Alphabet Weekends by Elizabeth Noble

Author:Elizabeth Noble
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780141941714
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 2010-02-08T10:00:00+00:00

She had that right. Tom associated Simon with a lot of things, not many of them good, but pretty much all of them connected to his flourishing career as a surgeon.

He remembered the first time they had met. He had been with Frankie then, the first girl Tom had fallen in love with. She had walked into his office one day, and it seemed to him afterwards that she had brought his heart to life. Not straight away, of course. He wasn’t Natalie. But gradually and inexorably. All that stuff he had listened to Natalie spout for years made sense to him for the first time.

Frankie seemed exotic. She was half Argentinian – her father owned a lot of land there – but she had been educated in England. She sounded posh, and she had the self-assured polish of the rich, beautiful and well-educated. He didn’t remember being intimidated by a woman before – that wasn’t his style – but she made him feel like a kid. Until she took him to bed, where she made him feel more of a man than anyone else ever had.

Natalie had hated Frankie on sight. Although what she had actually hated, on reflection, was the way Frankie made both of them feel. Tom was quite un-Tom-like around her. Not so much fun. Serious, and absorbed in her. Like there was no one else around. It was so weird seeing him like that. She’d told him, once, that it freaked her out. He said it was unfair of her: he’d been watching her behave like that around men for years, and put up with it, and that she, too, would have to learn to.

Secretly, he thought Frankie made Natalie feel insecure. She made most women feel that way: always immaculate, and always being watched by every man in the room, regardless of who that man was with.

It hadn’t lasted long. Tom always thought of it afterwards as a short, sharp shock. As though loving Frankie – which there was no doubt he had done – was akin to the electrical therapy they give to mental patients: mind-altering and violent. He was not the kind of guy she was going to end up with. That much was obvious. It was clear enough, too, that Frankie was not the sort of girl he would have been happy with long-term.

He remembered being surprised by the way his heart had betrayed him. Why would his physiology work that way? Let him fall in love with someone who didn’t suit him? A few months later he was actually glad that she had left him. It felt a little like being saved.

The four of them had had dinner once. It had been Natalie’s idea. He’d appreciated that she tried with Frankie – it was hard to imagine two more different women – and he understood her pursuit of a neat friendship between them. But Tom couldn’t stand Simon. He was of a type he had known throughout his life and never liked.

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