Read Online Campus Tramp by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online Page A

it?”
    “Guess.”
    Ruth thought for a minute. “Must have been that guy you’ve been dating. What was his name—Joe Gunsway?”
    She shook her head.
    “Wasn’t that his name?”
    “That was his name, but he wasn’t the one.”
    “He wasn’t?”
    “Nope.”
    Ruth shrugged. “Better tell me then. I’m all out of guesses.”
    “It was Don Gibbs.”
    Ruth’s eyes went wide. “Honey—”
    “He’s just wonderful, Ruth. I’ve never met anybody like him before. He’s sweet and polished and—”
    Ruth took a breath. “Okay,” she said. “Maybe he’s Central Ohio’s answer to Marlon Brando. Maybe what I’ve heard about him is a lot of crap—I don’t know. But you better be careful, honey.”
    “What … what did you hear?”
    Ruth took a second or two before replying, choosing her words carefully.
    “I’ve heard,” she said at length, “that he breaks girls’ hearts for the sheer hell of it.”
    Joe turned out to be somewhat harder to tell. The big thing with him, of course, was not to tell him that she was no longer a virgin, but to clue him in on the fact that she didn’t want to date him any more. For a little while she considered just turning him down when he asked her out and letting him figure things out for himself, but this didn’t seem to be the right way to go about it. Even if Joe wasn’t the man for her, it was only fair to be decent to him. He was a nice enough guy, even if he wasn’t her stick of tea.
    She didn’t even wait for him to call her. Instead she called him at his dorm, waiting impatiently while one of the other boys in the dormitory called him to the phone. The fact that he lived with others in a dormitory while Don had an off-campus apartment to himself seemed to her to sum up the difference between the two of them.
    “Joe,” she said right away, “I’m afraid I won’t be able to see you any more.”
    There was a long, stunned silence. When he finally spoke he sounded as though someone had hit him over the head with a sledgehammer.
    “Why?” he said.
    “There’s someone else,” she said, feeling like a character in a bad movie.
    “But I don’t understand, Linda. I’ve been seeing you all the time. How could there be somebody else?”
    “There is, Joe. And I’ll be seeing him regularly from now on.”
    “But … how long have you known him?”
    “Just one day.”
    “One day? Why, I saw you yesterday, and—”
    “I saw him after you left last night, Joe.”
    Silence.
    “Linda, if you’ve only known him one day you can’t be sure he’s the right guy for you. You’re only a freshman, for God’s sake. You ought to be dating a lot of guys so you can take time and make up your mind.”
    She felt like telling him that she knew Don Gibbs better after one night than she could know him if they went together for twenty years.
    “Linda—” his voice was strained “—just tell me who it is, will you?”
    “What difference does it make?”
    “Just humor me,” she said, trying to make it sound light. “I think I’ve got a right to find out who beat my time.”
    “All right,” she said. “It’s Don Gibbs.”
    “You must be kidding!”
    She assured him that she wasn’t.
    “Linda, that guy’s poison! Why, he’ll try to … he’ll be trying to—”
    “To what?”
    He didn’t answer, and she decided that he was not only behaving like a child but making something of a pest out of himself. So she decided to get rid of him once and for all.
    “To seduce me, Joe?”
    He didn’t say anything.
    “For your information,” she told him, “he already has. And it was wonderful!”
    She put the receiver back on the hook before he could say a word.
    Time seemed to fly by at the speed of light. For all practical purposes she moved in with Don at his apartment. Much as she would have liked to pack her clothes and move in completely and permanently, the administration of Clifton College would have looked askance at such an arrangement. Instead she had