Mrs. Robinson (Mrs. Robinson #1) Read Free

told myself to chill. This was the hand I had been dealt, and I needed to take things one day at a time. My life hadn’t always been like this, of course. Just like anyone who hated themselves, I’d arrived at this situation through many small changes and hiccups and unexpected turns in my path, little detours and such that I’d barely even noticed, until suddenly I’d woken up one day and realized I was living a life I didn’t even recognize. When I met Richard he was the hottest guy on campus, the proverbial big-dicked frat boy with the cocky smile and the family money that was older than God himself, and I fell in love with the gleam in his eye faster and harder than I would like to admit. I’d always had a soft spot for boys who looked like they would eventually make me cry, and Richard definitely fit the bill. He was an ocean, and I drowned. All my friends were crazy with envy when we’d had the storybook wedding in the biggest Methodist church in town, ivy-colored steeple included, little bursts of popcorn filling the air like lights in the July sky as we headed out those church doors and into our shaky little future. At first I’d been dumb enough to think he’d be my Great Big Love – you know, the kind of love you see in old black-and-white movies and feel silly even wishing for because it’s so unattainable; the kind that makes you get all dressed up and walk alongside rivers at night and dance next to cafes for no reason at all and wake up every day thinking that maybe the world was as good and as beautiful as you’d hoped it was as a little girl. And in the very beginning, I guess it was that big love. For one shining moment Richard and I were smiley and content and rosy-cheeked and ten million different kinds of happy, and we’d walk the streets hand-in-hand laughing at the secret we held between us, that love was the only truly great adventure left in this world. Soon I forgot how I had ever lived before him. While the rest of the cold dead world stumbled around in black and white, we loved in blazing Technicolor, and that made us laugh all the louder.
    But like most of the adventures out there, this one had proved short-lived. I got the sense that Richard would never open the gates and let me in on that secret inner life that sparked within those captivating black eyes, and I was right. Of course he’d finished his degrees and gone off to work for a law firm a few years after the wedding, and that’s when the magic wore off and the drifting started and the lingering scent of other women started reaching my nostrils when he’d lie down beside me at night. And the sick thing was that sometimes it seemed like he barely tried covering his tracks, that he almost enjoyed twisting the knife and keeping me a pawn in his sadistic game. But for whatever reason, I couldn’t run. And I guess I wasn’t totally blameless – perhaps I’d been a bit distant and cold, a little prim, and maybe that was what had made him stray. But whatever the case, the hope that things would return to how they were during those halcyon days after the wedding in that little house on Braddock Avenue with the weathered wooden floors and the vivid blue drapes had kept the blinders on my eyes and the ring on my finger. Sometimes it felt like the memories of those days were the only things that sustained me, actually – those, and my books. So the seasons blended into years and the years blended into decades and now every night I sit on my sofa, pour myself some Sauvignon Blanc while the love of my life pours his love into other women, and lose myself in fantastically improbable romance novels about tortured billionaires with private helipads and red rooms of pain to spare.
    But lately I’d started to get a little restless. I didn’t know how much longer I could sit on the sidelines of life, reading about the world instead of living in it. I was kind of over getting told to swoon every time some unrealistically wealthy alpha