Summerwater by Sarah Moss (top 10 motivational books .txt) 📕

even though they must have about a million high-tech ways of communicating between ships. Or maybe not, these days, maybe having sold all the weapons for the aerial bombardment of faraway children’s hospitals the nation is in fact protected by people waving flags and dispatching pigeons. Toby used to ask Milly to test him when he was in the cadets. You Are Standing Into Danger; Minesweeper On Active Duty; Man Overboard. Actually That Hurts A Bit; This Isn’t Working For Me; Please Get On And Finish Now. Not Tonight, Josephine. I Have A Book I’d Rather Be Reading. I’m Too Full Of Dinner. Though the book doesn’t agree, Milly reckons there are things best left unsaid in a long-term relationship. He’s moving down towards her breast, which is more like it. She leans back and makes an encouraging sort of sound, and as he flicks his tongue across her nipple she closes her eyes against the slatted pine ceiling and thinks of her last boyfriend but one who never did any housework and slept with at least two other people while they were together but knew what he was doing in bed, not that he didn’t need to given how he behaved everywhere else. He was tall enough to pin her wrists above her head and at the same time kiss her breasts a bit like Josh is doing now only more tongue and less lip, and then he’d run a finger very slowly down her midline, following her cleavage and her belly button, slowing, sometimes making a U-turn and heading back up while she stiffened, waited, caught her breath. Hm, that’s nice, what he’s doing now. She should do something for him, though, he doesn’t like it when she stays passive too long, needs to feel wanted like anyone else, and she can maybe get the duvet back at the same time. Not that it’s a nice duvet, polyester filling, makes you sweat, and smells like air freshener but it’s probably fabric conditioner, Josh’s mum’s a sucker for all those cheap smelly things that put more plastic into the oceans and more of what you don’t want into the groundwater. Don’t be thinking about Josh’s mum.

She sits up, sees Josh’s eyes widen as she rolls him onto his back. She slides down the bed, pulls the duvet up with her and lies down beside him, her knee hooked over his thigh, her head on his chest where his heartbeat drums in her ear, her hand cupping his other shoulder. It’s warm and he smells good. Love you, she says, which is true and also something of a negotiating position: if I love you enough, maybe we don’t need to have a simultaneous orgasm, or at least not this morning. You’re gorgeous, he says, love you too, and he strokes the back of her neck where the hair is still buzz-cut from last week’s new style, and runs his hand down the bumps of her spine so she can almost hear wheels over cobbles. What time is it, she says. It doesn’t matter, he says, we’re on holiday, we don’t have to do anything we don’t feel like. I’m a bit hungry, she’s about to say, but he says, I want to remember this when I’m back in the office, I want to make you come again, we’ve got all day. She turns her head to kiss his chest. It’s not fair to be thinking of Will the Wanker, she wouldn’t like it if he was thinking about Shelley, so she tries Don Draper again.

Oh, Josh has gone soft, which isn’t surprising, with her lying around like this. And she doesn’t like the feel of it soft, you realise there’s no bone, so to speak, just a defenceless – well, not a slug, nicer than that, but some hairless new-born mouse or rabbit, something that really shouldn’t be out on its own, if she can’t sort that out she’s going to go make them both some breakfast, though as she gets to work on it – under the duvet – it occurs to her that when she has sorted it out she will have to follow through, they will be back to Project Simultaneous Orgasm. Wouldn’t it be totally worth it, he says, just to know that we can do this thing that most couples can’t, for the rest of our lives we’ll be able to look at pretty much anyone and be really smug. Shut up, she says, sorting it out down there with the smell of fabric conditioner and sex which is probably highly erotic for some, it’s not the fucking Olympics. I want to watch, he says, I want to see you, and he flips the duvet right off onto the floor. She sucks her stomach in but there’s not much you can do at this angle, gravity being what it is. Bloody hell it’s cold for August. One day, she thinks, sorting it out rather more briskly, one day maybe we’ll be able to go to a Greek island. No, to one of those tropical islands, Mauritius or whatever. The Seychelles. Or Zanzibar, she always liked the sound of that word. Zanzibar. Oh God, Josh says, stop it, babe, not yet, come here, come back up here.

She lies on her back, opens her knees and cranes her head to see him, to see his face as he kneels between her thighs. He holds her gaze as he – oh, she says, ah, and she tugs a pillow – his pillow, she’s not stupid – under her hips and lifts her legs. It’s pleasant, she likes to see him too, eyes closed, concentrating. Pelvic floor, she thinks, clenches, and his eyes open and he closes them again as he smiles. OK, she thinks, now then, Zanzibar, we’re in a cabin with one of those wooden ceiling fans and a low bed with really crisp white linen sheets on a teak floor and there are French windows open