A Dangerous Age Read Online Free

to have to think about myself morning, night, and noon. I hadn’t even flossed my teeth since we made the down payment on the duplex and started ordering furniture and letting our parents pay for it, much less remembered to swallow a birth control pill when there certainly didn’t seem to be much reason to swallow one.
    “Is it true identical twins feel each other’s pain?” I asked Carl when we were settled in a booth in a neighborhood restaurant I’d found a few days before.
    “I feel this pain,” Carl said. “It kills me to see the mess it made. The surgeons have been photographing me; that’s weird enough. We’re mirror images of each other, it turns out. Something like that. They may take some skin off my butt if they need it. He’s knocked out most of the time. They aren’t letting him be in pain. They’ve got the best doctors in the world at Walter Reed.”
    “They should have. I’m glad they do.”
    “So you make movies? Winifred said you’d made some films.”
    “I’ve made a few documentaries. I’d like to go to Afghanistan and film some of what’s going on there. I don’t know what it takes to get to do that. I’m small potatoes in the film world, Carl. I’m just scrabbling for a living. It’s crazy. No one makes a living doing this. I don’t know why I think I can.”
    “I bet you will. I bet you’re good.”
    “I might be. It takes so much to prove yourself. You have to get people to put their faith in you and give you money.”
    “You aren’t going to eat those biscuits?” He had finished his eggs and toast and bacon and was eyeing what was left of my eggs and biscuits.
    “I am not. They are all yours.” He took a biscuit and filled it with butter and added jelly and began to eat it. I had not taken my eyes off his shoulders and hands since we sat down and I justwent on looking at them. The sexual stuff between us was so thick you could almost see it.
    “What are you going to do now?” he asked.
    “Wait for the movers to bring the rest of the furniture this afternoon. Stuff from my place in Baltimore. Did Winifred say when she’d be back?”
    “She said to tell you she wouldn’t be home until late tonight or maybe tomorrow. She might spend the night in the hospital so Aunt Sally can get some rest and our mother can leave.”
    “Okay.”
    W E DROVE BACK to the duplex and went into the kitchen, where he helped me unpack some boxes. Then he touched my arm, and we had a real conversation.
    “Would you go have dinner with me some night?” he asked. “I mean a date, like on a date.”
    “You’re too young for me.”
    “No, I am not.”
    “Then maybe I’ll go. I’m thirty-six years old, Carl.”
    “So what. I’m a man, Louise. Don’t play games with me.”
    So I didn’t play any. I put my arms around him and sighed a long, deep sigh and took the man to bed and kept him there until a delivery man started beating on the door a few hours later.
    Before he left to go back to the hospital, he made plans to take me to dinner the following night. “Don’t act like nothing’s happened,” he said. “Promise you won’t start all that.”
    “Who are you?” I asked. “I don’t know who you are.”
    “Yes, you do. You know plenty. I’m a musician, Louise, and I’m the dominant twin. Brian is my child and my brother. He’s me and now I’m going back up there and spending the night beside his bed. And then I’m going over there where they did this to him and count coup. Can you deal with all of that?”
    “Twenty-four?” I said. “I don’t believe you’re twenty-four. I think you are a hundred.”
    W HEN I WAS SEVENTEEN years old and having my first bad crush on a boy, my mother told me something she probably should not have told me, but all the women in our family tell things they shouldn’t tell. “You don’t know how easy it is to become pregnant,” she said. “You cannot imagine. I got pregnant with you the day your father and I were moving into our