"When the loving gets rough" - читать интересную книгу автора (Scope Perry)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Pat knocked discreetly on the door. She had stayed at Bickki's an hour longer than necessary, to be sure to give Karen and her customer enough time. Besides, Bickki had been bending her ear over losing Lennie who she'd gotten together with not long ago. The girl had broken a date and then neglected to come back to keep another one that night Lennie was a bore. So, in fact, was Bickki.

"Come in!" Karen was surprised to discover that she wasn't at all nervous. If this is what she had to do to go home, she was ready to do it.

"Oh," Pat said, seeing Karen sitting in the chair, fully dressed and made up. "I wanted to make sure you were alone." She threw herself on the bed. "How was it?"

"Fine. I didn't go through with it," Karen answered calmly. "I want to talk to you, Pat."

"You didn't go through with it!" Pat rolled off the bed and looked at Karen.

"It's not important, now."

Pat looked somewhere between angry and hysterical. "You promised! You gave me your…"

Karen looked at her erstwhile lover in stilled fascination. She wondered how she had ever thought Pat sensitive and beautiful. It was like looking at a portrait of sickness. She found neither beauty nor sensitivity in the intense face which glared at her, wavering between hate and self-pity. "Pat," she said as gently as she could, "I'm going back to Allen. I'm going home."

The next hour was only the beginning of an ordeal, the sort Karen hoped she would never have to go through again. Pat tried a burst of anger that numbed Karen's ears with its volume and fury. When that didn't work, Pat cried. Karen took the anger, the tears, the verbal brutality which followed them, and she also managed to withstand the final tantrum which came in the form of Pat on her knees, trying to make love to the girl, then begging for another chance. The arguments seemed endless, and lasted long into the night.

"I can make you happy, you'll…" Pat tried to kiss Karen's compressed lips.

Karen turned her head slightly, taking the kiss on her cheek. She waited patiently until Pat was finally quiet. Then she tried to explain how she felt. "It won't work. It never could. I'm going where I belong."

"What do you want from me? Congratulations? Am I supposed to wish you luck and Godspeed and all that?" Pat gave up. She refused to look at the girl. She thought of Paula, the young poetess who had made it very plain that she would give anything to be in Karen's place. So would Lorna. She didn't need Karen. She didn't need anyone.

"I don't need anything from you, except your word that you won't try to see me again. It would only make matters worse for all of us." Karen suspected that Pat wasn't as heartbroken as she wanted Karen to believe she was. That made it easier. She had packed earlier. Now she lifted her two suitcases and walked to the door. She wanted to say goodbye, but decided against it. The set of Pat's back demanded a more dramatic farewell.

Unfortunately, for Pat, Karen couldn't think of one.

Karen found herself walking along the beach front just as the day was beginning to peep through the curtain of clouds that hung over the water. The sky lightened as she walked. Karen thought back to the evening on which she had made her first trip down the beach front to the coffeehouse, the night she had first seen Pat. It was a lifetime ago, yet the ocean was the same combination of serenity and turbulence it had been then, a liquid garden at the edge of the cliff.