Read Online One Degree of Separation by Karin Kallmaker - Free Book Online

up, she buried her face in the collie’s fur and cried in pain.
    She was every bit the lonely, dried-up, frustrated, pathetic nobody Robyn had said she was.

4
    Friday morning the hot spell eased. Liddy lounged in bed, reading and taking notes on the laptop she’d bought with the advance against expenses that writer Dana Moon had given her.
    Robyn had said she was useless, but she was going to prove the bitch wrong. And prove her parents wrong, too, and several professors, as well as Miss Hoagie, her third-grade teacher, who had written, “Liddy’s work would be excellent if she finished it.” She had an agreement with Dana Moon to provide no more than 400 pages about the inner workings of a teaching hospital and the obstacles a female doctor would face upon becoming its chief admin-istrator. Liddy was starting with the more interesting tangent of women in medicine. Somewhere along the way she would get inside the hospital, preferably without becoming a patient.
    Her mother hadn’t wanted to believe in the job. “How can anyone want to pay so much for what will take you just a couple of months to do?”
    “I think she understands that boiling down all that information to four hundred pages is where the real work is. Anyone can gather up facts.” She had shrugged. “Professor Haughton recommended me.” The letter of recommendation was one of the high points of Liddy’s varied and lengthy collegiate career. Though her ambitions as a student had wandered from English to public administration, sociology to physical education, she’d managed to impress more than one instructor across disciplines with her ability to quickly process vast quantities of information and regurgitate it in an organized, succinct fashion. She’d gone to college to learn, not to become.
    Robyn Vaughn, one-time visiting lecturer at Cal in women’s studies, had said she liked Liddy’s bullet points. She’d said it again later that evening, with that cheap sexy laugh, while caressing Liddy’s nipples. They’d been standing at the end of an aisle in the used bookstore when Robyn had surrounded Liddy with that perfume. How must she have looked for Robyn to have realized she could touch her that way within minutes of meeting outside class? The scent’s effect on her had always been Pavlovian. She smelled it, she got wet.
    “Fuck and fuck it, that’s enough of that.” Liddy set the laptop to one side before she gave into the temptation to hurl it against a wall.
    No more thinking about Robyn. She was done with that.
    “A dojo, that’s what you need. Find a class, a sparring partner. Though I pity my partner in this mood.”
    She was halfway through her shower when she realized she was talking to herself. Okay, she needed to get out.
    The Golden Dragon Martial Arts Academy looked prosperous enough. Although the mats and equipment had a well-used look, none of them were threadbare, which was encouraging. The only people in martial arts who made real money at it were in the movies, but good instructors, in her experience, had no trouble keeping enough students to provide the basic necessities.
    “I’m only here for the summer, and I’m worried I’ll get out of shape,” she concluded, after stating her current rank and past studies for the benefit of the man seated at the small desk.
    It wasn’t until the white-clad instructor stood up that she saw the red and black belt he wore. She had not expected to find someone of that rank in the middle of nowhere. What next, a bona fide red belt in Iowa fucking City? She’d yet to meet one in Berkeley.
    Sensei Kerry looked her up and down. “Did you want to stay in shape or begin your progress from brown to black?”
    “Stay in shape,” Liddy admitted. “I’m not certain it’s in the cards for me to be a black belt.”
    He smiled in the way of every sensei she had ever met, male or female. “It’s not a matter of chance—”
    “Chance is an excuse for lack of focus, I know.” She