Read Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Fiction for Free Online

little, on the quilt. Clare wipes her chin with her wet hands, and then she wipes her face again, on the quilt.
    “Napkins would have been good,” Clare says.
    William shrugs. “I like this,” he says. He lifts up the quilt and wipes his hands on Clare’s jeans.
    “Oh, what is this,” she says. If they’re going to start acting like the senior-citizen version of Tom Jones , smearing their faces with nectarine juice and carrying on, the next thing you know, they’ll be hobbling off to motels and looking up positions for the disabled in the sex books. William does not look at all embarrassed; he looks as he always looks: imperturbable, and mildly intrigued, inclined to be benevolent, if no discomfort is involved. Privately, Isabel and Clare call William The Last Emperor and there have been times when Isabel has called Clare to say, “L.E. is driving me mad. Why don’t you and Charles come up before I put glass in his cereal?”
    “I love a nice nectarine,” William says. “My mother made a nectarine tart, I remember. Sliced nectarines and a little brown sugar on top of a brick, just a giant slab of really good pie crust.”
    William kisses Clare’s right hand, then her left, lightly, absent-mindedly, as if in passing.
    “What’s this?”
    “Nothing,” William says. “Tell me something else. Tell me a secret.”
    “Oh, a secret. What a baby. You mean something Charles doesn’t know?”
    William bites his tongue. He doesn’t think Charles knows much, but he could be wrong. He thinks that Charles has been so lucky and so handsome for so long that he’s come to think that the world is actually filled with honest men making fair deals and bad people being thwarted by good ones. This is what William prefers to think. Before he slept with her, William thought that Clare had gotten the better half of the bargain. He even said so to Isabel, a few times. Clare is good, spiky company, and she is the very best companion to have in a bad situation. Trouble brings out the cheer beneath her darkness, unlike everyday life, which tends to have the opposite effect, and she holds her liquor like an old Swede, but Charles has to put up with that squinty, unyielding nature, and he does it with real grace, William thinks. In private conversation, the men call Clare The Cactus.
    A small boy sticks his head around the doorway and stares at William, rather coolly, from under his long lashes. It is the same look David gives him, now pasted onto a round brown face. William knows he knows the boy, who he is and his place in the world (third grade, grandson of the cleaning lady; Clare likes him; Charles wouldn’t know him if he fell over him), but nothing else, like his name or why he is wandering around Clare’s house, comes to mind.
    “You have company,” he says. Small boys are not his department. Small girls are delightful; he would entertain a roomful of little girls, if it were necessary.
    “Hey, Nelson.” Clare waves to the boy. The boy doesn’t say anything.
    “Nelson Slater, come on. You’ve met Mr. Langford before. Last summer.”
    Nelson nods. Clare sighs. It’s not the short, vicious hiss that signals her annoyance. It’s not the mild, watery sound she makes when her children call while she’s working. It’s the sigh of some one settling in for a short, satisfying tussle. If she were upright, Clare would roll up her sleeves.
    The boy sits down across from them on the floor. Clare and William smile helplessly. He slides to the floor so easily, he glides right down, and later, he will spring right up. It is a lovely thing to watch, the way gravity barely holds him.
    Nelson has come to play checkers. Clare taught him when he was a little kid, and since the accident, Nelson makes a point of coming by every few days, eating the cookies that are always on the coffee table, and fitting in a quick game. His grandmother is collecting old clothes for church, from the garage, and he has fifteen minutes, she says. He