Fresh Girls & Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

Shut up, shut up, she wantedto say, but the sobs kept coming and wouldn’t stop, like the first night in the lounge, when she wept in front of this stranger and felt the tremendous release. Then she heard the short, sudden whistling high in the air. It seemed to swoop down from the ceiling, and it split across the surface of her body.
    Afterwards he sat by the bay window in his armchair, crossing his legs, adjusting the belt of his bathrobe. Light from the street lamps draped thin shadows over the floor, long and blue. He watched her across the room — she was bent over the bed, running her hands through her hair and then through the ropes and chains on the rumpled sheets. Her navy blazer lay crooked across her shoulders and her face was a blur of wet color, the smudged mouth, the pastel eyelids, and the wavy mascara lines down her cheeks. He didn’t think she even knew that she was crying.
    The air from the open window was crisp against his bare legs. He flicked the belt of the bathrobe off his thigh and reached for his cigarettes. Watched her lean down to pick up her dress, a designer affair from an expensive boutique; his eyes traced the buttons of her spine, her thin back. Women like her always did amaze him. Often they were as trusting as the underage girls he sometimes picked up in east-end bars with pool tables and staggering men instained jeans and baseball caps. The only difference was that the girls grabbed their purses and ran from his apartment counting their blessings that they were still alive. The women with the careers and the condominiums were the ones who came back.
    Now her hands were trembling, breasts bobbing inside the jacket like bruised fruit. He eyed her marks keenly: the welts, the drying blood zigzagging down her thigh, the abused nipples misshapen from the clamps that had remained on her throughout the session. Her breath was ragged in the air, halting like she’d forgotten how to breathe, then starting up again too fast, her throat chiseling up and down in her neck. He surveyed her body, then swiveled around to face the window.
    It had begun to rain, lightly at first, and then coming down hard. Rain so thick it looked white in the night, smacking the pavement and the grass like bullets. Behind his own reflection in the windowpane he saw her straighten up, hiccupping, pushing hair out of her eyes and trying to fasten it in a clip at the base of her neck. The window reflected the lights of the chandelier blazing above the bed, the pink cloud of the comforter, the dull antique bed frame. The ropes lay uncoiled around her and the riding crop was propped against the wall, stiff and slender. He thought with pleasure that he could see its leather tongue still vibrating.
    The rain poured down. He waited, and a moment of lightning filled the sky, bleaching everything silver — cars parked along the street, trees, other buildings. His own face loomed in the window, the smooth cheeks flushed boyishly from exertion, his lips curved and generous and undistorted by cruelty.
    He rubbed his palm absent-mindedly. It was reddened from the friction of the whip handles. He glanced again at her reflection; she was sucking in her breath, trying to stop a sob. They both waited for the sound of thunder, but it came from so far away it could have been the sound of someone coughing in the next room of the west-end building.
    He sighed, crushing out his cigarette and rising from the chair. Tonight he would let her go, and another night she would return. He knew. Already in the window he could see her starting towards him, tugging her skirt over her lashed thighs, as though he had done nothing.

MARRIAGE
              H is gold wedding band catches the light between the two walls of flesh that are our bodies in bed. It is a wide band with a perforated design, and it fits loosely on his finger. When he draws his hand up between us to touch me, the hand seems to take on a separate entity — as though it is a