The Romantic Read Online Free

why didn’t you?”
    “I’m not …” He sighs.
    “What?”
    “I’m not good at writing letters.”
    He looks so tormented that I soften and say,“Oh, well, you’re here now. Out of thin air.” I take his hand and lift it. “Abel Richter. In the flesh.”
    He sets his beer on the grass and brings both of our hands closer to the lamp. His hands are big, his long fingers cool from the bottle. My fingers are thin and bony but I know he likes them because he said so once, he said I had the hands of a tarsier, which is a small monkey. Another time, in the same fascinated voice, he said my hair was like milkweed tuft.
    Frowning, very intent, he runs a finger over the scar on my thumb. All the nerves in my body are flocked there.
    “How’d you get that?” he says.
    “Slicing onions.” Without even thinking, I say,“I still love you.”
    The finger halts. We look at each other. And then we’re kissing.
    It’s a long, un frenzied kiss. I never knew you could kiss like this, holding each other so lightly, nothing moving except for your mouths. When it’s over, I say,“We love each other. We never stopped.”
    He nods.
    “We never stopped.” I stroke his hair, feeling an immense tenderness.
    He reaches for the bottle. “Want some?”
    “No, thanks.”
    I nestle against his chest. Behind us, at the party, people sing along to “All You Need Is Love.” Down here, the ringing of crickets rises like an electric mist I can hardly distinguish from the quivering of my own body. I feel as if I have been lifted out of my life. Only a few hours ago I was sad and unlucky; now I’m one of the lucky ones. The miracle of him being here washes over me like a spell, likevoices murmuring into an anxious dream,“You’re all right, you’re all right.” In a kind of trance, feeling immune now to anything but happiness, I start unbuttoning my blouse.
    “What are you doing?” he says quietly.
    “Taking off my clothes.”
    I stand and remove the blouse and drape it over the back of the bench. “I want us to be together,” I say. I reach around and unhook my bra and let it fall on the grass. I am very serene, but excited, too. I know what he sees. Me fearlessly undressing. How white I am, the breeze off the water raising goosebumps on my skin.
    He stands and faces me. He looks almost frightened. Hasn’t he done this before either? “You’re so pretty,” he says, as if he wishes I weren’t.
    Nearer the creek, away from the light, we lie on the grass. Just before he enters me I am seized by a bursting feeling and I cry out, startled, then lose myself as the feeling branches down my legs in delicious, subsiding jolts. The pain of penetration is like a hundred tiny bones snapping, but it lasts only seconds.
    “Are you all right?” he gasps. “Is this okay?”
    Afterwards, after we have our clothes on, we smoke a joint. Holding our shoes, we walk across the creek and climb the bank onto a neighbouring lawn where we lie down and watch the sky, our old occupation. There it all is: the Milky Way, the North Star, the Little Dipper. He says Polaris, Cassiopeia, Ursa Major and Minor, Hercules, names he’d taught me and I’d forgotten.
    What I see, though, isn’t constellations, but a code, like Braille, all the stars positioned so as to tell us something. Iask him what he thinks it is and he says it’s,“Look. Look up.” Only that. He rests a hand on my belly. I pull him toward me.
    And then Tim Todd is hovering over us with his white spaceship face. He’s the one who, driving me home, says,“How do you know you’re not knocked up?”

CHAPTER FOUR
    Greenwoods takes its name from the oak and maple forests that the developers have bulldozed, and like any other Canadian subdivision, it has the bungalows, the wide looping streets, the young housewives with their herds of children. As an only child I am regarded as strange and spoiled, and while I can’t argue with strange, the presumption that I get whatever I want