Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [161]
He was incredibly insecure, having spent his childhood as an overweight blimp. Via the twin tools of weightlifting and bulimia he was now lean and beautiful, but he hadn’t made the emotional shift. In his own head, he was still a mountain of lard, ostracized and ridiculed. As Katherine moved away from him, the chant of, ‘You’re nothing but a fat bastard,’ started internally.
He was gentler than Simon had been, but just as persistent. He kept up a steady flow of phone calls, sent her flowers at work and wrote her a poem, telling her that she was the most interesting and intriguing woman he’d ever met.
And Katherine resisted a lot harder than she had with Simon. When Alex told her that he never usually pursued women so relentlessly, she sneered, ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’
When he swore to her that he wasn’t a womanizer, she laughed nastily and said, ‘You must take me for a fool.’
When he decided to surprise her one night by waiting outside her office, she told him coldly that stalking was a criminal offence.
But he didn’t give up and she began to soften. She couldn’t help herself. His attention was so seductive and she started to believe his protestations of devotion. Because she so desperately wanted to. Then one night he told her about the shame of his tubby past, and the last of her barriers was washed away in a tide of compassion.
As with Simon, Alex became an opportunity to fix where she’d gone wrong. And in the end, begging herself, steeling herself, gritting her teeth and swearing to God that she wouldn’t act needy in any way, she went out with Alex.
It lasted slightly longer than the Simon encounter, but sooner rather than later, she sensed a slipping away of his interest. When she questioned him on it, he denied that he was any less ardent than he’d been all along, but she didn’t believe him. She watched herself mutate from a breezy, self-contained young woman to a desperate, paranoid, insecure obsessive. And she could do nothing to stop herself. She accused Alex of looking at other girls and of not really caring about her. He protested, not very convincingly, that he did care about her, but then he didn’t ring for three days. And when he finally did, it was to tell her that he was seeing someone else.
All her old wounds were torn open. The mortifying feeling that she wasn’t good enough and the huge gaping ache of loss reappeared. Back she went into the pit of self-hatred. The pain was unbearable. She felt like a fool and a terrible failure.
Eventually, she righted herself. And though she swore she’d never, ever again, for as long as she lived, have anything to do with a man, she wasn’t convinced. She’d sabotaged herself twice now. She lived in terror of doing it again.
When she was between men, her life was nice and ordered. She became a fully qualified accountant, she bought her beloved car; eventually she bought her own flat. As she became more confident in her professional life she transformed herself from fresh-faced girl to sleek child-woman.
But the desire for love was relentless. It kept coming back at her like a boomerang. Reappearing every so often, usually when she was being wooed by a good-looking man.
‘Maybe you shouldn’t go out with such hunks,’ Tara had suggested gently. ‘Usually they’re so in love with themselves they’ve none left over for anyone else.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Katherine snapped.
‘I know.’ Tara sighed.
Katherine couldn’t go out with ordinary blokes. She just couldn’t. They held no interest for her.
She had slept with six men before Joe. The longest ‘romance’ lasted seven weeks, and all six of the men dumped her. Not once did she get what