All the Little Things by Sarah Lawton (the best books to read txt) 📕

of me that wanted him, wanted him in me, all the time. I was addicted to his attention and the way he fucked me, worshipped my body like I was the most amazing woman in existence. I’d never felt before that I was the centre of someone’s world and it was intoxicating and I was lost in it, in him.

He attacked me after I got my first commission. We were in our second year and I’d done a line of sketches inspired by the Cottingley Fairies hoax for a class, which my tutor had shown to a friend who was a buyer for department stores. He wanted to commission them for a wallpaper print for little girls’ nurseries. It was a small fortune to me, and I had thought Ciaran would be thrilled, but I was to find out later that it didn’t suit his struggling artist trope – to make money, from art? We went out to celebrate with the cheapest fizzy wine we could find, a lot of it, and when we got home, he broke a glass pane in our flat door using my head.

I wanted to leave him, of course I did – I hadn’t been raised to stay with a man who hurt me, but I also hadn’t been raised to understand how you can fall under someone’s spell so entirely. I let him take me to A&E for butterfly stitches and then I let him take me home to bed where he made me come again and again while he whispered how much he adored me, how I was the rock he wanted to build his life on, he was sorry, so sorry, it would never happen again.

It did happen again. It always does. He smashed my hand in the same door because I had embarrassed him by talking to his friend about football. He hated the game, never watched it, though I did because I had always watched it with my father, before, and it reminded me of him. But only men should talk about football, apparently. I had shown him up. I’ve never watched it since, and the fingers on my left hand never did heal straight. I was just grateful it wasn’t my right.

I can pinpoint the night I got pregnant with Vivian. I had offered to lend him some money, fed up of his whines of being skint. He hadn’t replied, but I could feel his anger simmering and growing and I tried to distract him the only way I knew how, with my body. And I thought it had worked, until he began to be rough, using hard thrusts that hurt me and made me gasp with pain, rigid hands that left bruises. I turned my face away and he lunged, biting me where my shoulder met my neck, so hard I thought he had taken a piece of me. He finished with a bloody-mouthed shout, slapped me and then left me there, in our bed, bleeding.

I didn’t even leave him to protect her initially, I was that worn out and weak, still in love with him despite his fists and his teeth and the words that hurt worse than either. I thought we could have a family, that the baby would fix everything, fix him, but when I told him I was pregnant he was beyond furious. He didn’t want a milky sow hanging around his neck, a baby to throttle him with inanity and despair like he’d done to his own father, a talented musician who never made it after being ‘trapped’ by his mother and himself. That beating was the worst, including several kicks to the stomach that I thought had ended everything. I should have gone to the police but instead I ran home with nothing except bruises and scars, and shame, to London to live with my mother again in her little house in Walthamstow, praying that he wouldn’t follow me.

By some miracle, despite weeks of bleeding, I didn’t lose Vivian. My fairy commission was enough to get by on while I slowly built us a life, painted a fantasy. Vivian never once asked me about her dad, although I was expecting it, planning for it, and she looked nothing like him at all, which was the purest sort of relief. I didn’t want to see his acid eyes ever again.

I had thought I would never want to be in love again, or even have sex with anyone ever again but, as always, thinking of Ciaran, of his hands on my body, stirred something dark inside me, and I went to bed and masturbated until I fell asleep, dreaming of dark wings and sharp teeth, of wicked hot breath on my neck and of cold, clever fingers between my legs.

When I woke up I felt overheated and sweaty and guilty about going out yet again the night before, and an echo of the strange dreams followed me around until I dispelled them with a cold shower. There were no movements from Vivian’s room so I peeped my head round the door ever so quietly. They were both in her bed, cuddled up together, which I couldn’t imagine was making them hot at all and I smiled before retreating downstairs for tea and toast, which I took outside into the garden to have while I listened to the birds waking up.

I was working on the final draft for the book when I heard someone pad into the studio behind me. It was Molly, looking pale, her eyes black and smudged with make-up, her long hair straggling down her back.

‘Are you okay, sweetheart?’ I asked her, putting down my pen and turning to her. She looked at me, her throat moved but she didn’t say anything. I put my hand on her shoulder, and she stepped into me, putting her head down next to mine, her arms round me. I could feel her shaking. I put both my arms around her and hugged her.