Falling Down Read Online Free PDF Page A

there’s no electricity.”
    â€œWhere’s this all coming from?”
    â€œYou have the smell of violence on you,” he said after a long, long time. “I can no longer abide that smell.”
    â€œAbide? Abide? What kind of word is that?”
    â€œI need…I need…I want to live with my family.”
    â€œNathan, I am your family.”
    â€œYou have been good for me.”
    â€œGood for you?”
    â€œCome with me,” he said. “Come be part of my family on the rez.”
    â€œThat’s it?” I said. “That’s it? That’s it?”
    â€œThe only life we have together is up there, up on Dinehtah .”
    â€œThis is a good life here. I am a good woman to you. My daughter, her daughter, we are good people to you.”
    â€œI have to choose,” he said. His voice so calm, so void of emotion, so much a slap in the heart. “My people, or you. I’ve made the choice, you can come with me, you can be with my family.”
    â€œHow can you make this so quick? How can you choose so suddenly?”
    â€œI have been choosing for months,” Nathan said. “You’ve just now heard the truth of it.”
    â€œTruth?”
    â€œWe’ve always promised we’d tell each other the truth,” he said.
    â€œAnd what’s so fucking great about your truth ? Why can’t you just try lying, just for a change? It’s the way lovers survive.”
    â€œThe truth is,” he said, “the truth, the truth about you is the smell of violence and accommodation about you. I cannot live down here. You can. You love this house, this…this palace. I’d be happy in a hoghan .”
    â€œIf I promise to follow you tomorrow,” I said, “will that work?”
    â€œLaura,” he said, “I truly don’t know.”
    â€œThen I promise to follow you. Tomorrow. Just one day.”
    He pressed his forehead against mine, I felt tears on his face.
    â€œMaybe,” he said finally. “I just can’t make a promise of my own.”
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    Except I didn’t know how to tell him that I’d break my promise. Only for a day, I thought. My PI license has to matter to my lover. What I want, what I need, has to matter to my lover. What other more basic trust can there be with a partner?
    I wanted to talk to him, to convince him. Instead, when it came time to talk that night, I found him naked in our bed, still wet from a shower.
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    There are many ways to make love without saying anything, many ways to make love slow and gentle or over-the-top wild, can’t wait to finish and start all over again. And somewhere on the edges of however you do it, there are those times when you couple together and one person is totally, completely, sensually lost in the moment and the other person participates wholly with the body and yet in the corner of the mind is the active, disturbing realization that your lovemaking is the same as it’s always been or something’s changed, you’d crossed a boundary, and you didn’t know if it was possible to look back.
    And the worst part of those thoughts, before you stuff them far down into the unconscious so you won’t dwell on them, is you don’t know if you’re continuing what is or beginning what was .
    Thinking about change. About what I’d said to Bob Gates, about crossing boundaries, going back to work with the agreement my PI license would be reinstated. I wondered if I’d hyped my answers, if they sounded slick, contrived, flippant, or facetious.
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    That night, with Nathan, something had changed.
    After the sex, my head on his stomach, next to the old,puckered bullet scars from Nam, he kept silent. I’d promised to talk.
    He waited.
    I couldn’t tell him the truth about not joining him on the rez, but I couldn’t lie about it, either. He stroked my body in all the familiar ways, wanting to make love again and feeling my