The Lessons by Naomi Alderman

up because I needed a better vantage place to see and be seen.
    ‘For fuck’s sake,’ someone was saying, ‘without telling him?’
    ‘I thought it would help him relax. He just seemed a bit … you know.’
    In my head a siren went off. It was distant at first, but growing closer and with a line into my heart and the beating that grew more and more intense with every thrashing crashing chastening word. My body is eating itself, I thought.
    ‘Mark,’ said Jess, and her hand was on his chest and she was saying further words but I could not hear them at all.
    I saw how this worked. I was here to be the moon, reflecting Mark’s glory because Jess was in love with him and they were playing a long and intricate game. And my wanting of her, and my need and my desire were only trophies she had brought to offer him. I would have run, but the teeth in my knee began to gnaw, so I crawled down the corridor papered with velvet bees and if she called after me I did not notice.
    Outside in the garden the air was cool and still. I stood up and walked slowly. The music throbbed from the lighted windows of the house, pulsing to the beat of the blood in my eyeballs, but the cool muted it, turning it leafy and distant. Though my shirt was thin and the rain had wet the grass, I walked through the garden further and further from the people and the tumult of destruction.
    In the early-morning light Jess found me. I was sitting on the lawn with my back resting against the sundial, staring at my hands, seeing the fat beneath the skin and the blood beneath the fat and the muscle beneath the blood and the bones beneath the muscle and on and on until the colours of my skin parsed into atoms and parts of atoms, the tiniest parts of reflecting light beneath which all of us are made of nothing.
    I said, ‘I can’t stay here, I can’t.’
    And she held my head and pressed my cheek very close to her breasts.
    ‘It’ll get better,’ she said. ‘You’ll see.’
    She sat down next to me and slipped her arm around my waist, resting my head on her shoulder.
    ‘Are you …’ I said, ‘are you in love with Mark?’
    She blinked and blushed, and I thought – yes, yes you are. And she said, ‘Don’t be an idiot. Mark’s gay .’
    I thought for a moment. I brought to mind the half-remembered image of Mark dancing with a taller man the previous night. I felt entirely a fool.
    ‘What are you …? Why did you even bring me here?’
    She turned her head towards me, pursed her lips into a smile, eyes dancing.
    ‘Because I fancy you, obviously.’
    And she kissed me as though there had never been any question we would do otherwise.
    We did not have sex that morning, or in the several nights and mornings that followed; it would be two or three delicious weeks before we progressed through the slow removal of clothes above the duvet to the things that might happen beneath it.
    That morning, we lay on her bed together. She brought me a large glass of water and I sipped it slowly. She made me lean back on the bed.
    ‘I’d follow you anywhere,’ I said.
    ‘I know,’ she said.
    ‘What are we going to do now?’ I said.
    ‘Now? You are going to sleep and I –’ she leaned forward and retrieved a book from her bedside table – ‘am going to read Hetherington’s Theory of Composition while you do.’
    ‘And then?’
    ‘We’ll talk about that when you wake up. I can take you home if you like. But sleep first.’
    When I woke, it was late afternoon and the sun was already red-gold and low in the sky. My head hurt and my mouth was dry. I opened my eyes, then quickly closed them again. Someone was sitting in a chair next to the bed.
    ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘you’re awake. Do you want some water? I can make breakfast – we’ve got good sausages. Or I do an excellent bacon sandwich. You’d like my bacon sandwich.’
    I opened my eyes again, more slowly.
    It was Mark, standing by the bed, holding a glass of water close to my lips.
    I jerked my