Me Before You: A Novel by Jojo Moyes

Author:Jojo Moyes [Moyes, Jojo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Women's Fiction, Contemporary Women, Romance, Contemporary, Contemporary Fiction
ISBN: 0670026603
Amazon: B0089EHWQE
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2012-12-31T06:00:00+00:00

The following weekend, I came down in the middle of the night to fetch some water. I had been having trouble sleeping, and had found that actually getting up was marginally preferable to lying in my bed batting away the swirling mess of my thoughts.

I didn’t like being awake at night. I couldn’t help but wonder whether Will was awake, on the other side of the castle, and my imagination kept prying its way into his thoughts. It was a dark place to go to.

Here was the truth of it: I was getting nowhere with him. Time was running out. I couldn’t even persuade him to take a trip to Paris. And when he told me why, it was hard for me to argue. He had a good reason for turning down almost every single longer trip I suggested to him. And without telling him why I was so anxious to take him, I had little leverage at all.

I was walking past the living room when I heard the sound—a muffled cough, or perhaps an exclamation. I stopped, retraced my steps, and stood in the doorway. I pushed gently at the door. On the living-room floor, the sofa cushions arranged into a sort of haphazard bed, lay my parents, under the guest quilt, their heads level with the gas fire. We stared at each other for a moment in the half-light, my glass motionless in my hand.

“What—what are you doing there?”

My mother pushed herself up onto her elbow. “Shh. Don’t raise your voice. We…” She looked at my father. “We fancied a change.”

“What?”

“We fancied a change.” My mother glanced at my father for backup.

“We’ve given Treena our bed,” Dad said. He was wearing an old blue T-shirt with a rip in the shoulder, and his hair stuck up on one side. “She and Thomas, they weren’t getting on too well in the box room. We said they could have ours.”

“But you can’t sleep down here! You can’t be comfortable like this.”

“We’re fine, love,” Dad said. “Really.”

And then, as I stood, dumbly struggling to comprehend, he added, “It’s only at weekends. And you can’t sleep in that box room. You need your sleep, what with…” He swallowed. “What with you being the only one of us at work and all.”

My father, the great lump, couldn’t meet my eye.

“Go on back to bed now, Lou. Go on. We’re fine.” Mum practically shooed me away.

I walked back up the stairs, my bare feet silent on the carpet, dimly aware of the brief murmured conversation below.

I hesitated outside Mum and Dad’s room, now hearing what I had not heard before—Thomas’s muffled snoring within. Then I walked slowly back across the landing to my own room, and I closed the door carefully behind me. I lay in my oversized bed and stared out the window at the sodium lights of the street, until dawn—finally, thankfully—brought me a few precious hours of sleep.

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