Michelangelo's Notebook Read Online Free PDF

two had been worth all the complications and the emotional ups and downs; the others had been clinging, needy or jealously possessive—and in one case, all three.
    She’d long ago come to the conclusion that sex and love got confused far too often and this time she was pretty sure she was confusing it with Peter. Right now he was looking for both sex and love, and she wasn’t really looking for either. If she was looking for a relationship now it would be with a man to give her strong friendship as well. What she wanted was give-and-take; Peter was looking for all take and no give.
    She reached out, grabbed the telephone on the bedside table and sat there with it in her hand, doodling on a little notepad. She could always beg off the date by telling him she was feeling under the weather, but he’d probably want to come over with chicken soup or something. She saw that she’d drawn a rough sketch of the Michelangelo drawing on her pad and grimaced. Who’d have thought finding an old master could get her into trouble? She still couldn’t figure out why Crawley had gotten so angry. She started drawing in as many of the veins, organs and ligaments as she could remember and then gave up. She hung up the phone without dialing. The least she could do was tell him in person. She sighed, got up and started to dress. Tonight, she feared, was not going to be Peter’s night after all. So how does one dress to tell a guy he isn’t going to get lucky?
     
     
     

5
     
     
    They walked back to her apartment, strolling slowly down Avenue A, listening to the music coming up out of the little basement clubs, smelling the aromas from a dozen different cuisines from around the world. Finn was in no hurry to get home from Max’s but she could feel the tension coming off Peter in waves.
    He had his arm around her waist, his hand slipped into the tight pocket of her Levi’s and about every third step his hip would bump into hers. In high school she would have cut off her left boob to walk down a street with a boy like that but now it just seemed… high school. Like a guy going out and finding a street sign with your name on it and stealing it for you. She sighed. Maybe that was the point; Peter was just too damn high school.
    “You okay?”
    “Sure. Why?”
    “You sighed.”
    “Sometimes people sigh, Peter.”
    “You’re not getting your period or something?” He sounded nervous, as though menstruating was some kind of disease.
    “Or something? Something like what? The clap? A yeast infection? Vaginal warts. Herpes maybe?”
    He flushed, hurt at the hardness of her tone. “No, no, I didn’t mean anything like that. It’s just you’ve been down all evening and I thought maybe…”
    “Thought maybe it would screw up your evening or something? Make things a little too messy for you? Blood and gore on the sheets?”
    “No,” Peter answered a little distantly. “I didn’t mean that either.” He took his hand out of her pocket and moved away from her side a little. He smiled tightly. “Where I come from girls don’t talk like that.”
    “Yes, they do, Peter. You just never listened.”
    She sighed again. She was treating him horribly and it wasn’t really fair of her. She was being a bitch and that wasn’t her at all. It was one thing to let a person down easily, it was something else to shoot him down in flames.
    “Look,” she explained, “I just got fired from my job for no reason. I was pretty sure I’d done something good and it turned out to be bad and I got into a fight with someone and wound up looking like an idiot. On top of that, Alexander Crawley is the biggest inflated-ego chauvinistic prick I’ve ever met in my life!”
    “Gee,” said Peter. “And I was worrying that it might be me.” He gave her a boyish grin and her resolve wavered briefly. They reached the door to her building and she got out her keys.
    Somehow a few seconds later she was kissing Peter. After the day she’d had at the museum