Me Before You (Me Before You, #1)

by Jojo Moyes

fuggy

haha funny word

“It’s all of twenty-four hours since I lost the last one. Am I allowed to just be a bit miserable and floppy? You know, just for today?” “But you’ve got to look at the positive side. You knew you couldn’t stay at that place forever. You want to move upward, onward.” Patrick had been named Stortfold Young Entrepreneur of the Year two years previously, and had not yet quite recovered from the honor.

I hadn’t thought that as well as the obvious fears about money, and your future, losing your job would make you feel inadequate, and a bit useless. That it would be harder to get up in the morning than when you were rudely shocked into consciousness by the alarm. That you might miss the people you worked with, no matter how little you had in common with them. Or even that you might find yourself searching for familiar faces as you walked the high street.

“Jesus Christ,” said my father. “Can you imagine? If it wasn’t punishment enough ending up in a ruddy wheelchair, then you get our Lou turning up to keep you company.” “Bernard!” my mother scolded. Behind me, Granddad was laughing into his mug of tea.

“Oh, lighten up, Clark. I’m the one having scalding hot air directed at my genitals.” I didn’t respond. I heard his voice over the roar of the hair dryer. “Come on, what’s the worst that could happen—I end up in a wheelchair?” It may sound stupid, but I couldn’t help but laugh. It was the closest Will had come to actually trying to make me feel better.

“Here, Clark,” he said. “Do me a favor?” “What?” “Scratch my ear for me, will you? It’s driving me nuts.” “If I do you’ll let me cut your hair? Just a bit of a trim?” “Don’t push your luck.” “Shush. Don’t make me nervous. I’m not great with scissors.”

It was a curiously intimate thing, this shaving of Will. I realized as I continued that I had assumed his wheelchair would be a barrier; that his disability would prevent any kind of sensual aspect from creeping in. Weirdly, it wasn’t working like that. It was impossible to be this close to someone, to feel their skin tauten under your fingertips, to breathe in the air that they breathed out, to have their face only inches from yours, without feeling a little unbalanced.

They say you only really appreciate a garden once you reach a certain age, and I suppose there is a truth in that. It’s probably something to do with the great circle of life. There seems to be something miraculous about seeing the relentless optimism of new growth after the bleakness of winter, a kind of joy in the difference every year, the way nature chooses to show off different parts of the garden to its full advantage.

Here’s the thing about middle-class people. They pretend not to look, but they do. They’re too polite to actually stare. Instead, they do this weird thing of catching sight of Will in their field of vision and then determinedly not looking at him. Until he’s gone past, at which point their gaze flickers toward him, even while they remain in conversation with someone else. They won’t talk about him, though. Because that would be rude.

“I just . . . want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.”

:(

How could I explain to him—how a body can become so familiar to you? I could change Will’s tubes with a deft professionalism, sponge-bathe his naked top half without a break in our conversation. I didn’t even balk at Will’s scars now. For a while, all I had been able to see was a potential suicide. Now he was just Will—maddening, mercurial, clever, funny Will—who patronized me and liked to play Professor Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle. His body was just part of the whole package, a thing to be dealt with, at intervals, before we got back to the talking. It had become, I supposed, the least interesting part of him.

I put Will’s birthday money into the cash tin in the kitchen cupboard. I thought it might make them feel better to know they had a little security. When I woke up in the morning, it had been pushed back under my door in an envelope.

He gestured at my minidress, a sixties-inspired Pucci-type dress, made with fabric that had once been a pair of Granddad’s curtains. The first time Dad had seen it he had pointed at me and yelled, “Hey, Lou, pull yourself together!” It had taken him a full five minutes to stop laughing.

“I worked out what would make me happy, and I worked out what I wanted to do, and I trained myself to do the job that would make those two things happen.” “You make it sound so simple.” “It is simple,” he said. “The thing is, it’s also a lot of hard work. And people don’t want to put in a lot of work.”

“You had a big life, didn’t you?” “Yeah, I did.” He moved a bit closer, and raised his chair so that he was almost at eye level. “That’s why you piss me off, Clark. Because I see all this talent, all this . . .” He shrugged. “This energy and brightness, and—” “Don’t say potential . . .” “Potential. Yes. Potential. And I cannot for the life of me see how you can be content to live this tiny life. This life that will take place almost entirely within a five-mile radius and contain nobody who will ever surprise you or push you or show you things that will leave your head spinning and unable to sleep at night.”

