Free The Perfect 10 by Louise Kean Page A

it’s inspired.’
    ‘Is it?’
    ‘Is it what?’
    ‘Is it inspired? The puff of air … ?’
    ‘I don’t know. The customers seem to think so.’
    ‘Haven’t you tried it yourself?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I say a little too defensively. ‘There wasthis one time, I did get one out of its box, and not just, you know, “inspecting it for delivery damage”.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘And I got distracted …’
    ‘Distracted?’
    ‘I tried to make it play chopsticks on my keyboard.’
    My therapist gives me a strange look. He doesn’t usually register any kind of emotion, or surprise, or anything. But that was definitely a ‘look’.
    ‘Sunny.’ He says my name as if he has reached some kind of conclusion, and my back straightens for a life-changing insight that has so far, in eight months of therapy, eluded me. ‘Do you think you might put too much emphasis on sex?’
    I’ve heard that one before. This is nothing new.
    ‘You feel relatively sexually inexperienced and instead of seeing sex as merely just one of any number of natural human instincts, you are building it up into something that it is not? You are putting it, and in fact your lack of it, at the core of your life, when it deserves no more importance than say talking, or laughing, or eating?’
    ‘Eating?’
    ‘Not just eating. Talking, or laughing, or any number of human instincts.’
    ‘But you said eating last. With emphasis.’
    ‘There was no emphasis, Sunny.’
    ‘Are you suggesting that I’ve replaced one obsession with another? I still eat, you know.’
    ‘Of course you eat.’
    ‘I’ve had a coffee, and a yoghurt drink, and a Skinny Blueberry Muffin already today. I’m not starving myself. I was in Starbucks for an hour before I came here.’
    ‘Starbucks? Are you going there now? You were so against it when it first opened! It wasn’t local, or atmospheric enough for Kew – weren’t those your words?’
    ‘I know. But then I tried it. Now I’m addicted to their Skinny Blueberry Muffins. It is a tasty yet low-fat snack.’
    ‘How does that make you feel?’
    ‘Well, it doesn’t exactly fill me up, but it’s breakfast.’
    ‘No, I mean how does it feel to sacrifice your principles for your diet?’
    ‘Look, I have a healthy relationship with food now. My diet is not the enemy, and food is not the enemy, necessarily. I know that you think that there is something unhealthy, emotionally, with the diet thing, but truly I am just focused. I had a lot of weight to lose. You could never understand.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because you’ve never been fat.’ I state it with force, like a dare. I challenge him to disagree, because I have a thousand arguments up my old fat sleeve on this one and he will never win.
    It still feels strange to say the ‘f’ word out loud, and not cringe, or whisper. Just the word still manages to hurt me a little.
    ‘We all want to lose a few pounds at some point,’ he says, and it’s like a starting pistol in my head.
    ‘But a few pounds is not fat! Not properly self-conscious afraid-to-go-swimming-for-being-laughed-at unloved fat!’
    ‘But, Sunny, it is this perception – that you were unlovable because you were overweight – that interests me. Many overweight people are very much in love, and are loved in return. A person’s weight is by no means their defining characteristic.’
    ‘Maybe before it wasn’t, in “the olden days”, but not today. Nobody loves fat any more. That’s the last century speaking. I know, I live it. Complete strangers whispered “fat bitch” to me as I walked past them in the street. They didn’t know me, but they wanted to hurt me, because of it. Tell me that is not a defining characteristic – a person you’venever even seen before hates you, and that’s not “unlovable”?’
    ‘But is it possible you lost the weight without addressing your own issues, not those of the strangers in the street, but your own?’
    ‘No, I just