18
IT WASN’T REALLY a gigantic paw, because Spot’s paw was rather small by comparison with the rest of him, and he was patting my cheek with it. The cat was sitting on my chest, purring loudly, and I was so grateful to him for waking me from my dream that I didn’t even scold him. In fact, I let him go on sitting there and tickled him under the chin until my pulse had calmed down a little. I’d never before longed so much to be back when a bad dream was nothing but a bad dream. There was a large lump in my throat, because the tears I’d shed in my dream had all gathered there. But I knew that if I gave way to my urge to cry it would be like breaching a dam—there’d be no stopping it. So I tried to concentrate on the soothing sound of the cat’s purr and just not think.
However, Spot wasn’t there simply to be tickled under the chin. He gave me a gentle reminder in the form of another pat on my cheek.
“How did you get in here, anyway, kitty?” I cautiously put him on the floor, switched on the bedside lamp, and got out of bed. Someone must have opened my door, because I’d definitely closed it before going to sleep.
“Or have you found out how to push door handles down?” Spot was still purring as he rubbed around my legs. I glanced at my alarm clock. Three thirty. Presumably the cat wanted to go out on his usual nocturnal mouse hunt. Normally, Grayson was responsible for letting him out (it was also Grayson who had to remove the dead voles that Spot brought home and left on the doormat), but today Spot seemed to have chosen me to open the door.
“Okay, come on, then,” I said, and Spot went out the half-open door ahead of me. He waited at the top of the stairs as I checked that Mia was in bed and sleeping peacefully (she was). Downstairs, I opened the door from the kitchen to the terrace for him, and as usual he suddenly wasn’t in any hurry, but sat in the doorway washing himself, while I stepped from foot to foot to keep warm as I slowly froze into an icicle. All the same, I watched Spot regretfully when he finally felt like setting off. There had been something comforting about his presence. Or at least, it had kept my thoughts occupied. When I went back to bed, I felt sure I’d have the images from my dream before my eyes at once: Henry taking off his bathrobe and plunging into the whirlpool; Henry smiling at B; Henry saying, in a deep voice, A woman like you shouldn’t let anyone treat her so badly.
A woman like you … Instead of going back to bed, I went into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. Without glasses or contact lenses, I couldn’t see myself very clearly, but even so I knew I couldn’t compete with B. I was the opposite of beautiful, grown-up, and sexy. It was pathetic.
As if on cue, I thought of all the nasty things Secrecy had written and the comments of the other students. Maybe they were right to say that Henry and I hadn’t slept with each other yet only because I was too childish and immature for him.
The opposite of desirable.
And then, without further warning, my tears began to flow, and Spot wasn’t there to take my mind off them. I was unable to stop crying, although I really did try to. I hung over the basin, bent double as if I had a bad stomach upset, and cried harder than ever before in my life.
When someone knocked on the door, I couldn’t have said how much time had passed. I didn’t want to know either. I didn’t want to know anything anymore. There must be some way of deleting the last few hours from my memory. The only question was, where could I find a hypnotist to do it for me in a hurry? Apparently electric shocks could do it, too, but perhaps the hard bathroom tiles would work if I just banged my head on them hard enough. There was another knock on the door.
“Liv? Are you in there?” That was Grayson, and he sounded tired and irritated.
Couldn’t I be left in peace in this house, even at night? I wanted to be alone. Alone with the tiles on the bathroom floor. “Go … go and use the guest toilet, Grayson,” I said, sounding just as irritated. The worst of my sobbing was over, but it had left me with hiccups.
Grayson muttered something to himself on the other side of the door.