The Affinities by Robert Charles Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

uncomfortable.”
    â€œIs that a thing?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œPeople like us. Are there people like us?”
    â€œWell, yeah. Of course there are,” I said.
    And Geddy beamed at me. It was a little heartbreaking, how badly he wanted it to be true.
    *   *   *
    I left Schuyler the same night. Only Jenny Symanski (and Geddy, of course) seemed genuinely sorry to see me go. Jenny wrapped her arms around me and we exchanged a kiss, sincere enough that Mama Laura blushed and looked away.
    And I had to admit, it was nice to be reminded how Jenny felt and tasted. There were years of familiarity folded into that hug. Jenny and I had made love (for the first time, for both of us) when we were fifteen, fooling around in Jenny’s bedroom on a hot August Saturday morning when her parents were out at an estate sale. Our lovemaking that day and afterward had been driven more by curiosity than passion, but it was a curiosity we could never quite satisfy. There were times—especially during the interminable Fisk-Symanski dinners our families used to hold—when Jenny would catch my eye across the table and communicate a lust so intense that my resulting boner required serious stealth measures to conceal.
    We couldn’t keep that kind of relationship secret forever, and my father complicated the whole thing by approving of it, at least up to a point. I think he felt it established my heterosexual bona fides. And he liked the idea of marrying his spare son to a Symanski, as if the families were royal lineages. It was Grammy Fisk who took me aside and quietly made sure I grasped the basics of safe sex: “If you marry that girl, it ought to be because you want to, not because you have to.”
    â€œI’m so sorry about your tuition,” Jenny whispered as we hugged. “But if you do have to come back to Schuyler, it won’t all be bad. I’ll make sure of that.”
    â€œThanks,” I said. And that was all I said.
    Because I had no intention of coming back. Not if I could help it.

 
    CHAPTER 3
    I saw the tranche house for the first time on a clear, hot evening at the end of August. Because it would come to mean so much to me—because I learned and forgot and gained and lost so much in that building—I’m tempted to say it seemed special from the moment I first glimpsed it.
    But it didn’t. It was one house on a street of many houses, not very different from the rest. It was large, but all these houses were large. It was sixty or seventy years old, as most of these houses were. Its garden was lush with marigolds, coleus, and a chorus line of hostas. A maple tree littered the front lawn with winged seeds the color of aged paper. I walked past the house three times before I worked up the courage to knock at the door. Which opened almost before my knuckles grazed it.
    *   *   *
    â€œYou’re Adam!”
    â€œYeah, I—”
    â€œI’m so glad you could make it. Come in! Everyone else is here already. Whole tribe. Buffet in the dining room. I’ll take you there. Don’t be shy! I’m Lisa Wei.”
    The same Lisa Wei who had sent the email invitation. Maybe because of the tone of her message, I had imagined someone my age. In fact she appeared to be around sixty—about as old as the house she lived in. She was a little over five feet tall, and she squinted up at me through lenses that looked like they should have been fitted to a telescope. She couldn’t have weighed much: I imagined she couldn’t go out in a windstorm without an anchor. But she was a small explosion of smiles and gestures. The first person she introduced me to was her partner, Loretta Sitter.
    Loretta owned the house, but she and Lisa had lived here for more than thirty years. “We’re that rare thing,” Lisa said, “a Tau couple . We decided we’d take the test together, and if we didn’t place in the same