Read Online The Eliot Girls by Krista Bridge - Free Book Online Page B

how to break up with him. A short time later, she heard Richard closing the door to the bathroom across the hall. Minutes later, he appeared in the doorway and cleared his throat.
    â€œWas this your room?” he asked. “I don’t see you in it.”
    â€œIt’s my mother’s. Well, my parents’. But my mother hasn’t slept in here since my father died.”
    An ornately engraved Louis XV walnut bedstead with a pristine white quilt draped tidily over its high mattress took centre stage on the long wall opposite the windows. Ruth sat on the edge while Richard took in the room in long, respectful strides. She wanted to be angry at him, as she had been earlier, for being so much himself at every moment, but the sweat-moistened creases in his shirt pulled her back to sadness. She wished he weren’t so correct, so conservative. She knew he was the kind of man she ought to love. Just before meeting him, she’d had a short-lived relationship with a boring man whose casual cruelty had briefly made him seem exciting. Near the end of their first date, he’d leaned over the dwindling candle on their restaurant table and told her that he loved her sexiness, the daring of it, because the horsey edge in her looks prevented her from being truly beautiful. She couldn’t think that was what she wanted from Richard, but his appropriateness, his consideration, his geniality—his obese, immovable respect—were killing her.
    He stopped at a Group of Seven calendar fixed at April 1985, two years earlier. “This calendar is outdated,” he said instructively.
    â€œI realize that,” Ruth replied. “My father died that April. My mother won’t change the calendar.”
    He moved towards the bed. Now he would offer the tedious apology. Now he would hover above her, reverently skirting the dead man’s bed. Now he would take her hand.
    â€œHow very Miss Havisham of her,” he said.
    For all her notions about passion as an unruly, uninvited guest who stumbled drunkenly through the house and smashed all her best antiques, it had been a long time since Ruth had been surprised by anything, least of all her own feelings.
    Then Richard leaned over her.
    â€œI want to rape you,” he whispered.
    Ruth remembered lying back on the quilt, thinking, At last .
    Through the tall windows that ran along the back of the house, she now saw Richard in the backyard throwing a ball for the dogs. Stevie and McGill raced in tandem while Marlow lay panting at Richard’s feet, casting worshipful eyes upwards each time Richard stooped to pat him.
    In spite of their first meeting, it had been Antonia who observed that Richard would age well. This prediction had immediately made Ruth value him more highly, for what was the use of good looks if they were just a flare, a dying sparkle? Richard had certainly been attractive as a young man, though what prevented him from being notably handsome was unclear. Perhaps he was too generic, too vague a version of the dark and handsome prototype. Or perhaps he was simply too apologetic to be striking. The problems of aging had only served him well. As a young man, his height had had an edge of lankiness that could make him look weak, but the added bulk of middle age had made him more elegant, more at ease in his frame. His extra weight was not a softness—regular morning jogs along the boardwalk kept him fit—but rather the physical solidity that suggests an inner solidity. The dashes of grey in his brown hair had the same effect of conferring dignity. He was certainly no longer the man who had given her a compote.
    Outside, the late afternoon air was still heavy with the heat of the day. Richard’s cheeks were flushed, his T-shirt damp at its underarms. Marlow still lay at his feet.
    â€œWhere’s Audrey?” Ruth asked, pushing open the screen door.
    â€œUpstairs. Door closed. I wouldn’t dare.”
    Sighing, Ruth sat on a