on and turned the car for home. We talked on the way back—about work, the twins, cricket, golf. I wondered why he had nothing to say, nothing to give. Afterwards I realised that he didn’t know either, for all his savoir-faire.

He dropped me at the house and for a moment we sat outside. He rubbed his knuckles against the outside of my thigh. It was a reassuring gesture but it did nothing. We played the scene from before; I went to leave the car and he held me back, just for a second.

“Eddie. Keep in touch, whatever happens?”

 I think he thought I was going to go in and start packing a bag. As I walked up the front path, I wondered why I hadn’t done that instead of ineffectually walking away and then walking back. Why couldn’t I just leave?

As I reached the back door, I looked up, as I always did, towards Alex’s room, and saw him standing looking out of the window. However, he wasn’t looking at me but at Phil’s car. He watched it as it drove away, then turned back into his room without glancing my way.

Nausea flooded over me. We’d done nothing that he could have seen, but the way he’d said “I don’t want to be nothing” haunted me. I missed him so much and despite being mere yards from where I was standing, he was impossibly far away.

+ + +

After his exams, our reunion swept everything aside for a brief and passionate time. I swore to myself that I would make him feel, make him know that he was everything to me, and I spoiled him horribly. I bought him gifts of sweets and flowers, all perishables, all disposable. Nothing he had to take home except a Thornton slide rule that I couldn’t resist getting him.

His eyes were bright and dark and his lips were full in that post-love way they always were. I reached under the mattress and took the case out, put it on his stomach. He yelped at the sudden cold.

“Another present?”

“Open it.”

“You could have wrapped it.” The disappointment must have shown in my face, because he lunged forward with a kiss and a laugh. “I’m only teasing you, Edward. You don’t have to keep buying me things.” He smiled broadly. “But I do like it. It makes me feel like a mistress.”

We were silent as he opened the case and I could tell he was pleased. “It’s lovely.” He held it up against his neck, like it was an emerald necklace. “Goes with my eyes, don’t you think?”

“I wanted to give you something you could take,” and I couldn’t finish the sentence, but I pulled him into my arms.

Sometime later I lay with my head on his chest. He worked his slide rule with one hand and touched my hair with the other. I regretted the present already; giving him something for university seemed to be opening up a door that he’d already stepped into. I didn’t know how anyone could feel as much, how a heart could be so full of emotion and still continue to function.

He wouldn’t talk about the examinations themselves, and every time I started to—in genuine interest—he’d change the subject or distract me in many delightful ways. I couldn’t even draw him on why he changed the subject; though I’d never taken him for superstitious, it was as if he feared that discussing them in any manner would blight his chances. I remember clearly him