Read Online Fortune's Hand by Belva Plain - Free Book Online

hate her.”
    â€œI don’t hate her. I only hate the situation.”
    His heart was crashing against the wall of his chest. “She’s been touring the shops all day for—for things. I’m at a pay phone in the drug store. I went out for aspirin. And I have to go back. Ellen, please. Please help me, just this once.”
    He hung up and walked back to where Lily was waiting for love. And he no longer had that kind of love to give her. How was that possible? But it had happened. It had dimmed like a bulb going out, evaporated like a bowl of water in the summer sun. Now she was a friend, a cousin, even a sister, to be held dear and guarded from tears. I must, I must tell her the truth, he thought for the hundredth time, but not today. Here, away from her home, was not the place to bludgeon her with this news and let her flee back in the bus with her pain.
    â€œHow is your headache?” Lily asked.
    â€œThe same. By tomorrow, it’ll be gone. I get them sometimes, so I know.”
    â€œYou didn’t used to get them. Maybe it’s your eyes, from reading so much.”
    â€œI don’t think so.”
    He wished she wouldn’t deepen his guilt with her concern.
    â€œYou’d better go in to bed. I’ll read a little out here and I won’t wake you when I come in.”
    The way he was feeling, sleep would be impossible. But she insisted, so he obeyed, to lie for what seemed like the entire night composing and discarding the speech, the explanation, the apology that decency demanded of him.
    In the morning he announced a conference with a professor.
    â€œOn Saturday?” Lily’s whole body pleaded.
    â€œIt’s often the only time,” he lied.
    Her disappointment was tangible. He could have reached out and felt it on her skin.
    â€œI’ll only be an hour,” he promised, “or not much more.”
    In the library there was thick silence intermittently broken by a cough or the squeak of a chair. He wondered whether there could be any of the others working there who were tortured as he was this morning.
    Lily was still in her nightdress and robe when he returned. “I started to get dressed, but then I got to cleaning your refrigerator. Not that there was much in it,” she said, and laughed. “Anybody’d think you wereon a hunger strike.” She paused. “Well, I guess I’ll get myself dressed.”
    He knew what was expected of him. It had been many weeks since they had been together in a private place. If anyone had told me, he thought, that I could be here like this and feel nothing, I would have said he was crazy.
    She was removing the robe and gown. He did not know why he suddenly thought of a little bird: perhaps it was because of her fragile shoulder blades. Without looking, he would have known how deftly she would set aside the pink silk pile of clothes and turn toward him, ready to run into his open arms.
    There was no way now to refuse. He undressed and put his arms around her. Or had he merely allowed her to direct the embrace? He was starting to feel a surge of panic. Ah, poor Lily! And poor me! They lay down. He heard her murmur,
“How I love you!”
And still he felt nothing, nothing but the panic and the sorrow.
    He opened his eyes. There in that corner by the chair had stood the girl with the green eyes. Oh Ellen … She had watched him first unfasten the buttons and then the lace that held her breasts; it was that one time, that one time only, begun and not completed; how long would he have to wait? Oh now, now. Ellen …
    There was no way Lily could have known and yet she knew something.
    â€œYou’re not yourself,” she said.
    â€œOf course I am. What’s different about me?”
    â€œI can’t say exactly, but I feel something.”
    It was the third or fourth time she had made the remark that endless day. He had taken her out for lunch at one of Eddy’s