Read Online Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos - Free Book Online

Or like a play,” I said. Teasingly, I hoped.
    “Now that you mention it, Viviana was a little of both. Leggy, over-bred, no shortage of drama, some of it melo-.”
    I am leggy insofar as I have legs.
    “Viviana. She’s Latin, then?” Jennifer Lopez, Salma Hayek, Penelope Cruz. They began slinking around my head on endless legs. Cameron Diaz, too, although it’s unclear to me that she’s actually Latin, and if Natalie Wood in West Side Story made an appearance, well, all I can say is I was a little agitated.
    “Viviana Hobbes. Her first name being one of those things Anglo-Saxon aristocrat families do to exoticize themselves.” And, instantly, there was Grace Kelly, shooing the Latin and pseudo-Latin lovelies away with one swipe of her Kelly bag.
    That night, when I kissed Martin good-bye, over his shoulder (I was standing a few steps above him), I imagined I caught a glimpse of Grace Kelly as Viviana Hobbes looking at us. But her gaze, when it met mine, wasn’t the cool blue regard we all associate with Grace, not the gaze of To Catch a Thief or High Society . Instead those eyes were Georgie Eligin’s from The Country Girl, all rue, patience, and loneliness.
 
    Over poached eggs on toast at Linny’s:
    Linny: Can I ask just two questions?
    Cornelia: No.
     
    Linny: First, you hear “Anglo-Saxon aristocrat” and torture yourself with Grace Kelly. Why do you do that? Is Grace Kelly the only Anglo-Saxon aristocrat in the world? Did you ever consider Jackie Frigging Bouvier Kennedy? Did you ever consider that Viviana Hobbes just might have eyes on the sides of her head like an otter?
    Cornelia: I’d have to say, no.
    Linny: I didn’t think so.
    Cornelia: Anyway, that wasn’t it, the Grace Kelly thing, that wasn’t what bothered me. It was the breeziness.
    Linny: Breeziness?
    Cornelia: His tone. Like marriage was a restaurant.
    Linny: I need a little more.
    Cornelia: Or tennis. Or two-button suits. Something he tried or used to do and just doesn’t do anymore.
    Linny: Like, “I was married, but it was nothing personal.”
    Cornelia: Like four years of marriage weighed nothing at all.
    Linny: OK, but at least he wasn’t like that one guy in that one movie, the one you made me watch.
    Cornelia:…
    Linny: The guy obsessed with his dead wife.
    Cornelia: True. Especially since he was obsessed with her because he’d drilled holes in her sailboat and sent her dead body to the bottom of the sea.
    Linny: Question number two: Did someone pass a law against sex?
     
     
     
    Six dates. I had to admit she had a point.
    And then came date seven. A little date I like to call Date Seven or It Happened One Night .

Clare
     
    For three days following her conversation with her father, Clare lived inside the storm—the black, spinning hurricane of her fear. At night, she lay down with its roaring in her ears, and if she slept, she heard it again before her eyes were even open. She didn’t read. She didn’t go to school. When the school secretary called, Clare heard her mother say into the phone that she, Clare, was sick, and the clarity and sureness of her mother’s voice made the storm around Clare grow blacker. That her mother could sound all right and be all, all wrong was as terrifying as the fact that her mother had never even taken Clare’s temperature, never brought her a blanket or a cup of tea, seemed almost not to notice she was there.
    Clare’s skin felt wind-burned and prickly; her eyes and cheeks were hot all the time, but there were moments—especially moments when Clare imagined too far into the future—when her body was seized by a hard shivering. “I am sick with dread,” Clare told herself. “I am heartsick.” But while giving names to things that frightened and confused her had helped Clare in her old life, it didn’t help her now. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms to warm herself, feeling the bones underneath, then rolled her fingers over the knobby places on the sides of her elbows,