Rocks, The Read Online Free PDF Page A

skin.
    “Hi,” he said. “How are you doing?”
    “Oh, hi.” She put her hand to her eyes and squinted up at him. “I’m doing great. Are you going in? The water’s, like, incredible.”
    “I might,” said Luc. He spread his towel beside her and sat down on it. He didn’t feel like going into the water, getting wet, jolting his still sleep-warm body awake. April had removed her hand from her face and lay with her eyes closed.
    “Aren’t you going to get burned out here?” he said.
    “Uh-uh. I’m covered with bulletproof sunblock.”
    April was in her mid-twenties. She’d been cast in the film she had just wrapped, which Luc had written, for her ethereal, almost translucent milk-white skin, strawberry-blond hair (above and below). The sets and locations were monochromatic in tone: an urban wasteland of apartment towers in Paris’s banlieues; the movie was shot almost entirely during the crepuscular hours of dawn and dusk. The exposed film had been desaturated of most of its color, so the girl (April), stalked by her obsessive former boyfriend, could blend or vanish into concrete wherever she went, and drive him insane. The unreal, liminal effect of her character was heightened by the fact that before shooting, Luc and the director had decided to cut most of April’s dialogue and have the rest dubbed in breathy whispers to avoid the shattering effect of her San Fernando Valley accent on even the most monosyllabic French.
    She looked healthier now. Her skin, faintly freckled up close, was alive—light goose bumps rose on her arms; the peach-pink areolae around her nipples had contracted and puckered as the salt water evaporated off her in the light sea breeze. Luc bent forward and placed his mouth over her cool, wet nipple, licking salty drops—
    April flinched, pulling away.
“Don’t!”
she said.
    “Why not?”
    “Someone might see you.”
    “There’s no one here.”
    “Well, I’m not comfortable with you doing that in public.”
    “Whatever makes you comfortable, then.”
    Luc pulled his knees up to his chest. He looked out over the flat blue sea at a gigantic insect-shaped motor yacht steaming inshore to round the easternmost point of the island on its way perhaps from Palma to Pollença, or to drop its anchor off the plush Hotel Formentor.
    “So, okay,” said April, her eyes still closed, “I want to talk about your mother.”
    “Okay.”
    “Well. She’s very beautiful.”
    “That’s nice.”
    “I mean, like, I can’t believe she’s
seventy
!” she said, ending forcefully, as if Luc had been deceiving her about his mother’s age for months.
    “You think she looks younger.”
    April made a sharp exhalation. “Yeah! Like,
forty
?
Maybe?
And she has a really—I don’t know—is that an upper-class English accent?”
    “That’s what it sounds like now. It’s what used to be called RP, or Received Pronunciation. It was the way some people in England spoke about ninety years ago. You hear it in old newsreels where they talk about the Suez ‘Ca-nell.’”
    “Then how come you have sort of an American accent when you speak English?”
    “Because I am an American. I told you, my father was American. When I spoke English, I spoke with him.”
    April was silent but cogitative in the sun for a moment. “So what happened with your mother and father? How come they split up?”
    “Why does anyone break up? They didn’t get on.”
    “So, does she, like, have a boyfriend?”
    “Not in the way you think of it.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “She’s had friends. And visitors. Friends who fly down for a few days.”
    “You mean they come down to see her and they have sex?”
    “Yes.”
    “Oh, wow. That’s different. Does she know to use protection?”
    “You know what, April sweetheart? I don’t go there.”
    “Well, she’s from an older generation, and she’s, you know, out there.”
    “I leave those things to her. It’s sweet of you to concern yourself, though. Are you