# Read the first page of Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff Read the opening of Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff free, no signup. A marriage told first by the husband, then by his secretive wife. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/fates-and-furies-lauren-groff - Genre: Literary fiction - Year: 2015 - ISBN: 9780698405127 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9780698405127&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9780698405127 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9780698405127 ## The opening A thick drizzle from the sky, like a curtain’s sudden sweeping. The seabirds stopped their tuning, the ocean went mute. Houselights over the water dimmed to gray. Two people were coming up the beach. She was fair and sharp in a green bikini, though it was May in Maine and cold. He was tall, vivid; a light flickered in him that caught the eye and held it. Their names were Lotto and Mathilde. For a minute they watched a tide pool full of spiny creatures that sent up curls of sand in vanishing. Then he took her face in his hands, kissed her pale lips. He could die right now of happiness. In a vision, he saw the sea rising up to suck them in, tonguing off their flesh and rolling their bones over its coral molars in the deep. If she was beside him, he thought, he would float out singing. Well, he was young, twenty-two, and they had been married that morning in secret. Extravagance, under the circumstances, could be forgiven. Her fingers down the back of his trunks seared his skin. She pushed him backward, walking him up a dune covered in beach-pea stalks, down again to where the wall of sand blocked the wind, where they felt warmer. Under the bikini top, her gooseflesh had taken on a lunar blue, and her nipples in the cold turned inward. On their knees now, though the sand was rough and hurt. It didn’t matter. They were reduced to mouths and hands. He swept her legs to his hips, pressed her down, blanketed her with his heat until she stopped shivering, made a dune of his back. Her raw knees were raised to the sky. He longed for something wordless and potent: what? To wear her. He imagined living in her warmth forever. People in his life had fallen away from him one by one like dominoes; every movement pinned her further so that she could not abandon him. He imagined a lifetime of screwing on the beach until they were one of those ancient pairs speed-walking in the morning, skin like lacquered walnut meat. Even old, he would waltz her into the dunes and have his way with her sexy frail bird bones, the plastic hips, the bionic knee. Drone lifeguards looming up in the sky, flashing their lights, booming Fornicators! Fornicators! to roust them guiltily out. This, for eternity. He closed his eyes and wished. Her eyelashes on his cheek, her thighs on his waist, the first consummation of this terrifying thing they’d done. Marriage meant forever. [He’d planned for a proper bed, a sense of ceremony: he’d stolen his roommate Samuel’s beach house, having spent most summers there since he was fifteen, knowing that they hid the key under the hawksbill turtle carapace in the garden. A house of tartan and Liberty print and Fiestaware, thick with dust; the guest room with the lighthouse’s triple blink in the night, the craggy beach below. This was what Lotto had imagined for the first time with this gorgeous girl he’d magicked into wife. But Mathilde was right to agitate for pleinair consummation. She was always right. He would know this soon enough.] It was over too quickly. When she shouted, the gulls hidden by the dune buckshot the low clouds. Later, she’d show him the abrasion against her eighth vertebra from a mussel shell when he dug her in and dug her in. They were pressed so close that when they laughed, his laugh rose from her belly, hers from his throat. He kissed her cheekbones, her clavicle, the pale of his wrist with its rootlike blue veins. ## Books with a similar feel - [Death In Troy by Bilge Karasu](https://uncovered.ink/read/death-in-troy-bilge-karasu.md) - [House of Names by Colm Toibin](https://uncovered.ink/read/house-of-names-colm-toibin.md) - [Forever, Interrupted by Taylor Jenkins Reid](https://uncovered.ink/read/forever-interrupted-taylor-jenkins-reid.md) - [Wellness by Nathan Hill](https://uncovered.ink/read/wellness-nathan-hill.md) - [Galatea by Madeline Miller](https://uncovered.ink/read/galatea-madeline-miller.md) - [Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer](https://uncovered.ink/read/here-i-am-jonathan-safran-foer.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. Rights holders can request removal at https://uncovered.ink/takedown.