Read Cast of Shadows - v4 for Free Online

spongy and sticky to Anna Kat’s nervous hands, but she remembered how much like concrete it had seemed against her back during a karate elective her freshman year. When the mats were up like this, the wrestling room was floored with thin, sandpapery carpet, and AK removed her right shoe and scratched her toes against it through her sock. It wasn’t meant as an advance, necessarily, but in a few seconds the boy had kicked off his left Nike and pinned her shin against the curve of the mat with his calf.
    He leaned over and kissed her and she kissed him back, draping an arm over his shoulder and touching the wet fade of his sweaty crew cut. In an instant, he had a hand on her breast.
    “Sam,” she said, pulling away.
    “Hmmph,” he said, reattaching his lips to hers.
    “Sam,” she said, disengaging again. “Let’s see a movie tomorrow.”
    “Like a date.” It was a clarification more than a question.
    “No,” she said. “Just… just
something
.”
    Sam slid his hand up the inside of her thigh and snapped the elastic of her panties with his thumb. “This isn’t something?”
    She pushed his arm away and laughed. “It is. It’s just weird.”
    “Dating is complicated, AK,” Sam said. “This is
un
.”
    “Un?”
    “Complicated.” He looked for a smile and didn’t get one. “Look, you go to the movies or even Starbucks together and people are talking. You’re seeing Daniel—”
    “Sort of.”
    “You’re sort of seeing Daniel. I’m seeing Chrissy—”
    “And Tanya. And Sue.”
    “You know about them?”
    “What’s the matter? More complicated than you thought?”
    “Nah.” He looked at his feet. “Is that what this is about? I mess around with other girls?”
    “No.” She shook her head. That wasn’t it. The problem she didn’t want to admit to was guilt. She felt a bit used. She felt a bit like a user. No one was forcing her to meet Sam, of course. She liked being with him. They did things together that seemed grown-up. They did things together that frightened her. Things that excited her.
That
was the problem. She liked the way he could thrill her, the dangerous feeling she had when they were together. When she thought about it, though, she didn’t much like
him
. Although he was intelligent, Sam could be cruel to people he didn’t like, and he treated his friends only marginally better. To get laughs he said mean things to people’s faces (instead of following the widely accepted high school policy that called for saying mean things behind people’s backs). He was indifferent and selfish and cynical, and while these things made him cool and even a kind of popular, that didn’t mean that anybody really liked him. If they were dating, she would have to defend him, and Anna Kat didn’t know how she would do that.
    Sam’s hand was inside her shirt and flat against her bare back, pushing her toward him. They were sweaty and gritty and aroused. Sam’s teeth closed around her right earring and pulled just the right amount too hard. “Did you lock the door?” he whispered.
    “No… ,” she said, as if an apology were coming.
    “Good,” Sam said, and he pulled her down on top of him in the narrow space between the rolled-up mat and the wall.
    In her locker, several walls and halls away, Anna Kat’s cell phone was ringing.
     
— 7 —
     
    There was no place she knew where Dr. Joan Burton felt more useless than in a hospital emergency waiting room. In a building filled with sick people, sick people she had been trained to help, she could do nothing but sit and do triage helplessly in her head. That boy, twelve or so, has a broken finger. The young man — newly minted from college, she suspected — folded into a chair across from the television like a passenger waiting for his plane to crash, possibly appendicitis. An older woman, escorted irritably by a husband of too many years, most likely psychosomatic something or other; she becomes ill to force him to pay attention to