Anthro-graphy
Personal amusement in the study of Humanity
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Excerpt from Boiling a Frog by Christopher Brookmyre.
Sarah was a resourceful and some might say formidable woman - but he didn’t want her to have to.
And he had made promises. Obligations. If he wanted to marry her, then that meant he had to want to always be there for her. Doing something that could get himself killed or imprisoned would suggest otherwise. But that wasn’t it either.
It was this: he could feel her fear of his death. A coldness, an emptiness, chasmic and desolately lonely. A fear like none he had ever known.
He could feel how she would miss him. In the past, when he was contemplating his next recklessness he hadn’t considered even how his parents would miss him if he died; he knew they’d be sad, but… In a relationship based so much upon his needs of them, he hadn’t appreciated that there were ways in which they needed him. In fact he had never appreciated that there were ways in which anyone needed him -
not like that.
He felt how there was something he gave Sarah that she could never replace if he was gone. A preciousness she could not bear to lose, and that he must do all he could to protect.
In short, he sensed the receipt of his own love, and it was a revelation far more devastating and unexpected than anything he had ever splashed across a front page.
He held her a little tighter on the settee
