Double Fault by Lionel Shriver Read Free Book Online Page A

jeans off, balancing on one leg, then the other. He seemed to enjoy her watching. Willy had often found the prick, both its shriveled button of retreat and its strangely dissociated waving and poking when in heat, ridiculous. But Eric's, at half-mast, drooped down his thigh at that unhurried and luxurious stage of excitation that was a man's most alluring.
      As he kicked his clothes to the side and glided toward her where she rested against the net, Eric didn't strut with the gut-sucking, chest-thrusting swag she had learned to associate with the vain male athlete who has taken his clothes off. At the same time the confidence of his stride, the wryness of his smile signaled plenty of vanity. But those vacuous hard bodies had flexed their deltoids as if to make up for other lacks. Triangular pectorals were all they had to offer and so seemed paltry, like lone finger sandwiches on a picked-over platter. Eric Underwood instead uncloaked his body as if it were a pleasant incidental, like free leather upholstery when you buy the car.
      If Eric considered his physique a trifle, Willy was in awe of it. Awe in general had not been a prevalent emotion in her life, and she wore the sensation awkwardly. She scanned his body for some restful ugliness. His feet were long, but this attenuated body should have big feet. Willy was ordinarily content with her own figure; it was taut and neat. But as Eric approached in the moonlight, she was aware that her breasts, while small, sagged just enough to fail the pencil test. She recited to herself that she was in good shape, that all women have a layer of subcutaneous fat; when Eric put his hands on her waist Willy heard in her head the very phrase, subcutaneous fat . Her own trunk was smooth and bland, with none of those conniving, thinking ripples musing over his chest. Eric sighed as he traced her hip, but Willy found the slight flare too wide and envied him the clean, parallel shoot to the thigh.
      The foil packet in his right palm scratched when he stroked her ribs. From the shading of dark hair, his forearms loomed in relief, while hers, blanched in the wash of the moon, looked flat, paperdoll. He smoothed his left hand from her hip to her thigh, teasing his fingers up and inward, and she panicked at what he could possibly find in the absence between her legs that could compete with the whole fifth limb that arced against her stomach. Maybe, in sufficient thrall, it was impossible to imagine that so riveting a sex could conceivably be attracted by one's own.
      "Oberdorf," he said cryptically. She didn't recognize the syllables, which sounded like an incantation, an open sesame from The Arabian Nights that would move boulders from caves.
      "What?" Her voice was thin and vague.
      "My last name is Oberdorf," he announced. "'Underwood' is for deviled ham."
      Something about this new name oppressed her. Underwood had been a flimsy, easily manipulated infatuate who had pursued her all the way to Westbrook on the basis of one Cuban-Chinese meal; an adventitious young man who might eventually prove a pest but whom she could employ usefully as insulation from Max Upchurch's forbidding disappointment. Underwood's phone number would be scrawled on scrap paper, later accidentally thrown away. An Underwood sent her flowers that she forgot to water. And an Underwood had a gutsy but goofy and entirely forgettable tennis game. An Underwood wouldn't have had a prayer in pro tennis—but with a name like that an Oberdorf could improve.
      "Eric Oberdorf," she said faintly. Her acknowledgment of his real name seemed to satisfy something he'd been waiting for, and he tore open the foil.
      If condoms once indicated consideration for the girl, they did no longer; and here Willy was yielding to a man she knew so slightly that she couldn't be sure if he'd have bothered to protect her from pregnancy if he weren't primarily protecting himself from disease. Nor could she tell if he was packing