The Tight White Collar by Grace Metalious Read Free Book Online

This was the group that went in for smoking, drinking warm beer out of cans and heavy petting. On Monday mornings the girls in this group got together in the ladies’ room at the high school and compared notes and Lisa listened, fascinated, to the remarks that bounced back and forth between the white-tiled walls.
    â€œListen, before I go out with him again I want to hire a good referee.”
    â€œWell, you know Bobby after he’s had a few. Then he says that his name is not Bobby at all—but Boddy!”
    â€œHow do you spell that, dear? Body or Bawdy?”
    â€œIf my mother knew about Jim! I mean, his mother belongs to the Ladies’ Aid and everything, with my mother, and they, all the ladies, I mean, think that Jim is an absolute saint. Good God!”
    â€œLast night Don bet me a dollar that he could make me moan before he was done with me and you know what? I had to pay him!”
    â€œLisa, I’ll bet Chris is really something when he gets going. I mean, those dark Latin types just seem to smolder and smolder until they catch fire.”
    â€œHe’s wonderful,” said Lisa and felt that she was dying a little because she could never come right out and admit that Chris had never even kissed her.
    â€œCome on, Lisa, tell.”
    Lisa tried an enigmatic smile but her thumping heart and aching facial muscles told her that it did not work.
    â€œThat’s private,” she said. “I’m no kiss-and-tell girl.”
    During all the nights she stayed awake after leaving Chris, Lisa wondered wretchedly why he had never even tried to kiss her good night. She was afraid that it was because she was unattractive, cold looking, and to be cold was worse than anything according to the girls in the Ladies’ room at school. But, perhaps it was because she was behaving as her mother had always taught her to behave. Like a lady. And maybe boys didn’t go for ladylike types. Look at her own father. He hadn’t wanted to live with a lady. He’d run off with a beer joint waitress. Lisa tossed and turned and got up and looked at herself in the mirror and went back to bed and wept.
    As for Chris, he lay awake with a thumping heart and an ache in his groin.
    Lover’s nuts, he told himself as he rubbed his sore parts gently.
    But every time he rubbed he had an erection and had to run quickly to the bathroom and finish behind the locked door because Aphrodite Pappas was a notorious examiner of sheets. And every time, while it was happening, his vision was of Lisa. Lisa, naked and still, letting him get on top of her, put it into her, letting him do anything he wanted with her.
    It was all craziness, thought Chris whenever he leaned, haggard and limp, against the bathroom wall. He didn’t even have guts enough to kiss her, let alone anything else. If he kissed her she might get scared, and if she got scared she wouldn’t go and park with him by the river and then he’d have to be content just to look at her in school.
    Finally, in the spring, Lisa failed a French exam and, as she said to herself later, it was well worth getting a poor grade for the semester and the devil from her mother because that evening, in the parked car by the river, Chris put his arms around her as she wept and then he wiped her eyes with his handkerchief and then he kissed her for the first time.
    â€œGod!” he said fervently, “I’ve wanted to do that for so long.”
    â€œI was afraid that you didn’t want to do it at all,” whispered Lisa.
    They kissed with the soft, dry kisses of inexperience but as the weeks went by Chris began to experiment with all the things he had heard and read about. He explored the soft, warm inside of her mouth with his tongue and his hands found the buttons on her blouse, the hook of her brassiere, and both of them trembled uncontrollably when he caressed her breasts.
    â€œBeautiful, beautiful,” whispered Chris as his lips found