The Romance Reader's Guide to Life by Sharon Pywell

Author:Sharon Pywell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

NEAVE

And Then, Ricky Luhrmann

When the divorce from Peter Winthrop was final, Lilly started dating again. Long ago we’d set up a daytime roster of babysitters to help us manage both Annie and Be Your Best, but evenings it was always one of us. Jane and I, both smitten with Annie, were always happy to be left with the little girl while Lilly made her way back into the world of romantic adventure. Maybe that eagerness of ours put my sister on too long a leash.

When she announced that she’d fallen in love again, it was a surprise. It shouldn’t have been. Ricky Luhrmann was fiery, poetic, volatile—traits that made the man a mesmerizing date but should have given her pause about his husband potential. I said as much, which did less than no good. Right from the start he made her ecstatic and he made her suicidal. She’d come home from every date with him looking drugged—so glassy and heated I’d thought she was ill. Asked if she felt all right, she’d laugh. Not a funny ha-ha laugh.

He wrote love letters, which is enough in some cases to clinch the deal. I don’t know why more men don’t take advantage of this simple truth about women. Love letters can turn the most stubborn case around. He told her she had a wild heart, and I said that wasn’t exactly the way I would say it, but I kind of knew what he meant. She did have a wild heart, and the fact that he saw it and loved it delivered her into his hands.

“He says he dreams me,” she murmured one slow afternoon as I tried to interest her in a few shifts in the budget lines. “He says I’m a doorway, a sacred space like all doorways, and he thanks God he found the country I lead to.”

How many good women have been snared and skinned with a little poetry, even bad poetry? Run! I wanted to say, but Ricky was like a scent or taste that shook all the reason out of her head. My sister’s mood made me appalled and envious in roughly equal measure.

“Love is as strong as death, and I want you to know my love is as strong as death,” he’d written to her. “I want to be destroyed by you. I want you to be willing to be destroyed by me.”

This particular piece of poetry must have scared her some, as well as made her feel other things. I know it made me uneasy. She’d folded it up and stuck it in a box that she’d buried in a drawer. Three months after they met they had a terrible fight—something so bad it gave me real hope that she’d break it off. I never knew what caused the argument, but it seemed to be of a sexual nature. When she got home to Annie and me at her apartment that night she was enraged, her wrists darkening and one shoe without its heel. I told her it didn’t look right—any of it.

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