The Carlton Club by Katherine Stone Read Free Book Online Page B

unbutton her blouse and unfasten her bra. Then she lay beneath him, her naked chest silhouetted in the spring moonlight.
    Mark looked at her beautiful breasts waiting to be kissed, gently, roughly, every way, for hours and hours. Wordlessly Janet pulled him to her.
    A year later, after they had both been accepted to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, after Mark had been named class valedictorian and after Janet had triumphed as Maria in the school production of The Sound of Music , they made love for the first time.
    They had never discussed it. They had spent the past year holding each other and kissing each other. Bare chested. Nothing more. But that night, in their secluded cornfield under the same springtime moon that had shone on them a year before. Mark removed all her clothes. Then his. He watched the clear gray eyes that squeezed tight for a brief moment as he entered her, then opened, smiling, as she wrapped her legs tightly around him and moved quietly, quickly with him.
    “I love you,” he told her afterwards. It was the first time he had told her that. He repeated joyfully, “I love you, Janet.”
    “I love you too, Mark.”
    During the four years at the University of Nebraska—home of the Cornhuskers—in Lincoln, Mark lived in the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. It was the same fraternity his father had pledged. Mark got A’s in all his courses. He took the required premed courses: biology, physics, inorganic and organic chemistry and calculus. But he majored in English. Mark’s favorite course was English literature.
    Janet lived at home. She performed in all the University musical productions. She earned A’s—and one A plus—in her music, dance and acting classes and B’s in her other classes. Janet took typing and secretarial skills classes because they seemed practical. Her favorite class was dance. The music courses added little, except exposure, to her natural singing talent, but the dance classes taught her something she didn’t know, something she needed to know to win the roles she wanted. Janet was years behind the students who had started ballet at age five, but she had aptitude and energy.
    Mark and Janet made love often, at least three or four times a week. Over eight hundred times before their wedding night, Janet calculated during a lecture on shorthand in the spring of her senior year. They didn’t experiment in their love making. They made love in the same way, the traditional way, quietly, passionately, every time. They never talked about it. There was nothing to discuss. It was completely satisfying for both of them.
    Mark and Janet were married two weeks after graduation. Mark’s parents paid for the entire wedding because it had to be held at the Riverwoods Country club, and they had to invite four hundred guests. Janet’s parents didn’t belong to Riverwoods, and they couldn’t have afforded a wedding of any size.
    Janet almost balked.
    “What will we owe them, your parents, in return for this?” she asked. Mark had already told her he would not, could not, accept his father’s offer to pay for his medical school tuition at any medical school in the country. Mark’s father wanted Mark to attend Harvard Medical School, but Mark only applied to one medical school, the one with the lowest tuition because of his state residency, the University of Nebraska in Omaha. Mark refused his father’s offer to pay for his medical education because what if he, they, decided not to return to Lincoln to practice after all?
    “It will put us into debt, Janet, but I can work the first two summers,” he said.
    “And I’ll be working. We’ll manage. I don’t want you to take the money from your father, either.”
    In response to Janet’s question about the debt for their wedding, Mark said, “We’re doing them the favor. They want this social event, and we’re agreeing to participate. I just hope you don’t mind too much. Or your parents.”
    “It’s such a terrible waste of