Astonish Me Read Online Free PDF

carpet, swung her legs around, and, taking his outstretched hands, stood unevenly on her bare foot and her cast. He put one arm under her knees and one around her back, and then he straightened up, cradling her. The easy way she lay in his arms reminded him that she was no stranger to being carried. Jacob had met her pas de deux partner, the only boy at her studio, Gregory, son of Russian immigrant scientists, a sallow, pimply creature who was educated by private tutors to avoid the brutalizing influence of high school. Gregory, for all his apparent wimpiness, could lift Joan over his head with ease. Jacob had wondered what it would be like to lift her, to grasp her by her thighs or her waist and move her body through space as he pleased. She looked at him. Their faces were very close. “Okay, fine,” she said. “Let’s go to the beach.”
    Jacob’s mother handed over the keys to her Rambler wagon with minimal admonitions. The front seat stretched out long between him and Joan, its scratchy cream upholstery radiating early summer warmth. Joan sprawled in the sun: wiry legs poking out of short shorts, bikini ties in a tantalizing bow at her nape, her face turned to her open window. The Rambler, with its big windows and long bench seats and vast carpeted launchpad of a cargo space in back, did not seem, as it usually did, like a blocky symbol of maternity but was transformed into a terrarium of sexual possibility. For weeks, Jacob had been gearing up to try something with Joan. Not because he didn’t care about their friendship but because he felt like his participation in that friendship, as it was, had become disingenuous. He wasn’t a saint or a child. He wasn’t the palace eunuch. He wasn’t her cousin, as he knew she had told one of her boyfriends. She might reject him—probably would reject him—but he needed to come clean. High school was, for all intents and purposes, over, and he needed to slough off its context. He wasn’t eager to be separated from Joan, but he was curious what would be in store for him at Georgetown, who he would be there.
    They turned off the main road and bounced along a sandy lane to their usual spot, some way down the shore from the popular swimming beach. Before they’d left, Joan had rallied enough to stump around the kitchen filling a thermos with fruit punch and her mother’s vodka, and after he parked, Jacob took the towels and the ice chest and crossed the low, sharp-grassed dunes. He spread the towels out on dry sand, and then he went back to get Joan. She was standing on her good foot, leaning against the Rambler.
    “I think it would make the most sense for me to ride piggyback,” she announced when he drew near. “For long-distance transport.”
    He considered. He had already held her in his arms, and having her cling to his back sounded like a new and interesting variation. “Okay,” he said. “You’re the boss.” He turned around and crouched down. Nimbly for someone in a cast, she hopped aboard. As he started across the sand, he kept his eyes on the terrain in front ofhim, but his nerves were busily mapping her body. His hands were wrapped around the backs of her thighs. He could feel her ropy muscles under his fingers and a film of sweat. The rough plaster of her cast occasionally scraped the outside of his left calf. Her arms were around his neck, her sharp chin on his shoulder, the soft points of her small breasts against his back. The spot where the crotch of her shorts pressed against his waist was almost too potent to think about. His glasses slid down his nose, and he kept having to toss his head like a horse to keep them from sliding off. They didn’t speak until he stooped to let her dismount onto the blue-and-white-striped towel.
    “Such service,” she said, sitting and smiling up at him uncertainly. She felt the pull, too. He knew she did.
    He sat. She looked away, out at the surf, which was breaking sluggishly, the waves plumping up in gelatinous