Chapters (55)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Cast of Characters
- Part One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Part Two
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Forty-three
- Forty-four
- Forty-five
- Forty-six
- A note on the Author
And even if they didn’t live together, what were she and Liev going to do? Go out on dates? Have dinners together, intimate candlelight suppers? Go to the roller rink? Decide whether or not they liked each other enough to “go all the way?” She was here, now, a grown-up more childish but less childlike than she was when he knew her. If she let him get to know her, then what? Well, then what? Just because she knew, when it was over, that she did not want him, didn’t mean she didn’t want him to want her as much as he ever had. As much as she had imagined he had.
“You think that we would stand a chance in the real world?”
“How do you know I’m talking about the real world? You don’t know where I’ve been. You don’t know the places I could take you to see if this could work. Reality doesn’t have to come into it. You could keep me inside your head, where I’ve always been, only this time you would be in my head too.”
“I don’t know what you mean …”
“You wouldn’t have to know. You would just have to trust me. Do you think you could do that?”
“Liev, for the longest time you were the only person I could trust. Which makes no sense at all, I know, because you weren’t even there. But whenever I felt someone did me wrong, whenever I felt mistreated, I imagined you telling them off, leaping to my defense. Would I have been right?”
“Of course you would. You think this was about sex, don’t you? The reason I was trapped behind glass?”
“I … children are very sexual. There’s nothing more sexual than a twelve-year-old girl.”
“That wasn’t what I wanted. That’s not what I was afraid of. There’s something in my life that’s a lot bigger than sex. Honestly, I don’t do sex at all.”
She wondered if it was a drug he had given up or a drug he had never been interested in. “This isn’t going to be about God again, is it? Because I’ve been hearing a lot about Jesus Christ and his old man lately. If you’re going to talk about Jesus I’m going to have to say to you what I said to Marcelle and to that awful nun …”
“No, not God.”
“Oh, fuck. Not heroin? Is that why you were always indoors?”
“No,” he laughed, “not heroin.”
“Then what?”
“Do you trust me?”
“You and me alone in this room right now? Yes, I trust you.”