Chapter Thirteen
“W HAT THE FUCK IS WRONG with him?” Gen’s voice is so loud and shrill that I turn down the volume on my phone.
“I mean, I’ve revised old poems for college workshop before. It’s not like anyone would know.”
Gen sighs and ignores me. “That’s a bold move, man. How the fuck are you expected to interpret that?”
I lie on the floor on my fluffy rug, staring at the ceiling, holding my phone over my face so she can see me. “The problem is, when I first read that poem six years ago, I only read the first few stanzas. So I have no idea what else he’s changed since then. He changed the title. He changed the line to be a different hair color. Your strawberry hair. He could be talking about someone else.”
She guffaws. “He’s trying to not be so obvious, bless his heart. It’s still about you. I know it, you know it, William knows it, my god, even that Hazel girl probably knows it.”
I shake my head and give her a look that means Stop .
“Leigh, babe, come on. He’s making a statement. This is your sign from the universe that he wants you back.”
“He never had me. He specifically didn’t want to have me.”
“He’s older and wiser now.”
“This is the whole thing with poetry, Gen. You can never assume the speaker of the poem is the same as the poet. For all I know, this is a drastic revision he’s made to an old poem because he got caught up and couldn’t figure out what else to submit to workshop.”
“Thank you, bitch, I’ve never studied poetry before,” Gen says in a mock-grateful voice.
“Even if he does have genuine feelings for me, I’m done with his type. They think they like you and then six months later they’re bored because no, you haven’t read the latest poem du jour by the other establishment literary man he loves. I’ve been there, done that. It doesn’t end well.”
“What did Bridget say when you told her this?”
I get up from the floor and look at myself in the floor-length mirror on my closet door. “She said I should make a list of all the ‘life rules’ I’ve concocted for myself. We’re going to unpack them one by one.”
Gen whistles low. “So what I’m hearing is that Bridget doesn’t trust your read on the situation, either. I love Bridget.”
“I’m not an idiot, okay?” I go through my closet looking for something to wear to my Writing Center shift. “I acknowledge that there was a vibe, and there is a vibe, but I know better than to think it could be anything real. Look at the facts, Gen.” I raise my fingers one by one. “One, you were there at Rowan when he disparaged my work in front of everyone. At worst, he’s a prick. At best, he’s a shitty communicator. Two, I literally told him I was into him in college—a very vulnerable moment, I might add—and he said very concretely that he wasn’t interested and that we wouldn’t work. He set a boundary—shouldn’t I respect that?”
“Okay, yeah, but—”
“He’s just toying with me now. I’m good for his ego. But this isn’t real. This is Will Langford.”
Gen sighs. “You undersell yourself so hard, dude. You undersell yourself and you oversell others.”
“Let’s talk about you instead.” I’m unwilling to take this further. She’s easily persuaded and launches into a detailed account of her team’s daily stand-up, where she was once again outmatched by a colleague who stole her Instagram post idea and took the credit.
“These people suck.” I completely commiserate.
Gen shakes her head back and forth as if she’s a human blender. “Gah, I swear to god, Leigh, stay there and don’t come back to marketing, because Jesus Christ…” She trails off with a string of expletives.
“I’m gonna try, at least,” I sigh.
The 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. shift at the Writing Center is sometimes packed, sometimes dead. It depends on the weather—rain almost always means everyone will stay home; sun means business as usual.
On this Wednesday, it’s pouring. So much so that when I enter the room, my sneakers are soaked and my white shirt is nearly see-through. Umbrellas only work when there’s no wind.
Four of us work the Wednesday-evening shift: me, Will, Houston, and Susan, a British Lit PhD who never stops talking. But tonight, Susan is home with a sick kindergartner and couldn’t manage to get anyone to cover her shift in time.
Will is significantly less wet than I am, probably because he has on sturdy black wellies and a knee-length forest-green raincoat, the rubber kind where water streams off in rivulets down your body. The only unprotected part of him is his chino-clad kneecaps—and those are deep brown from moisture.
“Wow,” he says when he sees me, my hair frizzed, my bangs plastered to my face.
I hold out my mangled umbrella. “Sucks to suck.” I throw it in the corner of the room to dry. “But maybe it’s worth it if it means people won’t come in tonight.”
His eyes linger over my chest. I’m sure he can see the lace bra underneath my shirt.
“Do you want my sweater?”
“What?”
