Among the Ten Thousand Things Read Online Free PDF

pounds, and that he’d never been traditionally handsome and still wasn’t but that he was, on the strength of his voice and stature, the declarative bridge of his nose and thick curls, graying now, becoming salt and sand—she was thinking that he was, to women, very much attractive. More now.
    Jack noticed not for the first time the dimples around her mouth that deepened whenever she made her worried face. The dimples were girlish, but she’d always have them. And he thought her eyes were on him in that critical way he’d seen more of these last few months. “Tell me what happened,” he said, “so I can—”
    “Tell you? I should tell you? No, you tell me. No, I don’t need you to—”
    “Have you been drinking?”
    “You were so sexy at the gallery this morning,”
she read,
“teasing me in those boots.”
The page she’d whipped out from nowhere, something she’d been sitting on, armed with.
“Tomorrow I’m going to bend you over—”
    “Deb.”
    “—I’m going to bend you over and show you how dirty you really are.”
    “Please.”
    “
I couldn’t sleep last night, getting hard thinking about what I had for lunch, which was you.
I haven’t been drinking, you shit.”
    “Now come on now, all that’s over. I ended it.”
    “Bravo,” she said as he came closer. “Really, well done!”
    “Let me see,” holding out his hand.
    “What for? So you should know how much to admit to?” She lunged forward on the bed and swung the box up and to one side, though kneeling as she was he had only to reach farther forward. “Think she left something out? I don’t think so, she’s very—
Hey!
”
    Hey!
because he had the box, and right away she was on her feet and after him. Jack rounded his back at her, her arms flying at him, and he didn’t know what to do. What he needed was to think, and so he spun around into the nearest place, their bathroom, and turned the lock behind him.
    “What the
hell.
” Deb smacked the door from the other side.
    He put the box on the counter and pulled the pages out in heaps, dumping them into the sink.
    “Jack!”
    It was the dirtiest stuff that worried him. Things he’d forgotten writing that made him feel foreign to himself.
i want to cum between your tits next time.
Not that they didn’t sound like him.
    “Open the goddamn door.”
    He wanted more than anything to make them go away. The girl was crazier than he’d thought, and it was impossible to talk to Deb with this between them, this prop. But there was only the wastebasket, which was small and from which they’d be retrievable, and the toilet, which would clog the pipes. They should have kept matches. Instead he pulled open the small window that looked out over the gravel courtyard, the building’s glorified air shaft. An illogical thing to do, holding handfuls of paper out the window and letting go. He watched the pages fall and catch the air, wafting white into the dark blue, flitting and flipping acrobatically, one or two sailing into open windows.
    In the current, the sheets turned as though someone were reading them. That he could hear them turning, flapping against the updraft, made him realize that Deb, in the bedroom, had gone quiet.
    When he opened the door again, there was only Travolta, the cat, just wandered in, touching her nose lightly to the corner of bedsheet that had wilted toward the floor.
    Jack carried the empty box out to the living room, where the dishes had been stacked and the spaghetti scraped onto a single hulking plate. Deb was standing in the middle of the room, running the charm at her neck taut along its silver chain and watching the time under the television. 12:44. 12:44. 12:44. 12:45.
    “Hey,” he said. There was a streak of pasta sauce bloodying her neck. He tried to pull her into a hug, to squeeze her arms that way he did when a fight was over, that way that said, It’s me, remember? Never forget it’s me. I want to hold you, and you want me to. He squeezed her