After the Fall Read Online Free PDF Page A

my sociability.
    Cary, bless him, was unfazed. “Then they’ll know how lucky I am to be here with her tonight,” he said smoothly, putting one long arm around me as if he had been doing it all his life.
    “How long have you two known each other?” asked Samantha.
    “Since last summer,” Cary replied, smiling down at me fondly. “There were fireworks from the minute we met.”
    And from then on I was hooked. I don’t think I spoke to Jake the rest of the night, and he would have had to screw Samantha on the bridal table to get my attention. Cary and I drank champagne, we talked, I introduced him to my friends, and after dinner he held my hand again. When I met up with Sarah to compare notes in the bathroom she laughed at how flushed I was, and when we embraced at the end of the night she whispered, “Keep him,” in my ear. I didn’t need to be told. When she arrived back from her honeymoon ten days later his car was still parked outside my house.

LUKE
•
    Cressida’s family had a beach house, of course, but I was surprised to learn that Cary’s did too. Actually, it was more of a shack, and on a lake, though one so vast that it could have been the sea. The property was in the north of the state, not far from where Cary had grown up amid the flat wheat-lands. Usually that part of the country was in drought, but this year it had rained, and for the first time in memory the lake was almost full. When Cary discovered that I was as keen a water-skier as himself, the first time they came over for dinner, he promptly invited Cress and me to join them for the approaching Easter break.
    “Hey!” I remember Kate protesting through my acceptance. “I thought we were going to catch up with Rick and Sarah?”
    “We can do that anytime. You know I never get a chance to ski,” Cary said, then turned to Cress and me. “She’s not all that keen unless it’s about a hundred degrees, and even when the weather is right, skiing’s not legal unless there’s a third person there to keep watch. So I’ve got my boat sitting in the garage, and it gets out about once a year when I can talk some mates into coming.” He turned to Kate. “Say yes—I don’t think I’ve seen you in your bikini all summer.”
    Kate giggled, slightly shrill from the champagne. “Well, it’s not my fault if you’re always spending your weekends off at conferences rather than at home with your bikini-clad wife.” She swallowed another mouthful, then shrugged. “Okay, then.”
    I was a bit surprised—Kate had struck me as someone who usually got her own way.
    “Is that all right with you?” I asked my own wife belatedly.
    Cress replied as she always did: “Sure, as long as I’m not working.”
    Of course, Cress was supposed to be working, but for once she managed to swap her shifts, all except for the last day of the break. We took her car so she could come back to work on Monday, following Cary’s four-wheel drive as the city gave way to suburbs, paddocks, unending land. Easter was early that year, midway through March, and hot enough even for Kate. As holidays go, it was close to perfect. Though the four of us hadn’t known one another for long, we got on easily. Cress and Cary had worked together on and off for years. At first I found him a bit withdrawn, but he loosened up and relaxed as the days went by. Kate was different altogether—laughing, talkative, noisy from the word go. I don’t think she was ever completely quiet; even when reading or making her breakfast she would be humming under her breath, occasionally singing a few lines. She flirted with all three of us, Cress as much as Cary and me. Cress is too self-conscious to have ever been a flirt herself, but she responds to it in others and was easy prey for Kate’s charms. The two of them couldn’t have been more different physically: Cress with her almost Nordic good looks and thoroughbred body, all lean lines and flared nostrils. Kate was slim too, but in a