Marian Keyes - Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married Read Free

that I am?"

    "Anyone would think you were trying to convince me not to like you." He smiled tenderly.

    The tenderness was probably what drove me over the edge. His tender smiles, his tender gazes, his tender kisses, his tender caresses, so much tenderness, it was a nightmare.

    And he was so touchy-feely! Mr. Tactile--I couldn't bear it.

    Everywhere we went he held my hand. When we were driving he planted his hand on my thigh, when we were 8 / marian keyes

    watching television he almost lay on top of me. He was always stroking my arm or rubbing my hair or caressing my back, until I could bear it no more and had to push him away.

    Velcro man, that's what I called him in the end.

    And eventually to his face.

    As time went on, I wanted to tear my skin off every time he touched me, and the thought of having sex with him made me feel sick. One day he said he'd love a huge backyard and a houseful of kids and that was it!

    I broke up with him immediately.

    And I couldn't understand how I had once found him so attractive, be- cause by then I couldn't think of a more repulsive man on the face of the earth. He still had the blond hair and the leather pants and the motorcycle, but I was no longer fooled by them.

    I despised him for liking me so much. I wondered how he could settle for so little.

    None of my friends could understand why I had broken up with him. "But he was great" was their cry. "But he was so good to you" was another one. "But he was such a catch," they protested. To which I replied, "No, he wasn't. A catch isn't supposed to be that easy."

    He had disappointed me.

    I had expected disrespect and instead got devotion, I had expected infi- delity and instead got commitment, I had expected upheaval and instead got predictability and (most disappointing of all) I had expected a wolf and had gotten a sheep.

    It's upsetting when the nice guy you really like turns out to be a complete, lying, two-timing bastard. But it's nearly as bad when the guy that you thought was an unreliable heartbreaker turns out to be uncomplicated and nice.

    I spent a couple of days wondering why I liked the

lucy sullivan is getting married / 9

    guys who weren't nice to me? Why couldn't I like the ones who were?

    Would I despise every man who ever treated me well? Was I fated only to want men that didn't want me?

    I woke up in the middle of the night wondering about my sense of self- worth--why was I comfortable only when I was being ill-treated?

    Then I realized that the saying "Treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen" had been around for hundreds of years. And I relaxed--after all, I didn't make the rules.

    So what if my ideal man was a selfish, dependable, unfaithful, loyal, treacherous, loving flirt who thought the world of me, never called when he said he would, made me feel like the most special woman in the universe and flirted with all my friends? Was it my fault that I wanted a Schr�dinger's cat of a boyfriend, a man who was several directly conflicting things simultaneously?

    2 There seemed to be a direct link between how difficult it was to get to a for- tune-teller's house and how good their reputation was. The more inaccess- ible and off-putting the venue, the higher the quality of the predictions, was the widely held view.

    Which meant that Mrs. Nolan must have been brilliant because she lived in some awful, faraway suburb on the outskirts of London.

    On Monday, at five on the dot, Megan, Hetty, Meredia 10 / marian keyes

    and I assembled on the front steps of our place of work. Hetty went and got her car from where it was parked, several miles away--because that was parking in central London for you--and in we got.

    The journey was a nightmare. We spent hours either stuck in traffic or traveling through anonymous suburbs, then we went onto a highway. After driving for ages more, we turned off an exit and finally turned into a housing project.

    And what a neighborhood! It was downright apocalyptic. The neighbor- hood I'd