Read The Slide: A Novel for Free Online

and I rolled onto my side.
    Two unfamiliar naked bodies zipped into a shared sleeping bag, growing rapidly acquainted. Everyone else could have been on Jupiter. Audrey was from Portland—Oregon, she said, not Maine. I admitted being unaware there even was a Portland, Maine, and in return she admitted she probably couldn’t pick Missouri out of a crowd of two. This was honesty, bedrock. She was the baby, with an older brother and sister who shielded her like a secret. An extremely tight family, she said, friendship and safety, yes, very tight indeed. I milked details and hung on words and committed names to memory: brother Brandon in med school and sister Caroline in business school. Obstetrician father Doug and cardiologist mother Marilynne. Audrey couldn’t imagine what it must have been like growing up an only child.
    “It was . . . What was it? Lonely sometimes. But at the same time you always feel special, like you’re the point of everything.”
    “Ooh. Dangerous,” she said, then laughed, and the sound of it I also committed to memory, fearing the chance I might never hear it again.
    Sex driven by what I could only call portent . Nighttime sky immense and distant, two sleeping bags zipped together, hard earth surely somewhere below us though we no longer had any knowledge of or use for it, she ran fingers across my hairline. Curled into my shoulder and, in that bedtime voice I came to love, then tremble beneath, then eventually react to with nothing but confusion, added, “Can’t believe I just did it with a stranger.”
    “Yeah,” I whispered back, “did it.”
    I stood from bed and put on shorts and shoes, a T-shirt to keep the mosquitoes off my chest. Downstairs, I thought briefly of my mother back there, alone and restless in her own bed. Except now I realized my father wasn’t out of town. To avoid even momentary consideration of this development, I rushed through the front door, leaving it unlocked, wondering if I should have put on socks.
    I walked in the middle of the street, moving clockwise around the neighborhood’s loop. The pavement beneath my feet was smooth and black and recently tarred. My plan was to pound memory out of my head, beat it senseless and move on.
    For me the cheating might have germinated in something as simple as tradition, the oldest and most habitual example of human weakness, our mundane inability to find happiness inside what we have. But never for a second did I feel consciously unhappy, so my own explanation felt more complicated than these and was further compounded by disgust for the very redundancy of the whole thing.
    And whatever scant sense this made remained the best I could possibly do. Headlights gave me a carnival shadow. A station wagon passed me on the left.
    This was the break between sophomore and junior years. We had spent much of the previous vacations making various trips east and west, more camping and more driving, guest rooms in parents’ homes, two hands reaching over voids to pull the other across. Some of this was fear, yes, acknowledged out loud by us both. The normal caution of two people who have found something very right and dread the catastrophe of its loss. The normal doubts of our love’s fortitude in the face of the normal selfish impulses. So it was perhaps as a test of strength that we had each semi-passively developed a separate agenda for this second summer. I’d given in to the idea of an INTERNSHIP, a word I ran into everywhere, something meaty and real with a PR firm that required a tie and taught me the value of coffee. I was certain this was a good idea. Her own plan, involving Spokane, Washington, and work as an ecological watchdog, felt just as certain, and the thought after two effortless years was that distance meant trial, and trial meant strength, and strength meant, among other things, health. And so: we would be apart.
    About midway through the summer, I ran into a girl at Stuart’s pool whom I remembered from a