Read Something Right Behind Her for Free Online Page B

Eve away, that had us all in the grip of
its dark reality.

 
 
    “I can feel the
heat radiating off your body,” Doug whispered in my ear. At first, I thought he
meant the state of my arousal, and then I realized he meant actual heat, my sunburned
legs pressed against his own. But I murmured back “like a stray electrical
current,” and he turned over on his side to face me. It was all over now, and a
sense of camaraderie had replaced the feeling I had earlier of a shared guilt.
“What do you mean?” He asked.
    “Oh, you know,
when we lived in the city it would happen every once in a while - there’d be
some stray electrical current and then some ordinary object you would never
expect to conduct electricity, or be electrified by, suddenly kills some lady
or her dog. This one woman was electrocuted by a lamppost. That’s what I mean -
between you and me - there’s some stray electrical current.” I stopped speaking
when he seemed suddenly quiet.
    “Andy,” he said,
“maybe you shouldn’t be so quick to share your feelings with the next guy you
boff, because that’s not exactly the warm and tender thing a guy expects to
hear afterward.”
    “Sorry,” I said.
“I just thought this was kind of random. Like perfect in a way, but, you know,
I’m your sister’s best friend.” I wanted to say something more, something about
how we had been thrown together by something larger than ourselves. I felt at
once like I had known this thing between us had been happening all day long,
and like it was a sort of sudden accident, like a car crash. I felt attracted
to him, but like I wanted to punish the both of us for what had happened, for
what we were doing to Eve. I reached then for what was harshest. I needed to
get at the truth.
    “I think she’s
dying, Doug.” I said.
    “I know she’s
dying, Andy. But you’re going to be ok,” Doug said.
    “How do you
know?” I asked.
    “Because there’s
nothing wrong with you.”
    He said this
like I’d passed some test. At first I thought he was referring to the sex, that
he was saying I’d been satisfactory. Then I figured he meant it some other way
- like I simply wasn’t the sick one, or that I was a nice kid. Neither thought
made me feel any better. Being the one who wasn’t sick, made me feel alone,
brought back the dark-cloud feeling. Being thought of as a nice kid meant Doug
didn’t take me seriously, and anyway I wasn’t such a nice kid. There I was
messing around with Doug when a few minutes ago I had been thinking how I
probably made Eve sicker by taking her down to the shore, by getting her high.
There were about one hundred-and-five reasons Eve would be disappointed with me
if she knew what I’d just done with Doug. Even if she weren’t sick, it’d be
some sort of best-friend betrayal. I suddenly felt the impossibility of being
there, of staying in that house, of dreaming my goddamn dreams and then facing
them all in the morning.
    “Doug,” I said.
‘Could you do me one favor?”
    “Yeah?” He was
sitting up and starting to get dressed.
    “Could you drive
me home?”
    Back in Doug’s
car, I started to cry. At first, I was silent, but then I started sniffling and
he handed me a tissue from his coat pocket. Maybe he was accustomed to driving
home tearful girls after such encounters at Princeton. He pulled into my
driveway. It must have been past three, and I was hoping to get into the house
without waking anyone up.
    “I’ll see you,”
Doug said. It was a statement of fact, not a plan of any kind. Sure, I’d see
him, and I thought of hospital beds and funerals. I wondered how long it would
take to erase from my mind that image of him sitting there, steering wheel in
hand. He looked, though exhausted, almost breathtakingly healthy. On my own
skin, I could smell a faint whisper of the ocean. The day, I assured myself,
had given something to Eve, not taken something away. What happened with Doug,
I told myself, was something I could handle.