Jennifer Greene - Ain’t Misbehaving

Stix had grinned at her just that beguilingly when she was sixteen. He’d been her first date. The traditional boy next door-give or take a few houses. He’d taught her a lot about kisses, most of which was hard earned. Since he was six foot six and she was five foot four, any physical contact had been hard earned, and not, they’d discovered, worth all the trouble. Stix had moved on to taller women, about nine thousand of them, by Kay’s last count, but he popped over regularly and made himself at home.

Lots of people did that to her, actually. She’d never figured out if it was just that kind of neighborhood or if there was an invisible sign on her door that said Endless Open House. She would have missed her family a great deal more if it hadn’t been for her friends, and Stix, unquestionably, was a special friend.

Choosing a cherry-filled doughnut, she plopped down on the kitchen chair across from him and glanced disapprovingly at his feet on the table.

The cowboy boots obediently dropped to the floor.

“You’ve got to stop using this house as a second home,” she remarked idly.

“Can’t understand you.”

With a grin, she swallowed her mouthful of doughnut and repeated the comment, adding, “People are going to think you live here. This is your third visit this week. You do still have a home of your own?”

“Certainly. That’s the place I keep my dirty laundry.”

Kay sighed. “So who’re you going out with tonight?”

“Samantha.”

“Heavens, that’s lasted two months now. Don’t tell me you’ve finally convinced someone you’re worth keeping?”

They bantered over two more doughnuts, after which Stix hinted tactfully that he was honestly hungry. Shaking her head resignedly, she fed him four peanut-butter sandwiches. She felt obliged to feed him. If Samantha ever discovered how much food he consumed, Kay would never have him off her hands.

It was a lazy kind of Saturday afternoon. Stix roused himself long enough to take a wrench to her leaky faucet, then settled in front of the TV set to watch a football game while she got out a dust cloth. The next time she looked, he’d been joined by Sandra, a teenager from across the street who claimed she would have been forced to clean the garage with her family if she hadn’t escaped.

Kay threw them both out before dinner, to allow herself time to get ready for her date. Just a movie and drink afterward, with Tim, a teacher at the high school. They had a reasonably good time, and she was home, kissed at the door and in bed by midnight.

The entire day she’d had Mitch on her mind. He wasn’t an obsession, but he was there, like a dream one couldn’t forget when one woke up, like the lingering taste of champagne after the glass was long empty.

She kept remembering his gentleness with Peter, so much in contrast to the hard lines of his face. She kept remembering his aloofness when she’d tried to talk to him, so much in contrast with the blazing warmth of his eyes when he looked at her. His simple announcement out of the blue that he was going to kiss her-but his kiss hadn’t been at all simple…

Impatiently, she switched the light back on, fluffed the pillow under her head and reached for a book. The old torch song “Stormy Weather” kept crooning in the back of her mind, nostalgic and moody and…disgustingly romantic. She flipped impatiently through her newest book on trivia.

The weather had been stormy, all right. So why had she had this warm glow inside her ever since Mitch had kissed her in the parking lot?

“Don’t give me that. Every guy knows that half the time when a girl says no, she means yes,” Jeff said disgustedly. “If a guy didn’t push it a little once in a while, he’d never get anywhere.”

A chorus of foot-stomping approval-entirely male-erupted from the back of the classroom. “I’m glad you said that,” Kay said cheerfully. “That myth has been kicked around for generations. It’s another way of saying that a girl just wants to be coaxed. Is that what you mean, guys?”

A half dozen “right ons” were pelted in her direction. Kay nodded as if pleased. The girls were staring at her as if she’d suddenly turned into Benedict Arnold. Hands were waving like flags of protest. Kay motioned them down; her attention, for the moment, was directed solely toward the males in the class.

“There’s just one problem with that,” she said regretfully. “When you coax people into doing something sexual that they’re not sure about, you’re in a position to hurt them very badly. Maybe in a way that will affect the rest of their lives.” She slid off the desk, aware that a few of the smiles in the back of the room were suddenly fading. In the silence that followed, she said softly, “Do you really want to be responsible for that? Jeff, can’t you understand what it’s like to be just plain scared?”

“Hey, wait a minute. You think a guy isn’t scared?”

“Very.” Kay agreed quietly. “Maybe more than most of you want to admit. Men often have a hard time acknowledging vulnerability, but that’s exactly why, when either partner says even a tentative no, the other partner must honor it. Now, let’s talk about some more of the sexual myths that get passed around. One of them is the notion that a girl means yes when she says no. Another is that a man can’t stop after he reaches a certain point. Now, what are some other myths?”

Mitch shifted in the open doorway, unseen, unnoticed. Kay played her class as if it were a symphony orchestra-a noisy clamor of basses, short silences, then the softer timbre of her voice making points that forced them to think.

Sex education had definitely changed since he was in school. At fifteen, he could well have been one of the boys in the back of the class-belligerent, wise-cracking, his jeans too tight, and just the first word on the subject of sex enough to raise his hormone level to the combustion point.

But in those days, sex education had consisted of the football coach belting out a few gruff words on the subject. And Coach had looked nothing like Kay.

She wore an open-weaved violet sweater, with sort of puffed sleeves and a rounded neckline. The clingy fabric skimmed gently over her slim figure, softly revealing the pert swell of her breasts. Her straight skirt, a plaid in muted jewel tones-violet and sapphire and topaz-not only hugged her hips but showed off her legs. And he’d been right about her hair. She did wear it simply brushed back, swirling around her shoulders whenever she moved.

Her skirt hiked up as she pinned two magazine photographs above the blackboard. “Sexual stereotypes in ads,” she announced. “One for makeup and the other for a motorcycle. You see dozens of ads every day, and each one tries to tell you what the Ideal Man or Ideal Woman in our culture is supposed to look like. Steven, do you think the girl in this ad is good-looking?”

“You better believe it,” hooted the boy from the back of the room. Two girls turned around to scowl at him.

“Is she sexy?” Kay asked.

There was a chorus of male agreement.

“She doesn’t have a single flaw,” Kay agreed. “Heck, she doesn’t even have a pore. The camera makes us believe she’s absolutely perfect. And the ad makes us believe that perfection is the goal for a woman. But it’s pretty easy to feel self-conscious, intimidated, even inadequate comparing oneself to that kind of role model. So…are these ads valid? Mark, answer a question for me. Is that your standard? When you feel attracted to a girl, is that what first appeals to you-how close to a perfect beauty she is?”

Finally, to Kay’s relief, they began to talk about their sexual feelings. For a while, she thought the boys in the back of the room were going to do nothing but smirk and wisecrack. For eleventh graders, some of them were remarkably immature.