For Love of the Game by Michael Shaara

Author:Michael Shaara [Shaara, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-75728-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-03T04:00:00+00:00

… they went to bed that first night—no—early in the morning. It was the wrong time. Too soon, too soon. There should have been more … time to open. She talked to him for hours about the mess of her life, she poured things out she had told no one else—she said: “I have no friends, and … there is something about you, something in that wide-eyed face.” Across a crowded room. Something gentle and … innocent, the ballplayer, the big kid, and he was somebody she could talk to, and so she talked and eased out from under the weight of it that night and afterward she gave him her body, lay there as a social gift, did nothing but mechanize, exhausted, and he felt strange, missing links all over the place, because that woman, when you sat across a table from her and listened to her talk and watched her eyes move and glow and felt her hand come across to touch you, that woman was not the same one in bed that night. In the bed she was a robot. She watched him: she knew. She said: “Very sorry, Billy Boy.” First time she called him that. “It was too soon.” Chapel didn’t understand why. But it was. She said: “I was doing you a favor, because you did one for me … but there’s more to it than that … or should be … or probably never will be. You wanted more than that, and I don’t have it, Billy, I don’t have it. I’m a weeper. I don’t have the right things … for anybody. Or was it—Billy—was it just … too quick? Was I too easy? Was that what it was? Because you are important to me already, you are not just another roll in the hay. What.…”

“I don’t know what.”

“Well, I’m sorry. I’ll go. But … thanks, Billy.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow?”

Long look. “You want to see me tomorrow? Really?” She was genuinely surprised.

“Hell, yes.”

She said: “We won’t go to bed tomorrow.”

“I want to see you. Do whatever.… Want to go flying?”

“I just want to have some fun,” she said.

“I’ll look into the matter.”

“I think I can make you laugh. I betcha I can.”

“How about flying? I know this fella who has a plane. Do you like to fly? I was thinking of flying up the river.”

And they did. And it began. And they did not go to bed for.…

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