He gestures to my body. “I have a T-shirt on under this. Maybe if you don’t want to sit in a wet shirt all night?” He’s wearing a baggy cable-knit sweater; a white tee peeks out around the collar.
“Oh. I’m fine, but thank you.”
He nods and I squeeze water from the strands of my hair onto the floor. Will laughs, and it’s light and breezy.
Houston arrives and takes the first appointment of the evening. We wait, and then, out of the corner of my eye, I see a familiar figure on the other side of the glass entrance, wearing a bright-red backpack and a baseball cap. It’s Lucas, and my entire body tenses.
“Fuck.”
“What?” Will looks up again from his laptop.
“Lucas is here for his weekly peep show.” Will frowns and starts taking off his sweater.
“Take it.” He hands the sweater to me.
“Maybe it’ll be fine.”
Will presses it into my hands from across the table.
“Take it,” he says, firm.
The sweater is still warm. I nod and mumble, “Thank you,” then walk quickly to the bathroom to change, passing Lucas, who enters the UWC at the same time.
In the bathroom, I unbutton my drenched shirt in a stall and flip it over the door while I put on Will’s sweater. It hits below my hips and maybe isn’t what I’d pair with my light-blue jeans, but it’s warm and soft and smells like Will—cedar cologne, pencil shavings, some musky scent all his own. I spend way too long looking at myself in the mirror, but it’s just because I’m hoping to stall out Lucas.
No luck. When I come back, Lucas is waiting. Will stares for a few seconds at his loose sweater around me. His neutral expression looks like there’s a lot of effort behind it, every line of his lips and jaw tense. I throw my wadded-up shirt in my backpack.
“Leigh, I brought you the revision of my essay.” Lucas stands way too close as I lead him to one of the desks in the corner of the room. “I want you to read through the whole thing and fix the structure and then edit it.”
I already feel slimy with his presence so close, so I concentrate very hard on the paper he hands me, just for something to do instead of thinking about how uncomfortable I am.
Will is clearly eavesdropping because he interjects from the main table, “Leigh, you only have thirty minutes—your appointment’s coming in at six forty-five.”
I know what he’s doing and something blooms in my stomach, the sweetness of his lie.
“This is going to require an hour,” Lucas says roughly.
Will shrugs. “Sorry, man, she has an appointment. If you need another thirty minutes, I’ll be happy to take over.”
I feel some rush of warmth across my skin, a strange urge to cry. Lucas is waiting, though, and he sits next to me, pulling his chair over. For the next thirty minutes, I am just thoughts in a body, some swirl of cells meant to cater to a man.
Houston leaves early, something to do with a date. Will and I are left to close up the UWC, turning off the computers and lights and tidying the consultation desks.
We’re silent as he takes the left side of the room and I take the right. I hear the click and power-down sounds of each computer, the rearranging of pencils and pens. Once we’re done, the entire room is darkened, save for the bright overhead light. Gilman Hall is empty at 9:05 p.m.
I finger the hem of his sweater. “Thanks for this, again. Just give me a second and I’ll go change so you can take it.”
He shakes his head. “You can give it to me later. I don’t need it this second.” A small smile.
I nod. “Okay, thanks. Well. Shall we?” I walk toward the door, grabbing my backpack, Will close behind me.
“Mhmm.”
But when I get to the door, my hand hesitates on the light switch. I turn to face him.
“The thing with Lucas. You didn’t have to. But I—I appreciate it.”
He shakes his head. “It’s nothing. I wanted to.”
I nod, and we stand there for a moment in quiet, tense stillness, two chess players before a match begins. I can’t get my body to move, to turn off the lights, to walk out of this room with him. And he doesn’t move, either—instead, his eyes jump to my mouth. A low exhale—maybe his, maybe mine. And then the energy in the air shifts. Under his focused, locking gaze, I go from Leigh the rejected to Leigh with the neon-pink heart and ashy-blond hair. The high school crush.
I feel his heat close to me and I smell him in the sweater and suddenly everything around me is Will. I can’t see or think about anything else.
“Leigh.” His voice is thick. He’s maybe a foot away from me.
“Yeah?”
He lets out a deep, measured breath. “Just… just…”
And then he closes the distance between us, now two inches apart, and I’m confident he can hear my heartbeat. His fingertips, soft and tentative, settle onto my hip bones, and my brain goes dark. All my heat, all my thoughts, exist only where his hands are.
