Read Online This Is What I Want by Craig Lancaster - Free Book Online

want to contemplate. She nearly choked on a laugh as Denise’s word sprang into her head. Swussy , her daughter had called it. Sweaty pussy. God, why did she think of that now? She teetered on the edge of hysteria. Would Raleigh like to talk about that word?
    “As I live and breathe,” he said, taking her hand. “I thought I wouldn’t see you until the supper.”
    She gave a curtsy. “Here I am.”
    “Here you are.” He released her hand and stepped back, as if to take her in. “What have you been doing?”
    She nodded at the building behind them. “Gym. Staving off old-ladyhood.”
    “And doing a mighty fine job of it.” Raleigh punctuated it with a wolf whistle, and she gave it the laugh it deserved. Some things never changed. The banter, easy and mildly suggestive, had never been a problem for them. There had even been times when they had walked it to the brink of having to make some hard choices. Patricia knew she cared a bit too much about how she looked when Raleigh was around, and she could think of a dozen hugs that lingered a bit too long, or a hundred times when she’d constructed an alternative reality in her head where they belonged to each other. She hadn’t worked out to her satisfaction whether that was out of bounds or just what any woman married thirty-some years might conjure to keep her romantic synapses firing.
    “I thought you were staying in Glendive,” she said.
    Raleigh pivoted from foot to foot. “Funny thing,” he said. “You remember Tommy Barron?”
    “Vaguely.”
    “He lived next door to us when I was a kid. I remembered he owns the Lazy Z, so I called him up and snagged a room.”
    “Disinfect the sheets,” she said.
    Raleigh laughed and took her elbow between his thumb and forefinger, and Patricia felt herself go a bit weak.
    “Have you had breakfast?” he asked.
    “No, not before working out. Are you kidding me?” She puffed out her cheeks and lifted her arms to demonstrate bloat.
    “Your workout’s done, so you must. With me.”
    Yes, please, she wished. “No, I can’t. There’s so much to do.”
    “A cup of coffee, then.”
    “No, I shouldn’t.”
    “One cup.” He took off his glasses and made his eyes sufficiently pathetic, and that did what little doing was required.
    “OK. One cup.”
     
    Patricia gripped her coffee cup with both hands. The willingness to talk with Raleigh was always in her; it was just that finding the right place to start could prove so nettlesome. His mind, the way he brought such crafted, powerful language to yearnings she thought were hers alone, was an endless source of fascination, so much that she had to tamp down the compulsion to do nothing but ask questions about the books she had read into a tattered state.
    Today, though, she had a more topical subject in mind.
    “The mayor’s office blew up last night,” she said before she took her first sip.
    “What? Like . . .” Raleigh threw both hands into the air and flared his fingers.
    “Yep.”
    “Was anybody hurt?”
    “No, thank God.”
    “What happened?”
    “Sam thinks the still got plugged.”
    Raleigh removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “So the theory is that our rum-running mayor had a distillery in his office and caused an explosion?”
    “I guess so.”
    Raleigh’s mouth, hanging open after the incredulity of his question, flapped a couple of times before he found more words. “How in the hell did we come from this place?”
    Patricia shrugged and then downed more coffee.
    “And why are you still here?” he added, making it sound like a lament.
    Patricia grimaced, something she hoped he didn’t see or that she sufficiently covered with the cup at her mouth. Raleigh, of course, would have no idea how that query could wound her by feeding into questions she’d been asking herself for a while now. He had it easy. He’d gotten out, been to places she had seen only on TV, made a name for himself. He couldn’t really hold regrets about Grandview,