Before the Storm by Diane Chamberlain Page A

religion like it’s the only way. So I’m
    still playing with what I want to be when I grow up.” He
    reached toward the seat next to him, his hand diving into the
    pocket of his leather jacket and coming out with a pen and his

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    insurance card. On his biceps, I saw a tattooed banner, the
    word empathy written inside it. As sexually excited as I’d felt
    five minutes ago, now I felt his fingertips touch my heart, hold
    it gently in his hand.
    “Listen,” he said, his eyes on the card. “Your car runs okay,
    right? It’s mostly cosmetic?”
    I nodded.
    “Don’t go through your insurance company, then. It’ll just
    cost you in the long run. Get an estimate and I’ll take care of it
    for you.”
    “You can’t do that!” I said. “It was my fault.”
    “It was an easy mistake to make.”
    “I was careless.” I stared at him.“And I don’t understand why
    you’re not angry about it. I almost killed you.”
    “Oh, I was angry at first. I said lots of cuss words while I
    was f lying through the air.” He smiled. “Anger’s poison,
    though. I don’t want it in me. When I changed the focus from
    how I was feeling to how you were feeling, it went away.”
    “The tattoo…” I pointed to his arm.
    “I put it there to remind me,” he said. “It’s not always that
    easy to remember.”
    He turned the insurance card over and clicked the pen.
    “I don’t even know your name,” he said.
    “Laurel Patrick.”
    “Nice name.” He wrote it down, then reached across the
    table to shake my hand. “I’m Jamie Lockwood.”
    We started going out together, to events on campus or the
    movies and once, on a picnic. I felt young with him, but never
    patronized. I was drawn to his kindness and the warmth of his

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    eyes. He told me that he was initially attracted to my looks,
    proving that he was not a completely atypical guy after all.
    “You were so pretty when you got out of your car that day,”
    he said. “Your cheeks were red and your little pointed chin
    trembled and your long black hair was kind of messy and
    sexy.” He coiled a lock of my stick-straight hair around his
    finger. “I thought the accident must have been fate.”
    Later, he said, it was my sweetness that attracted him. My
    innocence.
    We kissed often during the first couple of weeks we saw one
    another, but nothing more than that. I experienced my first
    ever orgasm with him, even though he was not touching me
    at the time. We were on his bike and he shifted into a gear that
    suddenly lit a fire between my legs. I barely knew what was
    happening. It was startling, quick and stunning. I tightened my
    arms around him as the spasms coursed through my body, and
    he patted my hands with one of his, as though he thought I
    might be afraid of how fast we were going. It would be a while
    before I told him that I would always think of his bike as my
    first lover.
    We talked about our families. I’d lived in North Carolina
    until I was twelve, when my parents died. Then I went to
    Ohio to live with my social-climbing aunt and uncle who were
    ill-prepared to take on a child of any sort, much less a grief-
    stricken preadolescent. There’d been a “Southerners are
    dumb” sort of prejudice among my classmates and a couple of
    my teachers. I fed right into that prejudice in the beginning,
    unable to focus on my studies and backsliding in every subject.
    I missed my parents and cried in bed every night until I figured
    out how to keep from thinking about them as I struggled to

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    fall asleep: I’d count backward from one thousand, picturing
    the numbers on a hillside, like the Hollywood sign. It worked.
    I started sleeping better, which led to studying better. My
    teachers had to revise their “dumb Southerner” assessment of
    me as my grades picked up. Even my aunt and uncle seemed
    surprised. When it came time to apply to colleges, though, I
    picked all Southern schools, hungry to