Read Online Something Is Out There by Richard Bausch - Free Book Online Page A

actually together.” She couldn’t catch her breath.
    He sat down on the sofa and rested one arm on the back of it, and she saw that he was nervous, too. “Took me just less than three hours. I was eighty-five miles an hour all the way.”
    “I’m sorry about not wanting to meet you in a motel.”
    “Forget it.”
    “It’s just that I’d have felt cheap.”
    “This is more fun—there’s an element of walking along a high cliff. We could both get busted—crash and burn.”
    “Not likely. The kids are at school and he’s never home before five.”
    “What about the neighbors?”
    “The whole street empties out before nine o’clock. Everybody works except Phyllis Copperfield across the street, and she’s a friend. She knows about you. She doesn’t know about
this
. But she’s off on a run and then she’ll come back and nap with her baby.”
    They looked at each other. There was an inevitable, though unspoken, element of evaluation about it. They had told each other so much on the telephone. She knew of his childless marriage to Marta, a good woman who was ten years older than he, and of his searching for someone, seeking to feel passion again. And she had told him of Warren’s essential prudishness, a religious man for whom lovemaking was a very specific kind of performance, with such elaborate trappings of romance that she felt stifled by it all—poor Warren never got beyond his sense of the kiss and the fade-out. She had told him all of this over the telephone, several weeks ago. They had established that both of them loved their spouses, and that this meeting would be nothing more than what the Internet site on which they had met claimed to provide: people mutually looking for extramarital excitement without commitment.
    “What does this Phyllis person know about me?”
    “Just that I have a friend online.”
    “Jesus—you told her? Did you say what the site was?”
    “No, no, no, no, no. I would never tell anyone a thing likethat. You’re the only one who knows about that. I just told her I’d met someone I liked talking to.”
    “You didn’t name me.”
    “No. God, no.”
    “Well, really.”
    “You haven’t talked to
any
friend about me?”
    “Not one, no.”
    “Well, Phyllis doesn’t know anything.”
    “Look,” he said. “Is it safe here for us?”
    “Yes.”
    “And he suspects nothing.”
    “Nothing,” she said. “Believe me. I pay the bills. I take care of everything.”
    “I still worry about the e-mails. I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
    “They’re in a file on my own computer, buried in code. Trust me. It takes three different passwords to get to it.”
    “And you’ve never done this before.”
    “We’ve been through all that.”
    “I’d like to hear you say it, anyway.”
    “You’re the first and only,” she said.
    His gaze went around the room. “I drove like a crazy man, getting here.”
    “You’re nervous,” she said. “Me, too.”
    “I was your first hit on the site.”
    “Nathan,” she said.
    “I don’t guess it makes much difference.”
    “What about you?”
    “Oh, I make it a regular practice. I’ve seen five hundred different women this way.”
    “Stop it.”
    “I’m scared,” he said. “I didn’t think I’d be so scared.”
    This was one of the things she liked about him. That he could talk this way so simply and honestly about his feelings.
    “Nathan,” she said.
    His smile changed everything about his face. She liked that, too. “Here we are,” he murmured.
    Again, they were simply staring at each other. She felt the breathlessness she had experienced earlier. She held still.
    He sat forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “I’ve dreamed about this. You’re even prettier than your picture.”
    “You sound even sexier in person,” she got out.
    “Those wonderful phone calls—I never would’ve believed people could do those things over the telephone.”
    “Me, either.”
    He said nothing for what seemed a