My hand goes to the center of his chest, almost a reflex, keeping just a modicum of distance between us.
His breaths are shallow and his jaw tightens and I feel hot, too hot, just—
“I’m going to kiss you, is that okay?” he says, so quiet it’s almost a whisper.
My body thrums under his gaze, almost shaking in restraint. “Yes.”
He waits a beat, either to give me time to back out or to muster up courage himself—but he moves another inch closer, his thumb gently tilting up my chin.
Whatever control I have left is shattered the second our lips meet.
He tastes clean and sweet, maybe a bit herbal from his Earl Grey tea. I fist my hands in his T-shirt and pull him roughly toward me, forcing him to back me into the door behind us.
He laughs into my mouth and his hands move to my waist, pressing almost too hard into my rib cage. I don’t mind. I want even more pressure. Don’t want even a centimeter of space between us. I grab his hips and pull them flush against mine and his teeth skate across my bottom lip in response.
Some sort of sound leaves my mouth—is it a moan? A sigh? I am nothing but where our bodies connect—the smooth skin of his bicep under my palm, the silken brush of his fingers against my throat, the jut of his thigh pressing between my legs.
That one in particular is very noticeable.
He twists his fingers in the hem of my sweater— his sweater. “I like this on you,” he says as he pulls away and begins moving his mouth over my neck, slow and purposeful. My fingernails press deep into his shoulder blades, and the hairs stand up on his arms.
He bends his knees and suddenly he’s picked me up, his arms holding my thighs. He walks me over to a desk in the corner where he sets me down. I spread my legs for him to step in between them and his hand creeps up under the sweater, over the cup of my bra. I trail a finger just an inch below the waistband of his pants until he shivers. He responds by pushing aside my bra and cupping my breast, a finger scraping over my nipple and shooting a deep feeling of want into my abdomen. It’s a push and a pull, a call and a response. It’s a rhymed couplet, this poem we’re writing.
He’s exactly how I imagined he’d be—in daydreams, early mornings alone in bed reading some filthy thing, and seeing his face instead of the male main character’s.
In high school, I wanted Will to look at me so hard that everything behind me blurred into the horizon, into nothingness. In college, I wanted him between my legs, on his knees, begging, worshipping. After college, I wanted him to flatten me into a wall, all ten fingers splayed over my rib cage, watching him lose control, forget his name.
All three versions of Will stand before me now, each intoxicating in its own way. Each a terrible taste of something I know I can’t have long-term.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he breathes into my ear, biting the lobe softly. “I do want you to take off my sweater.”
I can’t suppress a grin, but his words, his escalation of this moment into something that would surely be even better, snaps me back to reality. That choking feeling in my throat, that this will be over before it’s begun, jolts the recognition that we’re in public, in a dark room with a wall made of glass. Something fragile.
Some inconvenient metaphor.
I hesitantly peel myself away from him and take a deep breath. He looks like I’ve doused him in cold water before I’ve even spoken.
“This is a bad idea,” I begin, and watch his chest rise and fall, the dark pupils of his eyes.
“Yeah.” He nods slowly. “Probably.”
“It’s just,” and I jump down from the desk, smoothing out my, his , sweater. “You think you want this now, but it’s a temporary feeling. It’s just attraction, some sort of nostalgia for both of us.”
He stares at me blankly but I keep going, emboldened by his lack of reaction.
“You know, like sure, maybe we keep it casual, classmates-with-benefits. But there’s no way it ends well, and then what? We sit in the same poetry workshop for the next two years? I watch you end up with some girl like Hazel, have to workshop your poems about her ? We both know this isn’t a viable option.”
He cringes but doesn’t refute it, biting his lip as something flashes across his face that I can’t read. “And the other option? Keeping it… not casual?”
“I already know you’d break my heart.” It’s almost too vulnerable a statement, but he always pulls them from me, doesn’t he? It’s hard to give him anything else.
The sentence lingers in the space between us, like the all-consuming waft of cedar I inhaled pressed against his chest minutes earlier.
“I… I just…” He pauses, and I watch his confused expression coil into something entirely detached, colder. “I just got carried away. Won’t happen again.”
“Okay, yeah.” I nod, recommitting to my own statement, unsure why I feel a downward pull throughout my entire body. “I won’t, either. Not again.”
I grab my broken umbrella near the door. Will follows me out of the building in silence. I don’t know where we’re supposed to go from here.