After the Loving by Gwynne Forster Read Free Book Online Page A

headed for the breakfast room. “You put out some plates while I get us a couple of bottles of beer. Okay?”
    She found place mats and set the table. If anyone had told her that she would be sharing these idyllic moments with Russ, seeing the loving and tender side of him, she might have accused them of idiocy. Yet, although she believed that the wit, tenderness and gentleness he’d showed her defined him as truthfully as did the tough, stoic and solitary side of him, he had not yet acknowledged their passionate exchange, and she wondered if he ever would.
     
    “I’m not going to question it,” Russ said to himself, as he searched in the bottom of the beer and soft-drink chest for two bottles of Czech Pilsner beer, his favorite. “I’d been dying to do that since I met her.” He reached into his back trouser pocket for a handkerchief and wiped perspiration from his forehead. “Whew! She hit me like a speeding train. I may regret it later, but right now, I’m not sorry.”
    He walked back into the breakfast room in time to see her nearly trip on the edge of the Turkish carpet his mother fancied and which Alexis brought up from the basement to brighten the room. He rushed to support her.
    “Why do you wear those things?” he asked of her spike-heeled shoes. “It’s a wonder you don’t fall and kill yourself.”
    “The world loves tall, slim people,” she told him. “I’m not slim, but the shoes make me look taller.”
    He bit into a ham sandwich and chewed the bite carefully before helping it down with several swallows of beer. “They don’t make you taller. Some women put their hair up on top of their head thinking that adds height. Neither makes a speck of difference, so why not be comfortable and—” he told himself to say it even if she got mad “—why not accept yourself? If you don’t love yourself, it’s damned near impossible for anybody else to love you.”
    She removed the top slice of bread from the turkey breast sandwich and scraped the mayonnaise off the remaining slice. When she didn’t look at him, he knew he had touched a sensitive spot. “Don’t smooth it over,” he cautioned himself. “This is an issue between us, and if she doesn’t solve it, we’re not going anywhere.”
    “You want me to believe that a man like you who can have any woman that appeals to him is so different from all the rest—that these tall, willowy women like Alexis aren’tyour ideal, the kind you want? You honestly expect me to believe that?”
    He put the sandwich aside, leaned back in his chair and looked hard at her. “Whether or not you believe that is immaterial to me. They’re your words, not mine.” He pointed to her plate. “You ate hardly any breakfast, so you’re half-starved, and look at what you’re doing to that sandwich.”
    “I don’t like not being able to wear pretty clothes, so I’m going to lose weight.”
    He felt for her and deeply so, but he knew it was unwise to express it. “To me, at least, you’re a beautiful, charming and witty woman,” he said, “but if you want to change yourself into someone I won’t recognize, well…it’s your body and your life. I wish you luck.”
    She put the glass of beer on the table, untasted. “Those are the nicest…the most endearing words that I remember ever having heard. Thank you.”
    “But you don’t believe them.”
    “I know you mean them.”
    “But I’m either blind or I’ve got poor judgment, right?” That kind of talk would solve nothing. He poured the remainder of her beer in her glass, cut a turkey-breast sandwich in half and put it on her plate. When she looked at him with an appeal, an entreaty, he removed the top slice, scraped the mayonnaise off the bottom slice as she had done earlier, and set it in front of her.
    “Even if you want to lose weight, don’t damage your health.”
    Her smile, radiant and grateful, affected him like a shot of adrenaline, and he wanted to get her back into his arms and try