Chapter Fourteen
T HE NEXT FEW WEEKS ARE unbearable, each in their own lovely way.
It doesn’t help, first, that I now know what Will tastes like. How he could angle my hips where he wanted them. How responsive his body could be to the brush of my fingers against his shoulders, his chest, his thighs.
I find this new information utterly distracting right before I go to sleep, at the Writing Center during our shared shifts, and especially in poetry workshop.
In fact, workshop has become a weekly two-and-a-half-hour torture session. It’s a bad habit, I know it, but I scour every poem Will submits, looking for hints that they’re about me. It’s so pathetic I can barely tell Gen, even though of course I do.
The first workshop after the kiss, Will’s poem is about a Christmas party gone awry, the speaker having trouble with his wife, shards of broken glass ornaments piercing his knees. The wife is moody and blond and angry and has nothing to do with me, unfortunately.
The second workshop after the kiss, Will submits a poem called “On a Wednesday, My Mother Wears All Black.” I go through all the physical descriptions of the mother— water-logged hazel eyes, mauve lipstick, mole-speckled —to see if any of them could be me. None of them are.
“You’re sick,” Gen says, her whole body cackling over our video chat. “They’re about his mom , Leigh. You’re out here trying to see if he’s sexualizing you in a poem about his mother .”
“I’m going to hell,” I agree.
The third workshop after the kiss, Will’s poem takes place in some field in Pennsylvania where the speaker is drunk or high, contemplating his relationship with his father. It’s the exact kind of poetry you’d expect from a straight white male poet in an MFA workshop, and I hate how my classmates coo over it, how I can barely understand it.
My brain does snag, however, on the word lavender , which reminds me of I dream of your wrist, / and I choke in lavender . Here, Will uses it to describe the speaker’s drunkenness. My shampoo is lavender-scented. But so are a million other things.
I listen to “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon as a punishment that week, over and over, the chorus a reprimand.
The saving grace is that Writing Center sessions with Lucas, when Will is there, feel significantly better. Every time Lucas leans over my arm, or pushes my hand off his paper, or holds me longer than his appointment time allows for, I feel Will watching, his eyes protective even if he’s across the room. It’s hard to imagine him winning in a physical altercation against the bigger, more chaotic Lucas, but something makes me feel like he’d still do whatever he needed to kick Lucas’s ass if Lucas crossed a line.
Today, Lucas is particularly a lot . His latest history essay needs serious work. Even though he’s on the lacrosse team, he’s clearly not here on a scholarship. He’s smart enough but long-winded in his sentences, and massive parts of one section need to be cut. The problem is, since I’m not an expert in eighteenth-century Britain, I have to do a lot of question asking to coax out what should stay and what should go.
The other problem is that he interprets my questions as interest. In him.
“Great question, Leigh. The empire collapsed because—” My consciousness drifts off as the words get more specific.
“Leigh?”
I jolt back into reality. “Sorry, it’s just a bit hard for me to follow. Never been much of a history buff.” I send back a small smile.
“No, I was wondering what you were doing this weekend, actually.”
As he says this, Will walks over in our direction near the bookshelf, taking a pamphlet about commas for his own session. I can tell he wants to linger near me and Lucas by how he pretends to look through the pamphlet first, before taking it over to his student.
“Oh, I’m not sure.” My throat tightens. “We have an MFA party, I think.”
“Let me know if you end up being free,” Lucas says, his shoulders wide and imposing. “I’d like to get to know you outside of… this.” He gestures to the paper we’re working on.
I smile in a way that I hope reads as noncommittal. I don’t know why I can’t just say no to him in the moment.
Will walks briskly past us. I’m sure he heard this exchange.
“So sorry.” Thalia taps me on the shoulder. “Your two p.m. appointment is here.”
Lucas packs up his notes and his eyes linger on my face as we say goodbye. Across the room, Will’s deep at work with his own student, his body positioned away from me so I can’t see his face or profile.
Does he think about the fact that three weeks ago his tongue was in my mouth? Does it keep him up at night what my thighs felt like in his hands, on the same desk he’s sitting at now?
Ultimately, I know it doesn’t matter. This is what’s best for both of us.
Luckily, I didn’t have to lie to Lucas at all. Saturday turns out to be a beloved MFA tradition—the annual Halloween party. Which grad students love just as much as preschoolers do, apparently.
Penelope is hosting, which means the night will be high on both booze and production value. She believes all parties should have themes and sub-themes and occasionally sub-sub-themes, and this year is no exception.
The theme? Halloween. The sub-theme? Edgar Allan Poe. The sub-sub-theme? “EMERGENCY!”
“What does that even mean?” I’d asked her after workshop two days ago.
She replied with a glint in her eye, “It means the party is an emergency. I don’t care what other plans you have, I don’t care that I only decided to host three days before and forgot to tell everyone, I don’t care if you don’t have a costume. We’re having this party because we must .”
Can’t argue with that logic.
When Kacey and I knock on the door of Penelope’s apartment, she opens within three seconds and ushers us in. We’re confronted immediately with dim mood lighting, courtesy of hanging floating (battery-operated) candles, a raven garland around the kitchen table, and a NEVERMORE flag arranged over the couch. At a bar cart in the middle of the room, she’s prepared plastic martini glasses rolled in black and red sugar. The speaker is blasting retro spooky music, and a crowd of MFAers is already congregating in the kitchen.
