Ride the Nightmare by Richard Matheson Read Free Book Online

accepting—she remembered that now. (It seemed as if, now, a hundred different incidents were clarified.) He had only accepted when he’d seen that his apparent attempt to back out was embarrassing her.
    Again, who was to blame? Would it have been better if he had ignored that embarrassment and not accepted anyway? At least, then, this horror might not have occurred. Had he been kind to accept that invitation—or weak, thinking more of her opinion of him than of the pain to which he might be exposing her?
    None of which she was aware of at the time, of course. There was, at the time, only that sweetly uncomfortable sensation of allowing an attraction to become fatal. That burgeoning struggle between the impulse to love and the desire to remain unharmed. Not that she bore the scars of any past romantic wounds. Far fromit. Men had not existed in her life to any degree. Her mother had tried, often enough, to change this. But men seemed to Helen, if not frightening, somehow uninviting. The only man she had ever given her heart to had left her mother for another woman. This had not enhanced, for Helen, the attractions of men.
    This plus an undefined fear of sex through her teen years had always kept her to herself or with a group of girls. Occasionally, there had been dates, some of them enjoyable. Still, at those moments when conversation ended and dates expected physical affection, Helen was half-frightened, half repelled by the artificiality of the moment. Love, when she thought of it, seemed to her an emotion that needed size and scope, one which should envelop and beautifully so—not a feeling which one could forcibly arouse on the back seat of a car, a beer-can cluttered blanket on the sands.
    Maybe it was Chris’s love and knowledge of music, Helen thought. His quiet refinement. Maybe it was his reticence bringing out what aggressiveness Helen had not completely repressed in herself. Something had to explain her asking him to dinner. More amazingly, something had to explain her anxiety for him to like her, for something more than friendship to develop between them.
    Sometimes, she convinced herself that she was one of those females who never loved until the right man came along. At other times, with more logic, she decided it was probably closer to the truth that she was getting older and the desire for companionship was outdistancing timidity. It was not, she admitted to herself on those occasions, a union consummated in heaven. It was, under the circumstances of her life, simply a desirable and sensible relationship.
    Whatever the explanation, her falling in love with Chris had been continuous and certain—to her, remarkably devoid of complications. Chris’s holding back she accepted as faint heart; she overlooked it. She loved him and was, soon, convinced that he loved her in return. It seemed a very positive enterprise.
    Still, there had been little things—things she’d chosen to ignore or, worse, to rationalize. Things like Chris’s unwillingness to discuss his background. She tried, occasionally, to find out about his family but, outside of an infrequent comment about his mother, he was unwilling to talk about it.
    One day, in talking with her mother about Chris, she had to admit that, not only did she not know where his relatives were, she didn’teven know who they were or if they existed at all. A few nights later, at dinner, her mother tried to get Chris to answer specific questions about this. He was uncomfortably reluctant about it and said little. Strangely (it seemed now), Helen didn’t question his reluctance but only felt a startled irritation with her mother. Later that night, she told her mother so. Her mother only shrugged and smiled.
    “Well, if it’s a mystery man you want,” was all she said.
    How fantastic that, until this moment, she had completely forgotten that incident. Forgotten that Chris always questioned, never answered. His past had all been unknown to her. She had accepted this