"Lisa Tuttle - Tirnanog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tuttle Lisa)

LISA TUTTLE

TIR NAN OG

PEOPLE CAN CHANGE.

People do. But some things remain the same -- like my love for you.

Once upon a time, when I first fell, I told you what we could have together was
not exclusive and would not last forever. I never used the 1-word, and I drew
away a little, disbelieving or offended, when you did. I told you, quite
honestly, that I had no desire for children, and no use for a husband of my own.
I was quite happy to share you with your wife.

It's not surprising if you never understood how much I loved you when I took
such care to disguise my deepest feelings. I was a woman with a past, after all.
A woman of a certain age, happiest living on my own (well, with a cat) and with
plenty of lovers already notched into my belt.

I was past forty when I met you, and the easy-loving days of my youth, when the
times between men were measured in days or weeks rather than months or years,
were gone. I had been celibate for more than six months when I met you. I was
feeling a little desperate, and I fell for you hard.

You probably won't believe that, if you remember how hard I made you work to get
me. Once I saw I'd caught your attention -- the space between us seemed charged,
remember? -- I became distant, ironic, cool. I treated you with a casualness
that bordered on the insulting. I was so desperate to be wanted that I didn't
dare let you suspect. Nothing drives people away more than neediness. And then,
after we had become lovers, once you were well and truly caught, I guess it
became a sort of habit, the way I was with you, as if you were an irritation to
me, as if I suffered you to make love to me now and again as a very great favor.

But our affair went on for nearly seven years. Think of it. And eventually, our
positions became reversed. I was no longer the less-loving, the more-loved --
that was you. You grew tired of my undemanding presence, and called me less, or
made excuses at the last minute to cancel a date. Did you really think I
wouldn't mind? That I might even be grateful to lose you? That it wouldn't
nearly destroy me?

Well, as I said before, people change. I might have shrugged and cut my losses
-- dropped you before you could formalize our break -- and bounced back in my
thirties, but, pushing fifty, the loss of you was the loss of the last of my
youth, practically the loss of life itself.

I was surprised by how hard it hit me. If I couldn't win you back, I was going
to have to learn some new way of living, to cope with my loss.

I thought about my friends. Over the years that once large throng of independent
single women who had comprised the very core of my city, my emotional world, had