Penelope herself is wearing some long black maxi dress that looks like it came from Anthropologie and a (presumably) raven-inspired mask that covers half of her face. “Etsy,” she says when I compliment it.
Kacey and I were relatively bewildered at how to dress for this, so we went with the tried-and-true “just look hot” school of thought for Halloween. She’s in a black faux-leather mini dress and a black veil that looks like it has spiders on it, and I’m wearing a black velvet dress with fishnet tights and a really good smoky eye. We’re also carrying tons of cheap wine to make up for the lack of theme.
“Look who’s here.” August glides over. He’s in a full black suit with a white scarf tied around his neck, clearly Poe-inspired, and he’s mussed up his blond hair to look wild.
“The man of the hour.” Kacey runs her hand down his arm. “Nice look.”
I leave them to their flirting and pour a giant margarita into one of the glasses with black sugar around the rim. I want to be tipsy enough to relax but not so drunk that I start making bad decisions, especially when Will comes. I need to avoid being alone with him because I no longer trust myself to listen to my mind over my body.
It’s all the more convenient, then, when he enters the apartment with a woman I don’t recognize.
Wait. What?
She’s pretty. Long brown hair, red lipstick, black nail polish. She’s lanky, almost as tall as Will, and she looks expensive; I don’t know how else to put it. Wide-leg jeans that fit her perfectly, an oversize black silk button-down. She’s carrying a bottle of gin, because, of course.
She shakes hands with Penelope, and when Will leans in to say something to her, he puts his hand on her back before walking past me to the kitchen. When he does it, I feel the absence of his hand on mine. Because now I know how that feels—warm and firm and safe.
Kacey appears in front of me, holding a cup of wine. “Did William bring a date ?”
I respond with a gulp of my poorly composed margarita, feeling the grainy black sugar against my lips.
Will and his date (?) walk up to us just as I swallow. He’s wearing black pants and a white billowy shirt and he looks like a nineteenth-century poet, which is to say, he looks extremely attractive.
“This is Aria,” he says, and the brunette smiles and holds out her hand to shake mine, then Kacey’s. “She’s a third-year PhD in art history.”
Sounds about right. I guess it’s not surprising he’s pursuing a hot thirty-year-old with a humanities PhD. I stopped the kiss, so this is what I get. This is how it should be, anyway.
“Oh, cool!” I flash a bright smile to ignore the sinking feeling in my stomach. “Nice to meet you. So how’d you guys meet?”
Will’s eyes trail to my mouth and then to my eyes. For once, I don’t break eye contact.
“The Writing Center, actually,” Aria chimes in, her voice velvety. “William’s helping me with my dissertation.”
“What’s your dissertation on?” Kacey asks.
“I’m looking at twentieth-century women’s domestic arts and how they’ve influenced New England identity today. I guess it must sound really boring, but yeah… it’s been a fun few years so far,” she says with a self-deprecating chuckle.
“Wow, impressive.” I nod more than is probably necessary and take another slow sip of my drink. “Fun of you to come!”
I would very much like for this interaction to end but Kacey, oblivious, starts peppering Aria with questions about her PhD timeline (three years to go), where she lives (a ten-minute walk away), and where she went to undergrad (Brown, of course). Meanwhile, Will stares at her and nods at all the right moments, mirroring her smiles. I look down at our feet and see that he’s oriented his to point slightly in her direction, which I once read on wikiHow is a sign that someone likes you.
Aria answers more of Kacey’s questions and smiles and takes the cup of wine Will’s poured for her. But then Kacey gets a look at my face and reaches to rub her thumb over my lips.
“You’ve got black stains all over you from that sugar,” she laughs, and I flush red. Not the sexy image I want to portray right now.
“Excuse me, I’m just going to go to the bathroom.” I leave the group to fix my mouth.
When I emerge, my lips re-glossed and ready, Will is leaning next to the door.
“Creepy, do you always just follow me when I go to the bathroom?” I frown.
“You look good.” I watch his eyes sweep over my body, lingering on my fishnet legs.
“Your date looks good.”
The smile dissolves from his face. He moves toward me a few inches and I take a step back to accommodate him out of reflex, the wall hard against me. He’s so close and yet so careful not to touch me whatsoever. I have to tilt my chin up to meet his eyes.
“She’s just a friend.”
“It’s important in graduate school to establish a support system, so kudos to you.”
He takes a half step back, and I force myself to breathe.
“A month ago, you rejected me.” His voice is measured, in control, quiet. He’s just stating facts, and I know it.
The heat of the tequila burns in my belly. “And at Middlebury, you rejected me .”
He looks down at me, and something passes over his face. Like he’s solved a difficult math equation, like he’s had an epiphany.
“Ah, I see,” he says, voice low and rough. “So we’re even.”
“Stop.” The din of the living room music bleeds into the hallway so my words come out like smoke in wind. “You may think you know what my next move is, and you probably do. But I know your next move, too. Because for whatever reason, and I’m not sure what it is, you’re going to stop this thing in its tracks if I don’t. Excuse me for wanting to protect myself from whatever your current whims are.”
His expression hardens, the long line of his lips a stone.
“I need another drink.” I push past him before he can respond, colliding with his shoulder. Maybe on purpose.