Read Online Generation V by M. L. Brennan - Free Book Online Page A

and I counted all the things that I had to do on the long walk home. It was a warm afternoon, and I’d worked up a sweat by the time I got to my apartment. The door was unlocked, an unfortunate but not entirely unusual by-product of living with Larry, who on more than one occasion had lost his keys and just left the door itself unlocked when he went out.
    I opened the door slowly and cautiously, just in case a thief had finally taken Larry up on this repeated offer to steal all of our stuff. But instead of some crackhead bent on financing a drug addiction, I found something far more unexpected in our kitchen.
    Beth, my girlfriend—if I could even call her that anymore.
    I hadn’t seen her in almost three weeks, after a shared trip down to a film festival on the Brown University campus. It had been a great date, with lots of clandestine groping and making out intermixed with whispered comments about directorial decisions. Later, Beth got us into a festival after-party organized and hosted by the film studies department, and I’d finally begun hoping that we were getting over the whole sex-with-my-roommate business. She’d excused herself to go to the bathroom, and I was going for a second pass at the buffet table when a casual glance over my shoulder revealed what she was actually doing: giving her phone number to a doctoral candidate in his thirties who, judging by his bright red slacks, was clearly a tool. The evening had ended in one of those crappy party situations where you’re having a fight in a hallway, and everyone you know ends up walking past you. The result of the fight had not been positive—Beth had accused me of having repressively traditionalistic gender and sexual beliefs and told me to read Judith Butler. I’d ended up so much on the defensive that I actually apologized to her when I dropped her off at her apartment. Two days later she’d sent me a sixteen-page e-mail that outlined her view of what a modern and liberated relationship was supposed to look like, which boiled down to her being able to have sex with as many people as she liked.
    To give credit where it was due, it was really well argued, and the footnotes were flawless. I’d told her that I’d need some time to think about our relationship’s “new direction,” and we hadn’t seen each other since then. Mostly I’dbeen trying to come up with a better response to her e-mail than “You shouldn’t because it makes me unhappy (plus I really don’t want to catch venereal diseases).” Try as I might, I hadn’t been able to stretch that longer than three pages, and I had the distinct impression that word count mattered in this situation.
    Now Beth was unexpectedly standing in my kitchen, having apparently made use of the emergency key I’d given her. She was dressed in her usual mix of vintage finds and hippie chic, with her long black hair with its ebullient bouncing curls tied up with a pristine white scarf. I’d noticed that she almost always wore white clothing—she was obviously aware of just how good it looked against her flawless olive skin, courtesy of her Greek heritage. She was putting a used glass into the dishwasher (not one that I’d used—she’d obviously helped herself to a drink in my absence) when she spotted me. I was still standing in the doorway, finally understanding what deer experience when they see bright lights.
    Beth gave me a big, bright smile, the one that changed her face from an average level of cute to drop-dead gorgeous, and immediately rushed over to throw her arms around me and drop a very affectionate kiss on my mouth, reacquainting me with her tongue in the process.
    “Hey, sweetie!” she burbled when she came up for air.
    I was panting a little after the exuberance of her greeting. “Uh, hi,” I managed, trying to remind my sex-starved body that I wasn’t sure where the relationship was going. “This is kind of a surprise.” She was reaching Spanish Inquisition levels of unexpected,