Every time I looked at the back of my door I felt a little glimmer of excitement, both that I had been so organized and that one of these events might actually be the thing that changed Will’s view of the world. As my dad always says, my sister is the brains of our family.

I dont like this foreshadowing

“Okay then, Traynor, you show me yours.” He gazed at me steadily, half smiling. “You’ll have to put a new dressing on it when we get home.” “Yeah. Like that never happens. Go on. I’m not driving off until you do.” “Lift my shirt, then. To the right. Your right.” I leaned through the front seats, and tugged at his shirt, peeling back the piece of gauze beneath. There, dark against his pale skin, was a black-and-white-striped ink rectangle, small enough that I had to look twice before I realized what it said. Best before: 19 March 2007 I stared at it. I half laughed, and then my eyes filled with tears. “Is that the—” “Date of my accident. Yes.” He raised his eyes to the heavens. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t get maudlin, Clark. It was meant to be funny.”

“It’s quite simple,” he said, as if we had been in conversation. “You can sleep here on weekends. There’s a room going spare—it might as well get some use.” I stopped, the beaker in my hand. “I can’t do that.” “Why not? I’m not going to pay you for the extra hours you’re here.” I placed the beaker in his holder. “But what would your mum think?” “I have no idea.” I must have looked troubled, because he added, “It’s okay. I’m safe in taxis.” “What?” “If you’re worried I have some devious secret plan to seduce you, you can just pull my plug out.” “Funny.”

“You, Clark,” he looked down at his hands, “are the only person I have felt able to talk to since I ended up in this bloody thing.”

I could have stayed there all night, above the rest of the world, the warmth of Will’s hand in mine, feeling the worst of myself slowly begin to ebb away.

I was stunned by Will’s reaction to the whole day. I had thought I was going to get Taciturn Will, Sarcastic Will. At the very least, Silent Will. But he had been charming to everybody. Even the arrival of soup at lunch didn’t faze him. He just asked politely whether anybody would like to swap his soup for their bread, and the two girls on the far side of the table—who professed themselves “wheat intolerant”—nearly threw their rolls at him.

. . it’s very good that you’ve got over the hump, so to speak. I know it can be crushing to have to readjust your life so dramatically around new expectations.” I stared at the remains of my poached salmon. I had never heard anyone speak to Will like that. He frowned at the table, and then turned back to her. “I’m not sure I am over the hump,” he said quietly. She eyed him for a moment, and glanced over at me. I wondered if my face betrayed me. “Everything takes time, Will,” she said, placing her hand briefly on his arm. “And that’s something that your generation find it a lot harder to adjust to. You have all grown up expecting things to go your way almost instantaneously. You all expect to live the lives you chose. Especially a successful young man like yourself. But it takes time.” “Mrs. Rawlinson—Mary—I’m not expecting to recover,” he said. “I’m not talking about physically,” she said. “I’m talking about learning to embrace a new life.”

“Do you know something?” I could have looked at his face all night. The way his eyes wrinkled at the corners. That place where his neck met his shoulder. “What?” “Sometimes, Clark, you are pretty much the only thing that makes me want to get up in the morning.”

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I had been holding.

There it is lol

I kissed him, breathing in the scent of his skin, feeling his soft hair under my fingertips, and when he kissed me back all of this vanished and it was just Will and me, on an island in the middle of nowhere, under a thousand twinkling stars.

“I’m just thinking of what I know about Will Traynor, what I know about men like him. And I’ll say one thing to you. I’m not sure anyone in the world was ever going to persuade that man once he’d set his mind to something. He’s who he is. You can’t make people change who they are.”

I told myself that, somewhere, tiny particles of him would become tiny particles of me, ingested, swallowed, alive, perpetual.

You’re going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit. It always does feel strange to be knocked out of your comfort zone. But I hope you feel a bit exhilarated too.

I’m not really telling you to jump off tall buildings, or swim with whales or anything (although I would secretly love to think you were), but to live boldly. Push yourself. Don’t settle. Wear those stripy legs with pride. And if you insist on settling down with some ridiculous bloke, make sure some of this is squirreled away somewhere. Knowing you still have possibilities is a luxury.

😭😭😭

So this is it. You are scored on my heart, Clark. You were from the first day you walked in, with your ridiculous clothes and your bad jokes and your complete inability to ever hide a single thing you felt. You changed my life so much more than this money will ever change yours.

i can’t 😭