Robin and Ruby Read Online Free PDF Page A

Where are your clothes?”
    “They’re already at Diana’s.”
    “You went there first? Before you picked me up?”
    Peter nods. “I figured you’d need some space—”
    “You had this all planned out.” He gets in, slams the door. “You said it’s all about you and your path in life and your fucking destiny, but it’s about me, about what’s wrong with me. Why don’t you just say it?”
    Peter starts the ignition and without looking whooshes into traffic. A blare of a car horn startles them both into a shaky calm.
    “OK, yes,” Peter says, his gaze on the road, “there are some things about you—not that you’re a bad person, but there is the difference in our ages—eight years is a lot—and the fact that you have all of your twenties still ahead of you, whereas I want to figure out other things, start settling in to my adult life.”
    “I’ve already had my twenties. I had them in my teens.”
    “There’s also that,” Peter says. “Your history.”
    Robin feels his heartbeat quicken. “You mean my sexual history.”
    “Yes,” Peter says, softly but emphatically. “Especially after the last time.”
    The last time : The sex they had, during Peter’s previous visit, three weeks ago. That hot, hot moment when Peter slipped inside Robin unsheathed, and Robin let him thrust, thrust, thrust. Thirty seconds like that, maybe sixty, maybe a whole minute and thirty seconds. A tiny span of time that felt eternal. They both knew what was happening. Robin even said an encouraging yes, but finally Peter froze, cold realization on his face. “What are you doing?” he asked, and pulled out.
    “I haven’t been with anyone since I’ve been with you,” Robin says. “And I haven’t wanted to, either.”
    “With this virus, when I sleep with someone, I’m sleeping with everyone he’s ever had sex with.”
    “Well, that’s only a few dozen people,” Robin says and then neither of them says anything more.
    His head is flooding with chatter, noise he wants to float away from. He pushes the play button on the cassette deck. Exposé mixes into Lisa Lisa singing “I Wonder If I Take You Home,” a perky song that he understands now is really an anthem of doubt. Robin snaps it off after just a few measures.
    As Peter heads along Walnut Street toward West Philly, Robin imagines leaping from the car and running back to the restaurant, which is really a wish to run backward in time, to just a short while ago, when Peter was still his boyfriend. But in fact he feels paralyzed, rigid with the horror of being discarded by this man he was sure was the right one, the safe one, the one who would prevent him from chasing after his every dangerous impulse.
     
    The ride passes in silence. They cross over the Schuylkill River, past the big neoclassical train station and into the Penn campus, mostly quiet now that the summer is here. Peter reflexively locks the doors as they move into the surrounding neighborhood, where once-stately, now-dilapidated single-family homes are the outward sign of the poverty and crime that runs deep here. Peter pulls up to the curb in front of the row house where Robin and George share an upper-floor apartment. On the neighboring stoop, two teenage boys turn their attention to the car; these two, sometimes along with a couple more just like them, dressed in backward baseball caps and shiny tracksuits, are always here, staring at Robin as he comes and goes, never saying anything directly to him but often talking loudly among themselves in a way that unsettles him, because they’re letting him know whose turf this is. For the first week he would offer a hello, but he never got a verbal reply, and one time he heard one say what sounded like, “Crackers tryin’a take over the ’hood.” After that he just moved past quietly.
    The fact is that Robin picked exactly the wrong time to move into West Philly, just a week after police helicopters dropped a bomb on a separatist black commune