Rapture Read Online Free PDF

father was too much of a Washington bigwig to notice his daughter, or any of his children for that matter, having weightier problems to occupy him. His wife catered to him despite his pretty much ignoring her, which was his general attitude to everyone not in a powerful position. Though at one Thanksgiving Benjamin did feel a beam of curiosity pass over him, only to be followed by Mr. Crane’s temporary registration of suspicion.
    So in all the time they’d known each other he and Vanessa had always been somehow in each other’s lives. In a way, she already was his wife.
    And it wasn’t as if he didn’t love her anymore. He incessantly repeated this fact to himself because frankly he was appalled at how these other feelings could have developed. He’d fallen in love with someone else and suddenly
she
was crucial to him.
Her
body was what he needed. He couldn’t help it. What he could help was not leaving Vanessa. So he didn’t. After Mexico, he stayed. He stayed despite the fact that he grew more and more depressed. He thought obsessively of the one he was in love with, the one who wouldn’t see him, who wasn’t even going to
consider
him until he moved out. He’d wake in the morning lying next to Vanessa and think of Kay first thing and make love to Vanessa before she had to get up for work and while she was in the shower he’d think of Kay again and of the time they stayed on the beach till it got dark late and how she had that purple thing wrapped around her chest and how the whites of her eyes looked and how they had to climb back over some wall and the way she stepped around the green glass shards sticking up in the cement along the top like shark fins, moving as if she were a tightrope artist. The thought came to him then very naturally and without hysteria that he could see having a child with her. He had not had that thought before. Not with Vanessa. Then he remembered being under the mosquito net in that pink bed in Oaxaca and how soon after that she’d gone off with Johnny. Hearing the apartment door close behind Vanessa and the bolt click, he’d ask himself, lying there in Vanessa’s bed, if he was really in love with this other person who no longer was giving him the joyous feeling he’d gotten at first in that country far away, who instead was sinking him into a quagmire of suffering and agony. The answer bled out in front of him as an unfixable blot of doom, the same answer each time: yes.
    The sun had moved into the room so it was brighter. He preferred rooms dark. He looked down at Kay, as if to remind himself where he was, and thought there was a time he would have been dying for this.
    IT WAS HARD to believe she was here with him again, naked. What had happened to that last ironclad resolve, supported by the other ironclad resolves before it, not to see him again, or more importantly, at least never to touch him?
    She’d not seen it coming. Then suddenly there he was, touching her.
    They had finished their sandwiches. The water was heating for tea. He came up behind her at the sink washing dishes and put his arms around her. It was a friendly clasp, one he might have given her in the past, affectionate, not as an overture, but holding on tight and firmly as if to keep her from floating up. At first she felt it in that friendly way. Then the pressure of his arms and their insistence made her feel more.
You matter to me.
She had felt that insistence before and knew that it was possible for it to take her off down a road at first wonderfully lush and appealing which very quickly deteriorated into an impenetrable mass of brambles. But not being angry at him anymore, she wasn’t looking to him to soothe her. She had let that go. She felt his breath on her neck. An unnerving susceptibility moved through her. His breath on her skin. That was not false, that was    she felt unsteady. Small disturbances went off inside her. She put the