Prototype Read Online Free Page B

taller, and when they embraced, every gentle swell in one seemed to meet with a corresponding hollow in the other. Side-by-side they looked to be complementary opposites, Sarah very much the child of a fecund earth, while there was something mildly Teutonic about Adrienne …   in the fine blond hair, so very straight, and the murky blue eyes; in the height that once caused her to slouch until the boys caught up, then began to surpass her. But it worked; together they worked, and Adrienne had recently decided she loved Sarah enough that it ached.
    She supposed that was a good thing. To gauge the quality of life, there often seemed no better barometer than the measure of its pain. I've seen the highs, I've seen the lows, now how about I linger upon the middle plateaus awhile and sort it out?
    "I came up with another maybe for my thesis this morning." Sarah beamed with the enthusiasm that inevitably came when something dawned upon her, its avenues of possibility yet to be explored. "Want to hear it?"
    Adrienne laughed. "How many will this make , anyway?"
    "Five. Want to hear it?"
    "I'd rather hear that you've made up your mind."
    Sarah jabbed out and pinched her along the ribs. "Do you want to hear it or not?"
    Adrienne slid down onto the sofa and flung off both shoes. "Dazzle me."
    "Retention in American society of old world customs by Asian immigrants." She frowned. "That's still too simplistic for the final approach. But I think it's something I could really devour. Plus it's something that feels contemporaneously relevant, you know … not just something I can get eggheaded about that doesn't address anything going on right now in our own backyard."
    "Asian immigrants," said Adrienne. Nit-picking, but sometimes that's what Sarah needed; she tended to view panoramas at the expense of details. "You know Fishbine will make you narrow your focus." Her faculty adviser in the doctoral program at Arizona State University; generally easygoing but he tolerated no shotgun approaches and had no patience with indecision. At least he was not prone to imposing his own research needs on the agendas of his students; Sarah was fortunate in that respect.
    "I know he will. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai … I have no idea which one I'd end up preferring."
    "You wouldn't prefer one above the other, that's why you can't make up your mind."
    Sarah leaned back and probed Adrienne's thigh with her toes. "We only get one full life … if that much. Is it my fault if it all looks so interesting?"
    "You and your experiential smorgasbord." Adrienne smiled, grabbed Sarah's foot, and began to massage it, digging her thumbs into the arch where she knew Sarah liked it best. "I wish I could extract that mania from you and inject it into about half the patients I see. We'd cure thousands from depression."
    "And make millions." Sarah shuddered, froze, held her foot still. "Right there … yes. Yes! " She hurled herself backward along the length of the sofa and threw both arms across her face with a satisfied groan. "What would you inject into the other half?"
    "Probably your hedonism."
    "Rome fell," she said, and groaned again, "but what fun it must have been at the time, you know?"
    A few minutes later Adrienne got up to change into shorts and a T-shirt. They breakfasted on the back patio, grapefruit juice and day-old muffins from a favorite bakery. When Sarah returned to her chair in the front room and her book — an autobiographical account of a Japanese woman's transition and adjustment to life under the thumb of American culture — Adrienne showered away the last of her night's shift. Let her at least make a clean break before it all began again at four o'clock this afternoon.
    Sarah had left the bedroom blinds down after rising, to keep the sun out, so the room was still cool. The unmade bed sat in a low frame, and Adrienne crawled into it, set the alarm for two-thirty, although she might not need it at all; how one human body could be