Read Online Listen to Me by Hannah Pittard - Free Book Online Page A

baseball cap and coaxed Gerome from the backseat.
    â€œCome on, guy,” Mark said. “We’re in this together.”
    Gerome put his tail between his legs and emitted a bleat of objection, but he hopped down from the car without a struggle.
    The little field to the side of the station was already soggy. Mark walked Gerome the length of it so that he, Mark, could stay on the concrete and Gerome could walk on the grass. But Gerome wasn’t having it. Instead, he balanced his paws along the concrete perimeter, looking up at Mark every now and then as if to say, “If you don’t have to, I don’t have to.”
    Meanwhile Maggie was taking her time in the store. The parking lot was empty except for a beat-up pickup, which probably belonged to whatever sad sack was working inside. There couldn’t have been other customers. Mark imagined Maggie in the women’s restroom, pulling little pieces of toilet paper from the roll and arranging them daintily around the seat. Then, out of nowhere, he thought of Elizabeth, her severe short hair, her lithe little body. She’d played volleyball as an undergrad at some small liberal arts school in the Northeast, something she’d mentioned as a throwaway as they outlined his upcoming chapters. She hadn’t yet told him she was dropping out of the program. “It’s not merely about the body,” she’d said. “It’s about discipline. It’s about pushing the brain.” She spoke with authority about everything, with an air of privilege and a sense of too much self-importance. He’d liked it. Her entitlement was a bulletproof jacket, and she’d clearly been making her way through life as if nothing would ever thwart her.
    Now he imagined Elizabeth in the stall next to Maggie. He gave her a skirt, which was hiked unceremoniously to her waist, and panties pushed just to the knee. Above the toilet, she maintained a perfect athletic squat, never once letting the skin of her thighs touch the porcelain.
    Mark’s glutes flexed instinctively. There was a tingling in his hamstrings from his knees to his pelvis. Gerome pulled at the leash. That afternoon when Elizabeth had told him about volleyball was more than a year ago. Now she was elsewhere, in some West Coast town probably dating some West Coast asshole. In their correspondence, Mark never wrote explicitly about desire, and normally she didn’t either. But in an e-mail she’d sent just that week—in fact, on the very day Mark had discovered the switchblade and then decided without discussion that they would leave Chicago ahead of schedule—Elizabeth had broached the subject point-blank.
    Â 
Hiya—
    So I’ve been thinking about sex.
    Â 
    Mark had gotten up from his chair and closed his office door before continuing. The muscles in his buttocks tightened as he sat back down, and he was reminded of a day from childhood when Gwen had explained why horses so often relieved themselves before fleeing. “They’re lightening their load,” she’d told him. His father had said, “In other words, they’ve had the crap scared out of them.”
    Â 
Hiya—
    So I’ve been thinking about sex. And I’ve been thinking about your book. It would be incomplete, you know, if you didn’t also address what’s happening in the world of sex vis-à-vis anonymity. Like, did you know there’s a whole section on Craigslist about conference meet-ups? You name it; they have it. Think about it: the world’s most intimate act becomes anonymous by way of the Internet. Brilliant! These are real-life hookups, real-life liaisons. But when they’re over, they’re over, and nobody knows anyone else’s name. Husbands, wives, the people back home—they never find out. You just get on a plane and get out of Dodge. So my question is this—
    Â 
    The e-mail had gone on, but he couldn’t think about that right