For a Little While by Rick Bass

Author:Rick Bass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

The romance lasted only a little longer than did the carcass of the egret. The three of them continued to try to do new things together—they did not return to the bathysphere—though Richard and Annie went places by themselves, too, and explored, tentatively, those new territories. Always between or beneath them, however, there seemed to be a burr. It was not that she had made the wrong choice, but rather that some choice had been required—that she had had to turn away from one thing in the turning-toward another—and that summer, even before the two boys, two young men, prepared to go off to college, while Annie readied herself to return for her senior year of high school, she informed Richard that she thought she would like a couple of weeks apart to think things over and to prepare for the pain of his departure. To prepare both of them.

“My God,” Richard said, “two weeks?” They had been seeing each other almost every day. Their bodies had changed, their voices had changed, as had their patterns and gestures, and even the shapes of their faces, becoming leaner and more adultlike, so that now when Annie placed the old wax pressings to her face, they no longer fit.

“I want to see what it’s like,” she said. “Maybe everything will be just fine. Maybe we’ll find out we can’t live without each other, and we’ll end up married and having kids and living happily ever after. But I just want to know.”

“All right,” he said, far more frightened than he’d ever been while dangling from the crane. “All right,” he said, and it seemed to him it was as if she were climbing into the bathysphere alone, and he marveled at her bravery and curiosity, her adventurousness, and even her wisdom.

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