Summer Storm Read Online Free Page A

experience she was sure. She did not invite him up to her room.
    Mary shivered a little; the Nantucket rain was turning colder and she got up and began to walk slowly down the beach. It was painful, looking back like this; painful to look honestly and see how cocksure and how foolish and how young she had been. And yet she knew, as she reflected on the self-absorbed adolescent she had been, that she could not have handled things any differently from the way she had. Her only alternative had been to simply say good-bye and refuse to see him. And that was something she had not been able to do.
    They had reached the crisis point in their relationship rather quickly. He wanted to go to bed with her and she would not. He was very persuasive, and every sense she owned was screaming for her to give in to him, but there was a hidden core of iron in Mary’s character and on this issue he came up against it.
    “But, Mary, why?” he asked, his lips moving tantalizingly along her throat. They were both in the front seat of a car he had borrowed and the car was parkedin front of her dorm.He wanted to come up to her room.
    “No, Kit,” she said, and his mouth moved to find hers once again. She closed her eyes; nothing she had ever experienced had prepared her for the way she felt when Kit kissed her. His hand slid inside her open coat and began to caress her breast
    “I want you,” he said. “I want you so much. Mary—let me come upstairs.”
    “No,” she said again.
    “God damn it, why not?” Frustrated passion was making him lose his temper.
    She gave him the same answer she had given all the other boys, the answer that had stood her in such good stead for four years. “Because it’s a sin,” she said and stared resolutely out the front window.
    “What?”
    That was the answer she usually got. “You heard me. It’s a sin. Against the sixth commandment—you know, the one that says, ‘Thou shall not...’”
    “I know what the sixth commandment says,” he replied irritably.He looked at her, trying to make out her expression in the dark. “Are you serious?”
    And in fact she was. Then, as now, she was as oddly simple in some ways as she was bafflingly complex in others. Sex before marriage was a sin and she wouldn’t do it.
    He had tried to change her mind. By God, he had tried. He would have succeeded too, she thought, if she hadn’t been so careful about where she would go with him. He was as hampered by lack of opportunity as he was by her own resistance. You can’t make passionate love in the middle of a crowded student party—or at least not if you are as private a person as Kit was. You could do quite a few things at a movie, but certainly not what you ultimately wanted to do. He didn’t own a car, and on the few occasions when he suggested borrowing one, she had said she had other things to do.
    He stopped calling her and for a month she didn’t see him. It was pure hell and it was then that she came to the reluctant realization that she loved him. It was a terribly upsetting recognition. They were of two different worlds, really, and she feared and mistrusted his. Those worlds had touched briefly here at college but in June they both would graduate, and like two meteors on opposite courses, they would grow farther and farther apart as the years passed, never to touch each other again. She would continue her studies and, with luck, land a teaching job in a decent university. He would make it big in acting; she had no doubt at all about that. He had the looks, the talent, and the drive. Most of the boys she knew traveled through life in a pleasant cloud; they did things because they seemed like good things to do at the moment. Not Kit. He knew exactly what he was doing and exactly where he was going. And he was going to the top. There was no place for her in the future he envisioned for himself.
    In March she learned she had been awarded a fellowship for graduate study. Kit was offered a job with the Long