How to Misbehave (Short Story) Read Online Free

the darkness feel familiar. She could hear the rain, a faraway white noise that only seemed to deepen the quiet of the basement.
    She could hear her watch, too, ticking off the seconds. She’d had no idea it was making so much noise down there on her wrist.
    And beneath that, inaudible but present, she could hear the anger and frustration she’d been finding increasingly difficult to ignore over the past few years.
    This was what came of trying so hard for so long to be good. Twenty-four years old, and her inexperience was written all over her face, so obvious that it meant a man like Tony didn’t even find her attractive.
    When she was little, she’d believed that God was watching her, and she’d wanted to please Him, just as she’d wanted to please her mother. In those first years after they moved to Ohio from Michigan, away from her aunts and uncles and her grandparents, her mother had become so bitter and unhappy she was almost unrecognizable.
    Amber did what she could to make it better. She played with her younger brother, Caleb, and helped take care of baby Katie. She never made a peep at school, helped clean the house, brought home exemplary report cards.
    After a while, Mom got used to Camelot, Ohio, and Amber got used to being good. For years and years, she was as good as she could possibly be, thinking it was going to get her somewhere. Win her a blue ribbon, or true love, or fulfillment.
    It didn’t.
    Even before college, her faith in God and goodness had started to fray, and the summer break she spent in the slums outside Cape Town doing charity work with a group of Nazarene students left it in tatters.
    God wasn’t watching. There might
be
a God, or there might not—she hadn’t made up her mind about that. But she’d seen enough dire poverty and need in South Africa to shake her out of her complacence.
    Life could be short, and it could be brutal. She was lucky enough to have been born in a good place to good people in the midst of plenty. Yes, she needed to use the advantages she had to try to make the world better, but she also had to
live
.
    It wasn’t that she wanted to misbehave. She just wanted to locate some other set of standards, some way to
be
and
feel
without worrying so much about doing the right thing all the time. She wanted to follow the occasional crazy impulse without getting smacked down for it.
    She’d just begun to think that maybe she could, with Tony. That she could flirt. Be a bit reckless.
    Then,
smack
.
    “Say something.”
    Tony’s voice, strung tight again.
    “What do you want me to say?”
    “Anything. I get … I get antsy, being in my head this much.”
    She didn’t know what to tell him. She couldn’t go back to what they’d been doing before—teasing conversation that had misled her.
    Irritation nudged at her.
Be who you are. Say what you mean. What difference does it make, anyway? Who’s really paying attention?
    He might end up thinking she was a fool, but he was just a stranger. A guy who worked construction at her job. When the new wing of the community center was finished, she’d stop seeing him three or four days a week and start seeing him every three or four years. Or never.
    Why should she care what Tony Mazzara thought of her? He certainly didn’t care what she thought of
him
.
    For once in her life, she was going to say whatever she wanted, and damn the consequences.

Chapter Four
    “I’ll talk to you,” Amber said, “but only if you promise not to feed me any bull.”
    Tony sounded cautious when he replied. “I’m not feeding you bull.”
    “Just … just be honest, okay? You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, and the same goes for me, but don’t say what you think I want to hear. And don’t tell me how nice I am. You don’t know me.”
    “All right.”
    A few more seconds ticked by. She hadn’t expected his easy acquiescence. This was uncharted territory, and stepping into it unsettled her as much as it