Red Clover Read Online Free PDF

her third drink. Sixty-five minutes after they had walked in the front door, he paid the bill, and they left.
    He didn’t know what to say on the drive back. If it had gone well, he had been prepared to ask her if she wanted to see a movie the following weekend, but now that was out of the question. She broke the silence when they were a few blocks from her house.
    “I had a nice time.”
    Lee figured she was just being polite. He followed suit. “Me too.”
    He pulled up in front of her house.
    “Wanna come in?”
    “Come in?” I can’t believe she wants to continue this.
    She reached over to touch the side of his face. “You know. For a nightcap.” She leaned in for a kiss. Lee instinctively backed away.
    “I think maybe you’ve had too much to drink, Catherine.”
    “So you’re not coming in?” The pained look on her face caused him to panic. She looked as though she was about to cry.
    Lee went for the door handle. “C’mon. I’ll walk you to your door.”
    “Don’t bother,” she said through a whimper.
    “I’m sorry. I’m not sure what to—”
    “Go to hell,” she muttered as she opened the car door.
    Lee opened his door and walked around to her side of the car, but by then she was out of the car and halfway down her front walk, the middle finger of her right hand high in the air.
    Lee stood beside his car staring at Catherine’s front door for a long moment, dumbfounded by her behavior. He tried to make sense of what had just happened and how he could have handled it any differently. Was intimacy really expected after a first date? Was she hurt? Insulted? Was she drunk? Did she seduce all her dates like that, or was this the one time she had mustered enough courage to be the pursuer, only to have him dismiss her advances? He didn’t know.
    A woman wearing a bathrobe and a turban on her head emerged from the house next door. She stood on her porch with her arms crossed staring at him, compelling Lee to slip back into his car and drive off.
    By the time he arrived home, Lee knew three things for sure: His first date had been a disaster. He would never again go on a date for the wrong reason. And before he asked a girl out again, he would get to know her.
    “To not try new things guarantees you’ll never be able to do them.”
    Well, I tried something new, Dr. Jerry. What does that guarantee?
    The following Monday, he and Catherine arrived at exactly the same time to an ecology class and were forced to take the only two remaining vacant chairs, next to each other. At the end of class, before the teacher had even finished giving them their homework assignment, Catherine scooted out of the classroom. Lee never saw her after that.
     He felt terrible about everything having to do with Catherine— their lousy date followed by his rebuff to her advances, the pain he saw in her face afterwards, the story about her guilt-ridden father buying her off, her mother’s departure, and now her absence from classes. He felt guilty for the part he had played in all of it and wavered between calling her, in an effort to make amends, and letting it go. In the end, not wanting to risk making the situation worse, he let it go.
    * * *
    After two years of community college, Lee applied to Cornell University, and although his grades were mediocre at best and not all his community college credits were transferrable, he was accepted into their horticultural program. Lee suspected his karate skills had played a decisive role, as Cornell had one of the highest-ranking karate teams in the country, and Lee’s solid skills made him a good candidate for the team. That, coupled with the school’s declining enrollment for the previous two years, had definitely worked in his favor.
    He moved into a private dorm room and quickly settled into a busy schedule of horticulture and karate classes. Lee had to admit it was a strange combination of interests and understood that no matter what direction he took with either of them, he