Substitute for Love by Karin Kallmaker Read Free Book Online Page A

fight.”
    “I’m not fighting. I’m trying to help you see what you’ve done.”
    “I saw an injustice and did the only thing I could to stand up to it.”
    “Oh, Holly.”
    She had failed. Failed.
    Thoughts she never let free began to spin in her head, searching for solutions, to find the value of y, or express the pattern of raindrops down a windowpane — something to make sense.
    A simple time calculation told her that if she had gone to MIT, she would have a doctorate by now. She would no longer be receiving grades for her daily life from Clay. Funny that today she had also realized she was the same age her mother had been when she’d been born.
    She was floating in chaos theory, where the elegance of mathematics can express the unknown and the unimaginable. You could even not know what a thing was, and mathematics could express the not knowing.
    She stared at Clay and said, “I was thinking about going into teaching. I think I would be good at it.”
    “We can’t afford for us both to be teachers.”
    Surprised by Clay’s grasp of their finances, when he usually refused to mire himself in details, she answered, “I haven’t run the numbers, but it could work.”
    “You didn’t think it through, did you?”
    “Do you think everything through?”
    “I try, because a sense of equanimity is important in a world so out of balance. Our government is controlled by corporations. Our lives have no real privacy.”
    She cut him off with, “You hated where I worked. You hated everything about it. Why aren’t you happy I’m out of that place?”
    “I am, Holly. I’m just disappointed that you fell back into your old habit of not considering consequences before you took action.”
    Impulsively, she reminded him, “We’re together because of that habit.”
    He looked puzzled, but the memory came into vivid focus for her.
    She wanted to know if he thought she’d make a good college student. He had pointed out, in his serious way, that she’d been taking college courses for the past two years. But it was official now that she was eighteen, she told him, and she would be a full-time student next fall. Her aunt’s reluctance was the only reason she wasn’t already. Clearly startled, he had glanced at the calendar on his desk. She would be an excellent student, he said carefully, if only she could learn to focus her energy. If she applied herself to one thing, had someone to help her concentrate, then yes, she could be an excellent student.
    It had been too much to bear. He cared about her future. He was saying how bright she was. She had never heard praise like this before from someone she respected so deeply, or if she had it was so long ago it hardly mattered. She had stopped to see him in his office because she thought the world of him. He was so dedicated to making the world a better place. She had launched herself across his little office, knocking over books and papers in her haste to embrace him, to show him how full he made her heart. Her abandon was the act of a child, but it had taken them to an unexpected corner. Ten minutes later she had no longer been a child, or a virgin.
    “I seduced you, in your office, without a thought to the consequences. I don’t recall a lot of reluctance on your part.”
    His puzzlement was genuine. “I don’t remember it that way.”
    “It’s not important,” she said quickly. But somehow it was.
    “This is my fault,” he said suddenly. “I forget that everyone has their part to play in the whole. I expect you to change.”
    She didn’t know what he really meant, but it sounded as if he was giving up on her. “I try. Damn it, Clay, why can’t you just agree it was the right thing to do? Can’t you at least imagine what I felt and tell me what you would have done?”
    “But Holly, it’s irrelevant. You acted true to your nature, I guess. I shouldn’t be disappointed.” He had another spoonful of cottage cheese. “It will take months, if not a year, to