Fresh Girls & Other Stories by Evelyn Lau Read Free Book Online

flakes of glass hum in the background. The last time they had been together, she had lain there looking up at him with so much trust in her eyes. He had looked back down at her without smiling, without tenderness, in the 3:00 a.m. dimness. She had seen embarrassment and anger in his face as he thrust himself in and out of her deliberately, one of her white legs stretched up like an arching swan’s neck onto his shoulder. Perhaps that trust had frozen him because he could not meet it. Perhaps he could not admire her for this. Perhaps he too only craved things beyond his reach and despised her for giving herself to him. But how else could she have done it? He never phoned, though from the first night he had said he loved her, would have married her if … if she wasn’t so needy? If she didn’t pull at him quite so much, trying to take hold of just a corner of him to pull down into herblackness? Allan called himself a marketer of mirages. His phone began ringing every morning at 5:00 with stock-market representatives from New York; he sauntered whistling to his sports car to drive to company meetings. On the evenings when he came to pick her up, jazz on the radio, the web of stars jailed her and she reeled, spinning apart from the speed. Those nights when he buried his head between her thighs for hours, arduous, relentless, she had always felt as if he was trying to take her to some place where she did not belong. Maybe he was searching for the diamond inside her? That was why although in her mind and behind her shut eyes she was looming larger and larger, threatening to branch out, transcend her body, she stayed intact, with her nails digging into the hands on her belly. Their nights grew progressively silent until they never talked anymore; he busily digging with his tongue, she fighting the commands of her body.
    No, she could not whirl seductively on the edge of his world. I see that, I see how impossible it all was, and how she had to phone him then, late at night when the white lines had faded and she would speed in a dark cab across the city, looking at the lights colorful and cold. It disturbs me that she was always in such bad shape when she arrived, was always pulling and dragging at his corners. They could have loved each other, measured outequal amounts of light and dark for each other, if she hadn’t been on the verge of what she thought was death. If maybe, just once, she had not called him and made herself ugly by whispering
I need you.
Because, though he is the one person who could live with her level of pain, he didn’t choose to. I don’t think he was contemptuous of her, exactly. It was only that once, just once, he would have liked to see her real smile, not the crazy butterflies that flitted around her mouth. He would have enjoyed that, I think. They could have built something together then, from that one smile.
    But she stands now at the jaws of the window, her hand clothed in tie-dyed cotton, listening to the radiant music of falling glass. She pictures Allan in his penthouse bed, with the mountains melting outside the window, the city gathered together and pooled beneath the balcony. The wind is blowing into his apartment, over the crystal ball on his desk, over the bamboo plants, over the waterbed. He is settling under the rose-colored comforter, grateful for the silent phone, the stars floating past the breathing green bamboo, past the pulsating crystal, settling around the mountains.
    She stands there, holding her own hand, empty of pain. She watches the glass swoop from the window onto the pavement below, sprawling like dancers in lewd but beautiful positions on the sidewalk. And I holdher hand and tell her that it is better this way, that I am the only one she has, the only one who can keep her safe. She nods, and the diamond glitters in a lump in her chest, intact, and I take her hand and guide her away from the music, down a line of soft white glass.

FETISH NIGHT
              T he