Rock of Ages Read Online Free

love three times that night.
    Maybe it was the memory, or maybe it was just a wild hair. Georgia took off the gym shorts, panties, tee-shirt, and sports bra and walked over to the window. She peeked out through the closed blinds. It was dark, and Georgia was known, among her friends, to get a wild hair now and then.
    She put her running shoes back on, no socks, and picked up the house key off the dining room table, just in case she locked herself out. Just one lap around the house, she told herself, for old times’ sake. To prove I’m still alive.
    She went out the back door and almost turned around, but she’d had enough false starts. She ran across the yard, wearing only the shoes, then turned and sprinted through the area between her home and the Wyndhams’ next door, ducking under a dogwood limb, dodging the rose bushes, the cool early fall breeze tickling her bare skin, her heart thumping. She could hear a television and the drone of porch voices. She made the turn into the front yard.
    She didn’t even think about the motion detector until it came on. She froze like a deer in some car’s headlights for an instant, and then she heard the voices stop.
    The light, bright as the sun, stayed on, and would not go out. She had just recovered enough to start running again, with her hand shielding her eyes, when she heard Sally Wyndham call across the side yard, timidly, “Georgia? Are you all right?” Bob had to be out there, too, sitting and rocking on their front porch, a country quirk in a neighborhood where everyone else retreated to the back.
    â€œFine,” she called over her shoulder as she sprinted away from them. “I’m fine. Really.” She reached the darkness on the far side of the house and finally, mercifully, the door from which she left. So much, she thought to herself, for spontaneity. There was a time when she would have evoked a little excitement among the neighborhood husbands if she had been caught naked in her front yard, a naughty scamp who might do anything, who wasn’t afraid of anything. Who, though, wanted to see a 51-year-old English professor’s tits and ass? She could imagine the whispering, the head-shaking, the pity. Poor Georgia. She ought to get some help.
    She didn’t think her body was that bad, although she could hardly bear to look at what gravity and age had done to it when she was safely inside again, and she didn’t really think she was having a breakdown, no matter what anybody said. But people would think she was a pathetic, addled, menopausal hag, and that threw her.
    She sat up late, listening to some old rock ‘n’ roll now, dipping into the bourbon, not answering the phone. She was still there at half past midnight when she finally figured that she had to go, that she could not let every bit of the past leave her without some kind of illogical, nostalgic gesture.
    Do something, as Phil would have said, even if it’s wrong.
    Part of it, she thought later, was the realization that nothing, not one damn thing really, kept her in Montclair except ennui and fear. She had a little money, she was relatively fit (though not young enough, she conceded, to live on raw hot dogs, corn chips, chive dip, marijuana, bourbon, and Almond Joys, certainly not young enough to be caught buck naked in her yard). She could travel to Nepal, or join the Peace Corps like Justin, or take off and see America, the whole country, and take months. Hell, she could live in the back of Phil’s suburban assault vehicle.
    She could do all of that. Maybe East Geddie would be a start at least.
    She did worry a little about herself. Justin, before he left, could not get her out of the house except for a handful of safe, familiar places, all in Montclair itself.
    Today, a trip around the house buck naked, she thought. Tomorrow, a drive down to North Carolina. The next day, who knows? Before losing Phil, she had long enjoyed describing herself as