Robert B. Parker Read Online Free PDF

was some snow, not heavy, big flakes, drifting in the lights in front of the dorms. I said good night to my date, who seemed in a hurry to go in. Jennifer stopped kissing Nick and turned her head against his chest and saw me. She winked. I took Nick’s hand and moved it up to the small of her back. “I don’t want you getting more than I did,” I said.
    “Nobody could get less, Boonie,” Nick said. Welaughed. Walking away from them I felt short of breath and my eyes stung in the crystal-flaked darkness.
    We were in a booth in the spa; most people were in class and it was quiet in the spa. Jennifer gave me one of her Pall Malls. Each of us sat sideways on our side of the booth, feet out along the rest of the booth seat. Jennifer had on saddle shoes. “What’s a cockteaser, Boonie?” Her face was somewhat oval. On one cheek was an almost imperceptible scar. Scraped it as a small child, she’d told me. I was the only one, she said, who’d ever noticed it.
    “A cockteaser is a girl who makes you think she’ll come across and doesn’t,” I said.
    Her face was serious. She nodded. “I figured something like that because of the
teaser
part. But what’s a cock?”
    I grinned. “Jesus Christ,” I said, “doesn’t Marblehead have a bad element? Didn’t they teach you anything?”
    I was thrilled to explain things to her. There was so much she didn’t know. I could tell her things forever.
    “No, no, no,” she said with that thrilling lilt in her voice that she had, “no making fun. If I can’t ask you, Boonie, who can I ask?” Her face was serious now. “Everyone else I have to pretend with.”
    I wasn’t sure I could talk; my throat was constricted. It was hard to swallow. As I breathed I felt as if my breath trembled in and out. “A cock is another name for a penis. Originally it meant a spigot, or faucet, and by, you know, analogy, it became slang for the other thing.”
    She seemed pleased to know that. She made me feelI’d pleased her. It was years before I understood that she made everyone feel that way.
    In a skin-tight one-piece black Lastex bathing suit a girl named Fritzi swam slowly past the dock in an expert Australian crawl, her long white arms stretching out fully, her breast arching out of the water with each reaching stroke. Six or eight of us watched her. Keg beer in big paper cups, chino pants, white shirts with button-down collars, the cuffs turned up, somebody’s camp at the lake, I never knew whose. Among the trees charcoal smoke and the smell of grilling meat. Feeny the Narragansett beer salesman used to get us the keg and tap it for us. He often stayed at the party, only a couple years out of college, not much older than we were, stocky and full of laughter. The beer came mostly foam at first until it settled down from the trip out from town. I had to keep the paper cup tilted so the beer slid down the side and even then it took a while to fill.
    “Want to take a walk, Boonie?” Jennifer was wearing gray flannel Bermuda shorts and a man’s white shirt with the tails tied in front. Her thick white socks were halfway up her tan calves. I handed her the beer I had drawn and took another cup and got a second one full. I didn’t want to make her wait, so it was mostly foam. Didn’t matter. I could come back. It was still May and the summer homes around the lake were empty. We walked on the thick pine carpet under the high-branched long-bodied white pines. Pines high enough and thick enough to have suppressed the underbrush. It was mostly clear going on the thick needle carpet.
    “Where’s Nick?” I said.
    She sipped a little of the beer from the big cup. A wisp of foam stayed on the bridge of her nose when she lowered the cup. I reached over and wiped it away.
    “He went to Bowdoin this weekend,” Jennifer said. “I came with Bruce Walter.” Behind us the sounds of the party were clear. Laughter in two octaves, the sound of splashing as people dove into the lake; somebody