After the Fall Read Online Free

late. I dined out on the story for a few weeks, and I have to admit it was embarrassing when nothing eventuated. But that was all. I wasn’t crushed by it, and after six months it was difficult to believe it had ever really happened.
    That might have been it if it weren’t for glandular fever. My best friend, Sarah, was getting married, and my ex, Jake, had also been invited to the wedding. The three of us had met in college, where we all began in classics. We still moved in roughly the same social circle, though ellipse was perhaps a better term, given how hard Jake and I worked at avoiding each other whenever our paths crossed. I’d remained single after our breakup, though I’d heard through the grapevine that he was seeing some blond Amazon whom no doubt he’d bring to the wedding. Knowing that I’d hate to be there alone while Jake was flaunting his new chick to all our friends, Sarah had suggested I attend with her cousin.
    I agreed immediately. Ryan and I had met a number of times over the years, at Sarah’s family beach house and her various birthdays, and we got along well. Better yet, he wasn’t planning on taking anyone to her wedding. Maybe he was gay, I wondered, and was cheered by the prospect—at least that way he was less likely to pick up at the wedding and leave me all alone.
    It all sounds a bit sad and desperate, doesn’t it? I guess in truth it was, but I was still a bit sad and desperate about the way Jake and I had ended. Ryan was the best face I could put on it … at least until he called to tell me he’d just been diagnosed with glandular fever.
    I hung up the phone in a panic. It was the night before the wedding, and the outlook was grim. Who would be available at such short notice?
    I was toying with the idea of asking Joan what her brother was doing when I thought of Cary. Cary looked okay in a suit. He was easy to talk to and respectably employed. Even if I had to explain the situation to him, he seemed nice enough to go along with me for a night. I dug around in my purse for his number, still scribbled on a scrap of napkin from our impromptu picnic on the hay bale.
    The phone rang five times before it was answered by a machine.
    “Hi, this is Cary, and here’s the beep.” I liked the message. No theme tunes, no zany sound effects, no time wasting: just concise and to the point. No games, I thought to myself as I stammered out something about please calling me urgently. You’d always know where you were with this one. Then I went to bed at the ridiculous hour of eight thirty, depressed, thinking about how at the same time the following night I’d be sitting alone in a sea of couples, adrift and unclaimed.
    Jake was introducing me to a woman with breasts the size and color of cantaloupes when the phone rang. Relieved, I turned to look for it, then woke up confused and angry when it wasn’t in my handbag. For a moment I lay there disoriented until it dawned on me that somewhere a phone was still ringing. As I retrieved it from under my clothes on the floor the digital clock flashed eleven twenty.
    “Hello?” I mumbled, still half-asleep.
    “Hi, Kate. It’s Cary.” The voice at the other end was wide awake, confident, even amused. When I didn’t immediately respond he prompted, “You called me earlier tonight.”
    “Oh, God, yes, I’m sorry,” I said, sounding dazed even to my own ears. “I just woke up,” I added, aware that I was effectively admitting that I had no life to be sound asleep before midnight on a Friday.
    “If you want I can call back some other time,” he offered.
    That brought me around. “No, no, don’t hang up,” I practically begged. “I have to ask you for a favor.”
    To his credit Cary didn’t burst out laughing at the whole sorry tale of Ryan, the wedding and the glandular fever.
    “When did you say this was on again?” he asked, just as I was wondering whether to mention my nightmare of the cantaloupes in a play for