More Bitter Than Death (42 page)

So, this is love.

He realizes that it is only right that he too should get to experience it, although he hadn’t been expecting that.

Not him.

Not with her, anyway.

Girls like her don’t fall in love with guys like him. That’s just how it is. And once again he is astounded that he’s actually lying here in bed next to her. That he, of all people, is the one getting to touch her soft, pale skin, cup his hands over her small, pink nipples, kiss her inner thighs and the forest of light-brown hair that grows there, hear those little smothered sounds she makes as he moves more heatedly inside her. The noises confusingly evoke both porn movies and the sound an injured animal makes, so that he feels both horny and worried: Is he doing this wrong? Is this hurting her?

But she just smiles, says it’s perfect, nice, so nice that it feels like she’s coming apart. She explains to him that it’s like a kind of pain even though it’s not. And he understands what she means, because when he explodes in her, when he dies in her arms, he feels something similar. All the pain and all the pleasure and all the feelings wash over him like a gigantic, frightening, but also liberating wave.

No one is more beautiful than she is.

He had that thought the very first time he met her, and it was simultaneously arousing, forbidden, and yawningly mundane. It had been part of the reality he had just gotten used to: there were certain things in life that just weren’t meant for him, for people like him, doors he would never be able to open, places he would never get to see, emotions he could never expect to experience.

Love, for one.

He noticed her right away when he started going to the Employment Center. He noticed how her long brown hair was streaked with fire when the
sunlight hit it, how her eyes could change from the palest gray to the darkest thundercloud violet.

And when she laughed, he wanted to laugh with her, to share in her happiness. Although obviously she never laughed at him. Why would she do that? Why would anyone laugh at him?

And then . . . They had been chatting about his future. She was sitting there in front of him on her swivel chair as if it were the most natural thing in the world, sucking on her yellow pencil, saying, “But isn’t it about time you pull yourself together? I mean, you’ve actually had two trial employment periods. You should have managed to get hired at one of those companies; you’re a bright guy.”

And he’d been ashamed. His cheeks got hot. His scalp turned red under his long, dark hair. He hated her for sitting there in her swivel chair with that pencil in her mouth like a lollipop, calling him a bright guy, hated that fucking grocery store where he’d spent day in and day out plucking old fruits and vegetables off the shelves—moldy oranges and rotten plums, with fruit flies swarming around him—detested the pointless welding training program that didn’t lead to any kind of job, hated sorting mail in Solna, and all the nut jobs who worked there. Everyone stuttering, limping, crippled—freaks.

Everyone was like him.

And most of all he’d hated himself for not being able to be like other people, “acting like folk,” as his mom used to call it before she and his dad up and died.

She puts her hand on his stomach and he can see it going up and down as he breathes.

“Hey you,” she says. “Do you love me?”

“Of course I do,” he mumbles.

Self-conscious but still happy, bursting with that grown-up love that tastes so different from anything he’s ever encountered.

“Would you do anything for me?”

He turns to her and her hand rolls down onto the soiled blanket. The last rays of sunlight are shining in through the window, lighting the fire in her hair. Warily he sets the coin down on the stack of newspapers next to the bed and places his hand on her breast.

“Of course I would,” he says.

“Even if it were horrible, really horrible?”

There is something dark in her eyes now, as if she were in pain. And he knows instantly that he would do anything to see her happy, to erase that look of pain from her face, to smooth out the furrows in her brow, to bring the smile back again.

“I’d do anything for you,” he says. “Anything at all.”

Camilla Grebe (b. 1968) is a graduate of the Stockholm School of Economics and has had several entrepreneurial successes. She was a cofounder of Storyside, a Swedish audiobook publisher, where she was both CEO and publisher during the early 2000s. She lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

Åsa Träff (b. 1970) is a psychologist specializing in cognitive behavioral therapy. She runs a private practice with her husband, also a psychologist. She primarily diagnoses and treats neuropsychiatric disorders and anxiety disorders. She lives in Älvsjö, Sweden.

Also by Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff

Some Kind of Peace

Before You Die

Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff

Translation © 2013 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Published by agreement with Nordin Agency

Originally published in Sweden in 2010 by Wahlström & Widstrand

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Paperbacks Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition June 2013

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Cover design by Eric Fuentecilla

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grebe, Camilla.

[Bittrare än döden. English]

More bitter than death / Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff ; translated from the Swedish by Tara Chace.

pages cm.

1. Domestic abuse—Fiction. 2. Family violence—Fiction. 3. Abused women—Fiction. 4. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Träff, Åsa. II. Chace, Tara, Translator. III. Title.

PT9877.17.R43B5813 2013

839.73'8—dc23

2012042541

ISBN 978-14516-5460-8

ISBN 978-1-4516-5464-6 (ebook)