Read Online The Sensual Mirror by Marco Vassi - Free Book Online

a new level. For the first time that night Eliot considered the possibility that he and Gail might actually split up, and the insight was immediately followed by alternating waves of exhilaration and sadness.
    When he finally turned and went back into the living room, holding the two glasses in front of him, he was a much more sober man than he had felt himself to be for quite some time. As so often is the case in life, one slips quite suddenly from the embrace of normality into the kiss of crisis without so much as a caress to mark the transition.
    Again, Gail responded to his mood. As he mixed the drinks she at first sat on her couch, then sagged into it. Beneath the veneer of anger there lay a pit of corrosive exhaustion. She had a sour taste in her mouth and was looking forward to the clean cut of the vodka to scrape the fuzziness off her tongue. She too had shifted from the tactics of the immediate to the strategy of the structural, beginning to feel the edges of questions that had been put on the shelf since that night when Eliot had wanted to drink her piss. And when he came toward her a second time, now holding the drinks, she sensed the deepening of awareness in him, and let herself be washed over with the imminence of decision.
    Eliot sat next to her. She took a glass. They clinked rims and smiled at each other the way two boxers touch gloves in the center of the ring before trying to beat each other into insensibility.
    “Cheers,” he said.
    They sipped in silence for a few minutes. Outside a brigade of fire engines boomed down the street, klaxons blaring. Gail’s cat strode into the room glanced at the humans, found them dull, and leap onto the window sill where she gazed down onto the street, pondering whatever it is that cats ponder when they sit with the rapt absorption and stillness that might make a zen monk envious.
    “Where were you?” she said at last, calmly now, conversationally.
    Eliot took a surreptitious breath. This was the first major shift, the dangerous hurdle, the trap of reasonableness. Coming after the recent explosion, her peaceful sweetness threatened to melt something in him which might cause him to blurt out an explanation too close to the truth. His first impulse, for example, was to claim that Julia had been taken with a fit of hysteria because of the accumulating pressures of her breakup with Martin, and that he had taken her for a drink and talked her down from her suicide threats. And that in the process he had had no chance even to get to a phone. This would have caused Gail to capitulate at once, blaming herself for doubting him, for being angry. Then it would have been all peaches and blowjobs, as Gail outdid herself in making dinner for him and pleasing him erotically. Of course, as soon as she finished with him, she would be on the phone to Julia. Julia would then have to think very, very, very quickly indeed to piece together how the situation was moving.
    That would be a test for my super-efficient little executive secretary, he thought, suppressing a smile.
    But such a scheme, like nuclear warfare, was unthinkable.
    “I . . . “ he began, and then fell silent, staring at the rug. His mind was an absolute blank. He literally didn’t know what sort of story to make up.
    “I want to marry you,” he said.
    Her mouth fell open. His mind reached up a hand and slapped itself across the forehead. They were both flabergasted. Little chill thrills of delight ran up her spine. This was the last thing in the world she expected. Little thrill chills of fear ran down his spine. This was the last thing in the world he expected.
    “I don’t understand,” she said.
    “Neither do I,” he replied, quite honestly. But now that he had the opening sentence, the rest of the paragraph was much less difficult. It was easier to be logical than to be original.
    “It occurred to me this afternoon,” he went on. “I was sitting at my desk, planning the Hartsville deal, thinking about