Ain’t Misbehaving Read Online Free PDF Page A

to watch a football game while she got out a dust cloth. The next time she looked, he’d been joined by Sandra, a teenager from across the street who claimed she would have been forced to clean the garage with her family if she hadn’t escaped.
    Kay threw them both out before dinner, to allow herself time to get ready for her date. Just a movie and drink afterward, with Tim, a teacher at the high school. They had a reasonably good time, and she was home, kissed at the door and in bed by midnight.
    The entire day she’d had Mitch on her mind. He wasn’t an obsession, but he was there, like a dream one couldn’t forget when one woke up, like the lingering taste of champagne after the glass was long empty.
    She kept remembering his gentleness with Peter, so much in contrast to the hard lines of his face. She kept remembering his aloofness when she’d tried to talk to him, so much in contrast with the blazing warmth of his eyes when he looked at her. His simple announcement out of the blue that he was going to kiss her—but his kiss hadn’t been at all simple…
    Impatiently, she switched the light back on, fluffed the pillow under her head and reached for a book. The old torch song “Stormy Weather” kept crooning in the back of her mind, nostalgic and moody and…disgustingly romantic. She flipped impatiently through her newest book on trivia.
    The weather had been stormy, all right. So why had she had this warm glow inside her ever since Mitch had kissed her in the parking lot?

Chapter Three
    “Don’t give me that. Every guy knows that half the time when a girl says no, she means yes,” Jeff said disgustedly. “If a guy didn’t push it a little once in a while, he’d never get anywhere.”
    A chorus of foot-stomping approval—entirely male—erupted from the back of the classroom. “I’m glad you said that,” Kay said cheerfully. “That myth has been kicked around for generations. It’s another way of saying that a girl just wants to be coaxed. Is that what you mean, guys?”
    A half dozen “right ons” were pelted in her direction. Kay nodded as if pleased. The girls were staring at her as if she’d suddenly turned into Benedict Arnold. Hands were waving like flags of protest. Kay motioned them down; her attention, for the moment, was directed solely toward the males in the class.
    “There’s just one problem with that,” she said regretfully. “When you coax people into doing something sexual that they’re not sure about, you’re in a position to hurt them very badly. Maybe in a way that will affect the rest of their lives.” She slid off the desk, aware that a few of the smiles in the back of the room were suddenly fading. In the silence that followed, she said softly, “Do you really want to be responsible for that? Jeff, can’t you understand what it’s like to be just plain scared?”
    “Hey, wait a minute. You think a guy isn’t scared?”
    “Very.” Kay agreed quietly. “Maybe more than most of you want to admit. Men often have a hard time acknowledging vulnerability, but that’s exactly why, when either partner says even a tentative no, the other partner must honor it. Now, let’s talk about some more of the sexual myths that get passed around. One of them is the notion that a girl means yes when she says no. Another is that a man can’t stop after he reaches a certain point. Now, what are some other myths?”
    Mitch shifted in the open doorway, unseen, unnoticed. Kay played her class as if it were a symphony orchestra—a noisy clamor of basses, short silences, then the softer timbre of her voice making points that forced them to think.
    Sex education had definitely changed since he was in school. At fifteen, he could well have been one of the boys in the back of the class—belligerent, wise-cracking, his jeans too tight, and just the first word on the subject of sex enough to raise his hormone level to the combustion point.
    But in those days, sex education had consisted