Kate Christie Read Free

Uh-huh.”
    “Guess we’re even, then.”
    She took off her sunglasses and slipped them into her bag.
    Then she smiled, and I noticed the coppery glint of her eyes again.
    I checked my watch. “I should probably head up. Thanks again for the ride.”
    “De nada. See you around, Cam.”
    She turned away, and I did too a moment later, heading in the opposite direction. As I walked toward the track, I pondered the fact that her “de nada” had a Spanish lilt to it, which might have to do with her slightly darker coloring. Maybe she wasn’t as WASPy as the majority of the tennis players I had met in Southern California.
    Curiouser and curiouser. Not only did Jess Maxwell know who I was, she seemed to want to get to know me better. I could dig it, I thought, only just stopping myself from skipping all the way to the stadium.

Chapter twO
    Whenever I think of spring semester sophomore year, I remember listening to Melissa Etheridge’s self-titled album on Friday nights with Holly, my best friend from soccer, shouting along with the songs while we drank Rolling Rock beer and got ready to go out to a party or check out the scene at Zodiac.
    Holly and I had been inseparable since the first day of preseason freshman year. I wasn’t even sure why we’d latched on to each other at first. We were about the same height and build and we both had freckles, but there the similarities ended. I was dark-haired, fair-skinned and comfortable in faded jeans and hiking boots, while Holly was blonde, blue-eyed and nearly always dressed fashionably in the latest J Crew ensemble. She hailed from an L.A.
    suburb, her family as different from mine as possible. Her father was a corporate lawyer, mother a stay-at-home mom despite the Beautiful Game 17
    fact there weren’t any kids left at home, older brother president of a fraternity at UCLA. They were all blond and, far worse to my mind, card-carrying Republicans.
    But Holly and I had been tight ever since that first day when we ran the timed two mile together and pushed each other to make it in under twelve and a half minutes and then walked off our cramps, barely speaking the entire time. She was the first person at SDU I told I was gay, and she was cool with it. She even said she thought she might be attracted to women herself. Now, a year and a half later, Holly had canceled her assorted catalog subscriptions, joined the SDU Democrats and was dating a woman for the first time, a junior who lived in her dorm and looked even straighter than she did.
    I had dated a few different women since arriving at SDU—
    Beth, an intellectual writer-to-be who lived one floor away my first semester on campus; Sarah, a beautiful redhead who lived off-campus and kept trying to get me stoned the previous spring; and Tina, a rower for whom sport came first. Most recently I’d hooked up with Elissa, the girl with the L.A. boyfriend, but she’d gotten way too serious way too fast for me. I was soon single again, and happy to be so.
    Single or coupled, Holly and I reserved Friday nights for each other. Usually I would get dressed up in jeans and a collared shirt and swing by her dorm a couple of buildings away. There, we would blast Melissa and drink beer and get ready to head out. “Like the Way I Do” was our favorite song that year. As we ritually bellowed the verses, rewound, and bellowed the words again, I couldn’t help but feel that something was missing. I was having a good time casually dating, but I had yet to fall in love with anyone in California. As my sophomore spring progressed, though, the feeling of something missing was overtaken by the sense of something about to happen. Maybe it was just the mood of springtime, of new life everywhere, but I felt as if I were on the verge of a kind of discovery.
    In the weeks that followed that first car ride, I saw Jess Maxwell around campus only a couple of times in passing. By April, everyone at SDU seemed to have spring fever except me.
    Summer for me