Her first reaction was one of revulsion. Why couldn’t the dope just leave her alone? Didn’t he know when he wasn’t wanted?
Then the feeling changed. He was, certainly, a nice guy. As nice a guy as she had ever known. And he liked her as a person, and he wanted to see her.
Why shouldn’t she see him?
She picked a time when she could afford a break for an hour or two. It was early evening — she could get her studying done after he brought her back, and her mind would be probably keener and more alert if she took a two-hour breathing spell first.
Once she had made up her mind to see him it was not hard to get the ball rolling. She managed to bump into him “accidentally” in the café that evening. They talked; she suggested that they go for a ride for a little while. She didn’t have to push him into it — he was anxious to see her and glad that she wanted to see him.
When they were in the car she didn’t tell him to park and he didn’t consciously seek out a lover’s lane type of situation. His car was getting fairly low on gas and he felt more like talking than driving, and it wasn’t long before the car was parked in a relatively private spot on a relatively lonely road. Because the sky was still light and because neither of them had planned on anything of the sort, it didn’t seem like a necking situation.
She found herself talking to Joe, talking easily and readily. She told him everything — from her arrival at Clifton right up to the present. He listened to most of it without saying a word, and just having him to talk to made everything a lot easier for her.
Thinking back on it, she couldn’t tell what made him decide to kiss her or what made her let him kiss her. It just happened, One moment they were sitting together in the front seat of the car and the next moment she was nestled in his arms with her mouth to his. It was a gentle kiss, not sexual at all, but one kiss led to another and one thing led to another and...
The funny thing, she thought afterwards, was that she didn’t really want him sexually and he certainly wasn’t trying to seduce her. If anything it was the other way around. He kept wanting to stop, to avoid taking advantage of her, but she wouldn’t let him stop.
The experience itself was neither the passionate love she had enjoyed with Don or the frantic sex she had experienced with all of the others. It was, instead, more an act of friendship than anything else. She knew that he wanted her, wanted her perhaps more than he wanted anything else in the world. She knew also that he would never have her because she would never love him. Giving herself to him was a small way of thanking him for his love without returning it.
They made love in the back seat of his car. While she couldn’t say for certain, she was fairly sure that he hadn’t had much experience in the past. He was awkward and unsure of himself, but the warm feelings she had for him more than made up for any slight incompetence on his part.
They made love quickly and when it was over she felt neither frustrated nor satisfied. She was somewhere in the middle between the two extremes, not guilty over what she had just finished doing and not entirely pleased with herself either.
Naturally it served to make him love her more than ever. But, after they had gotten dressed again and had returned to the front seat of the car, she could tell that he knew where he stood now, that some element of his love for her had undergone a metamorphosis of one sort or another. He would not be calling her on the phone now any more; he would not be grabbing her arm or chasing her around campus. Nor would he spend his time pining away for her in some dark room. Eventually, when he met a girl who was right for him, he would be able to forget her and concentrate on the new girl.
That was the way she wanted it.
It was the way both of them wanted it.
As he drove back to campus, one hand on the wheel and the other draped over the back of the seat, she sat close to him without touching him. And she felt close to him, too. She knew that he was as good a person as she was ever likely to know, and she realized that knowing him had done her a lot of good.
“Linda—”
She waited.
“I’m glad that it happened tonight.”
She didn’t say anything. The statement didn’t seem to require an answer.
“But I’m a little worried that it might have been bad for you. That you might take it the wrong way.”
“What do you mean?”
He couldn’t go on, and after a minute she understood what he was getting at. He was concerned for her, concerned that the act of intercourse might cause her to slide back down to the state she’d just finished crawling back out of. Could that happen to her now?
No, she told herself. Not in a million years. Giving herself tonight had been a thoroughly different sort of thing, a healthy act as opposed to the sick and twisted sort of thing she had been in the habit of doing. If anything, making love with Joe would help her, help her to be honest with herself and decent with others.
“Don’t worry,” she said.
“I don’t mean to—”
“I know. It’s all right.”
And everything was going to be all right. She was sure of it now, as sure as she could be of anything. All she had to do was keep going the way she was headed and she didn’t have a thing to worry about. That was all — just keep plugging in school, keep going to bed early and getting up early, keep going to classes and studying hard and keeping her mind on what she was supposed to be doing. The rest of the world would take care of itself if she could manage the difficult business of holding up her own end.
He let her out at her door and she walked up the stairway to her room. She got to work at once, settling down at her desk with a book open in front of her. She scanned page after page, her eyes taking in a paragraph at a clip as she read through the book.
Next year would be a problem, she thought. Her parents would have to find out and in all probability she would have to strike out on her own. But somewhere she would find a college that she could work her way through, and from there on in everything would be all right.
Exam week came. The Spanish final was first and she walked into the exam room feeling confident and walked out of it feeling still more confident. It was amazing how quickly she had managed to get the language down pat once she had really started to work on it.
The English final was the next day and she was a little worried about it.
But before it was time to take the exam she got the shock of her life and all thoughts of tests and classes left her head immediately.
Chapter Eleven
There was no single act or event that brought the full force of the shock home to her. The shock came instead as a sudden awareness of something she should have known all the while.
This didn’t make it any less of a shock.
She was sitting in her room, the Spanish exam over and done with, the English exam due the next day. She was at her desk, studying valiantly, when she decided to take a ten-minute break to rest her eyes. So she left her desk and sat down on the edge of her bed and let her mind wander.
She realized with something of a start that she was a good three days late for her period. This didn’t shake her up too badly, since she had been late before without being pregnant. She digested the thought carefully and her mind almost managed to swing from that topic to another less dangerous topic when another realization came to her and her fingers began to tremble uncontrollably.