Free The Loop by Nicholas Evans Page B

desperately for their approval, until they drifted off or started cheating on her or announced over a last, lousy dinner in a cheap restaurant, trying to break it gently, saying maybe, honey, we should call it a day.
    She’d never lived permanently with any of them. And so when Joel made his proposal, she went into a spin of panic. For weeks, she would wake up in the middle of the night with her heart pounding and an absolute certainty roaring in her head that tomorrow this gentle, golden man who lay warm and softly snoring beside her would tell her it had all been a mistake and would she please pack her bags, take her dog and get the hell out of his life.
    But it didn’t happen. And after awhile she relaxed. And soon it seemed as if they weren’t even separate people. She had read about such things in books but never believed it could be so. But it was. They often knew each other’s thoughts without need of words. They could spend a whole night talking or a whole day silent.
    Normally when people asked her about her work she would give a few jokey answers, putting it down, and would then switch the conversation around by asking questions of her own. Who could possibly be interested in what she did? But with Joel, it was different. You couldn’t deflect him. She found herself telling him more about her work than she had ever told anyone and he made her realize that her supervisor was right: she was good; hell, she was brilliant.
    The first time he told her he loved her, she didn’t know how to react. She just murmured and kissed him and the moment passed. She couldn’t bring herself to say it back, although it was true. Maybe he was the kind of man who said it to every woman he slept with. But that wasn’t all that restrained her. There seemed something fearfully final about saying it back, like joining two ends of a string to make a circle; she would be completing something. Ending it.
    But as fall gave way to winter and the Cape cleared of tourists and its skies of the great flocks of migrating birds, Helen found herself somehow clearing too. Free of doubt and self-consciousness, she came to accept what she and Joel had found. He loved her and she must therefore be lovable. He told her she was beautiful and for the first time in her life she truly felt she was. And though surely he must know it, why should she not now tell him that she loved him in return? So the second time he said it, she did.
    They moved the long kitchen table into the living room and arranged it by the big bay window, setting up their laptops and piling it high with papers. But little work got done. They talked too much or gazed too long at the wind scything spume from the gray waves of the bay. There was a wood stove which they kept going all the time and each day they took Buzz for long walks by the water’s edge in search of driftwood.
    Joel had a way with animals and the hitherto unruly Buzz was soon his devoted slave, sitting and staying to command and fetching sticks thrown seemingly impossible distances out into the surf. Helen watched in mounting panic while the poor dog got tossed and swamped and dragged under. She was convinced he would drown. But Joel just laughed. And soon, a bedraggled head would bob up somewhere in the foam, teeth clenched on the stick that, miraculously, he always managed to find and he would struggle back with it and drop it at Joel’s feet, begging for more.
    Joel had just discovered opera, which Helen had always claimed to hate. She groaned every time he put on a disc and even more when he sang along. Then he caught her one day humming something from Tosca in the bathtub and she was forced to admit that some of it was bearable. Not as good as Sheryl Crow, but not bad.
    There was a bookcase stuffed by the landlords, inexplicably, with musty translations of Russian classics, books Joel said he had always meant to read but had never gotten round to. He started with Dostoevsky and moved rapidly on through