Free Breakable You by Brian Morton Page A

None of them was his child.
    The park was horrible. He needed to get away from all these
people
. Especially these children, but everyone else as well. He changed direction and led her toward a wooded part of the park.
    "I think this is called the Ramble," Maud said. "It's about the only part of the park where a person can get lost. I remember once wandering in here as a kid and not being able to find my way out. I was terrified."
    But even from here you could hear them, you could hear the children's voices. It was no good.
    He turned to Maud and touched her arm. It was the first time he had touched her since he'd mashed up against her on the Promenade.
    "I have to go," he said. "I apologize for everything. You seem like a special person, but I really have to go."

----
Eleven
    Okay. Get lost
. This was the first thing she thought of saying, because she was sick of this, this doomed effort to woo him. But she didn't say it, because she didn't want him to go.
    Don't go. Please.
    This was the second thing she thought of saying, because despite the ample evidence that he had barricaded himself off from human contact, she was weirdly and irrevocably drawn to him. But she didn't say it, because it would have sounded weak. She had no interest in pleading.
    You're not going anywhere.
    That was the third thing she thought of saying. And this is what she said.
    "You're not going anywhere. You know that."
    She moved closer to him. She was looking down at him.
    He was the first man she'd ever been with whom she
could
look down at, and it filled her with a sense of her own power.
    She had always been attracted to tall men. So this was something new. Samir was half a head shorter than she was, and she felt obscurely that the disparity in size was part of the attraction here, part of the mutual attraction, part of why he couldn't quite walk away from her, part of a charm that she could figure out how to work.
    He looked puzzled. But he wasn't walking away. He was waiting for her to do something. He was waiting for what would come next.
    What
would
come next? It was up to her.
    She felt the way you do when you've got a key that doesn't fit perfectly in the lock, but you know that if you play around with it a little, the lock will turn.
    "I have something to show you." She took his hand and led him farther into the untended part of the park, thick with high wild hedges. The path was faint and unpaved.
    She was anxious. The Ramble, she was remembering now, used to be well known as a place to avoid. Prostitutes, transsexual prostitutes, gay men grimly humping. Here under the trees the light was nearly gone.
    She found a little clearing that was hidden from view behind a circle of tall bushes. Still holding his hand, she squeezed through a space between the bushes and pulled him after her.
    She put her hand on his chest and pushed him back a step, so that he was backed up against a thin young tree. She put her other hand on his belt and undid it. He still had a look of puzzlement, but he wasn't stopping her.
    "You never had any intention of leaving," she said. She undid the two lower buttons of his shirt and kneeled and kissed his stomach, which was a good stomach, not too trim—he didn't have "washboard abs," which, to her, would have signaled mostly vanity—but not too paunchy, and then she pulled his zipper down and was pleased to see that he was hard. She licked the tip of the thing, slowly, and then looked up at him.
    "You
do
want to be with me," she said. "I thought so."
    She felt like some femme fatale from an old movie—Greta Garbo as Mata Hari, although in an X-rated version—which was wildly new to her. She had always felt that her sexual life was unoriginal, uncreative—wholly missionary and
bien pensant
—and it was exciting to find herself sinking so effortlessly into a different role.
    She took his penis into her mouth and he leaned back against the tree and closed his eyes.
    The blow job, for Maud, had always been