Stewart and Jean Read Online Free PDF Page A

are legitimate.”
    “Yes,” conceded Marissa, hiding the uneasiness she felt at having blabbed Jean’s secret. “But either way, I don’t think it’s exactly good for Jean that he’s here, you know?”
    “Oh, no, of course not.”
    “Even if he does have legitimate cause to feel upset, Jean’s still the real victim.”
    “Totally. All I meant was, maybe he would listen to reason, if someone explained it to him the right way, made him understand what he’s doing and just how, you know, inappropriate it is.” His eyebrows drew together and his mouth twisted up as he uttered a phrase made ridiculous by its inclusion in a hundred thousand movies: “Do you think he’s after, like, revenge?”
    “I don’t know,” Marissa said, her eyes misty, as if transported to another realm by the sound of that non-quotidian word. “Maybe.”
    Charles squinted into empty space, distracted from the hot girl he was talking to. Was Stewart going to do something to Jean? Inflict violence upon her? On the one hand, that was definitely a paranoid notion. On the other other hand, this was definitely the kind of thing people did commit violence over. And getting a job in her building and taking her out on a date was plainly a form of passive, psychological violence. If he really was going to be indefinitely lurking beneath her office, how could she do anything but quit? Who could tough that out? But what guarantee was there he wouldn’t find some perfectly good reason to be near her next job? Or apartment? Or both? “I mean, there’s no way to call the cops on him, is there?”
    “It seems like there should be, but when I think it over I don’t see how.”
    Charles was relieved, because his own question had thrown him into a mild, quasi-panic. It all sounded very fucked up, but he still would hate to casually get the guy arrested. “Well, I’ll talk to him.”
    “Yeah? About this?”
    “I don’t know yet. I’ll feel it out. Discreetly—I won’t tell him about this talk we just had. It’ll be kind of natural for me to strike up conversations with him, since we’re both newbies at Temple.”
    “Oh, yeah?”
    She said it with enough genuine interest that Charles was able to finally divert the conversation from Stewart to himself. He told her how he was from Spokane, how he’d moved here to get his MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence. “Oh, you’re a writer!” she exclaimed. He modestly confirmed that he was. “That’s cool,” she said. She asked where he’d done his undergrad—Spokane, he told her—she asked if he’d gone to Sarah Lawrence right after getting his BA—nah, he’d futzed around a while first, wandering around Spokane trying to figure out how to get out of there. Now, he joked, he was just waiting to become rich and famous so he could pay off his student loans. She said she was sure he would, and asked if he was working on anything now. He told her he was, though it was still in the “planning phase.”
    Even after she’d finished her salad she lingered, chatting with him. She listened to his stories with interest and laughed a few times. She offered stories of her own, without Charles having to work hard at drawing her out.
    Eventually Marissa said she needed to get back to work. Charles considered asking for her number, but decided against it. He had to check within himself and make sure his hesitation wasn’t mere cowardice; if he’d decided it was, he would have forced himself to go ahead and ask. But no, it really did feel premature, even though she was smiling at him with apparent sincerity. Besides, it wasn’t as if he was unlikely to bump into her again. In fact, she even said, “Well, see you in the park again, I hope.”
    It was time for Charles to be getting back to work, too. There was a food kiosk on the other side of the park, called Sandwichcraft. That was where Charles had been heading when he’d gotten side-tracked. It was too late now. He’d sacrificed his chance