Still Me (Me Before You #3)

by Jojo Moyes

for those few minutes, my mouth full of unfamiliar food, my eyes filled with strange sights, I existed only in the moment. I was fully present, my senses alive, my whole being open to receive the new experiences around me. I was in the only place in the world I could possibly be.

Agnes appeared oblivious. She glanced around distractedly, trying to locate her husband. She wouldn’t relax until she had hold of his arm. Sometimes I watched them together and saw an almost palpable sense of relief come over her when she felt him beside her.

“It is magical, this meeting of our bodies. And afterward we just hold each other for hours and I wrap myself around him and he lays his head on my breasts and I promise him he will never be frozen again.

But it was simple. I wanted to be good at my job. I wanted to get the absolute most out of my time in New York, working for these amazing people. I wanted to suck the marrow out of each day, as Will would have done. I read that first letter again and again, and once I’d got over the strangeness of hearing his voice, I felt a strange kinship with him, a newcomer to the city.

I didn’t want to talk any more. I just wanted to feel his skin against mine. I wanted to be completely his again, enfolded, possessed.

“This is a ridiculous discussion and I’ve got to get some sleep.”

At one point I felt so bad that when I walked into my bathroom and saw a large chestnut-colored cockroach on the sink I didn’t scream, like I had previously, but briefly considered making it a pet, like a character in a children’s novel.

I beamed at him, but something about his expression troubled me. I thought he’d enjoy my little taxi-summoning flourish, but instead it was as if he suddenly didn’t recognize me.

I wanted him to feel like he’d taken everything.

I wasn’t sure men would ever understand the infinitely subtle weaponry women used against each other.

Because all I felt was a second gigantic hole where my heart had been. Without the anger that had fueled me for the past forty-eight hours I was a void. Sam had gone and I had as good as sent him away. To other people the end of my relationship might have been comprehensible, but to me it somehow made no sense at all.

I let the stiff breeze sting the tips of my ears and my feet grow cold, and I told myself that I wouldn’t always feel so sad. I let myself think about Will, and how many afternoons we had spent around this castle, and how I had survived his death, and I told myself firmly that this new pain was a lesser one: I was not facing months of sadness so deep it made me feel nauseous.

“I know this—nobody gets everything. And we immigrants know this more than anyone. You always have one foot in two places. You can never be truly happy because, from the moment you leave, you are two selves, and wherever you are one half of you is always calling to the other. This is our price, Louisa. This is the cost of who we are.”

I licked him. His aftershave didn’t taste as nice as it smelled but it was kind of nice to lick someone.

Just get through today, I told myself. If life had taught me one thing, it was that the answers would come soon enough.

And then he kissed me.

All this nonsense about women having it all. We never could and we never shall. Women always have to make the difficult choices. But there is a great consolation in simply doing something you love.”

Perhaps I was meant to be with this man, I thought, albeit via a strange, unsettling route. Perhaps this was Will, come back to me.

Margot understood me better than I understood myself. I would have molded myself to fit him. I would have shed the clothes I loved, the things I cared most about. I would have transformed my behavior, my habits, lost in his charismatic slipstream. I would have become a corporate wife, blaming myself for the bits of me that wouldn’t fit, never-endingly grateful for this Will in American form.

“You know,” she said, “when you get to my age, the pile of regrets becomes so huge it can obscure the view terribly.”

You are a courageous, gorgeous, tremendously kind little creature and I shall be forever grateful that their loss has been my gain. Thank you.

“The William Traynor Memorial Library.

This was the problem with grand gestures, I realized. They tended to backfire in spectacular fashion.

The key was making sure that anyone you allowed to walk beside you didn’t get to decide which you were, and pin you down like a butterfly in a case. The key was to know that you could always somehow find a way to reinvent yourself again.