You Between the Lines

Chapter Twenty-Three

W E LIE IN BED AFTER, naked, limbs entangled, neither of us wanting to fall asleep. I finally force myself out of Will’s arms to shower and when I return, he’s reading in bed, his eyes drowsy.

“Hi.” I move back toward him. I’m in underwear and one of his giant old T-shirts. He’s in boxers now, too, and he does a long, feline stretch that causes his ankles to dangle off the bed.

I nuzzle into him, his arm looped around my shoulders, my head perched on his chest, listening to his steady breathing.

“Leigh.”

“Mhmm?”

“We should’ve done this way earlier.”

I laugh into his chest, but there’s a pang of something inside me, too. The same feeling I felt at Middlebury, standing outside with him after confessing my feelings, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It’s easier to ignore it.

We drift off, and I reluctantly disentangle myself from his overwhelming body heat. Early the next morning, he rectifies it by pulling me into his chest, his hand skimming the swell of my hip, twisting my shirt in his hand.

“Sleep well?” he murmurs against the back of my neck.

“Mhmm.”

He rises to heat the kettle to make us tea, his standard Earl Grey, and brings the steaming mugs into bed. We prop the pillows against the headboard and take slow sips. It scares me how normal this already feels, how comfortable and domestic we could be.

My phone buzzes, and my dad’s face lights up on the screen. I sigh into Will’s shoulder.

“Do you have to take it?”

“Yes, because if I don’t, the Perrin Fire Department will be here in an hour to confirm I’m alive. He’s done it before, and he’ll do it again.”

Will laughs as I roll out of bed and walk to the bathroom for privacy. I answer the phone on its last ring.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hey, honey. Did I wake you?”

“No, no, I was just reading in bed.” In the mirror, I notice a faint hickey along my collarbone.

“I wanted to ask when your reading was. I’m just planning my calendar for the next month, and I want to make sure we can go.”

“Who’s we ?”

He laughs as if I’ve made a joke. “Me and your mother, of course.”

“Like together ?”

“Yes! We want to come down together. Counseling’s been good for us. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like everything’s solved, but we’re on a good trajectory now. I’ll spare you the details—Mom said you didn’t want to hear them—but yes, we’ll be traveling together and we both want nothing more than to see our favorite daughter blow everyone away with her genius.”

Even before AWP, I’d been dreading the First-Year Reading Series, which is happening two weeks from now. Now that I know I’m not a front-runner for the fellowship, it feels like too much is riding on that one single night. But for my parents to be there together, on their way to working things out? It’s the friendly audience I desperately need.

I give him the date and Dad says he’ll—they’ll—be there. By the time he hangs up, I’m art-directing the family photo we’ll take at the end of the reading. Them flanking me on either side, color-coordinated and grinning. A Leigh sandwich.

I downright skip back into Will’s bedroom.

“Do you want to go to the farmers market with me?” he asks from bed. My face must freeze up because he continues. “I go most Saturday mornings. They have a really nice cheese booth and—”

As he carries on naming the local farms he usually buys from, the promise of the day twists around my windpipe. It sounds delightful and sweet and couple-y and that’s, somehow, what makes it feel like a danger zone. Yes, clearly we’ve begun the casual sleeping-together phase of our… friendship… but I’m still trying to reconcile the competing parts of my body and brain. Going to farmers markets together is what bona fide defined-the-relationship couples do. Which we are not. And cannot be. I still haven’t gotten over how quickly he pulled back after Halloween, how firmly he broke it off (again) at Thanksgiving. My body’s been taught that this isn’t a sure thing, that every step forward comes with two steps back, no matter how much either of us wants the other.

I’m not sure if he senses my hesitation or realizes for himself what a dangerous game we’re playing, but he backtracks. “Of course, we just got back from a trip and I totally understand if you need to unpack and relax—”

And because, unfortunately, I am me, I interject, “No, let’s go. I, uh, am out of… cucumbers.” Naming, like an idiot, the first vegetable I can think of. “And I needed to go to the grocery store anyway. So sure, I can come with you to the market instead. It’s really good for the environment if we combine our errand trips together. Less, uh, driving.”

“But,” Will pauses, sounding worried, “cucumbers aren’t in season. So the farmers market won’t have them. If you need them, I can drive you to the store after…?”

“Oh, wait, sorry, I didn’t mean cucumber. I meant, uh, squash ?”

Will nods. “Yes, great, they will have a lot of squash.”

“Excellent!” I clap my hands together. “Let’s tackle those errands!”

Our very casual, just-classmates Saturday goes like this:

Will drives me back to my apartment to set down my duffel bag and change clothes. He waits in the car while I put on an outfit that I calculate to be equal parts charming and casual.

At the farmers market, I watch Will buy goat cheese, Swiss chard, and honey, while he attempts to help me sort through all the squash by asking what I plan on making with it. I lie about a salad and so we go with butternut.

He takes me to the grocery store for cucumber anyway because he refuses to believe I don’t actually need it.

We end up back at his place, unwilling to separate after twenty-four hours together, and decide we can sit together writing.

Out of the corner of my eye, curled up on his couch with my computer on my lap, I watch him at the table. His brows are furrowed, making sharp creases that stay even when he releases them. He types a sentence, then closes his eyes as if in pain. I hear the tap-tap-tap-tap of the backspace key.

He carries on like that for a while. A flurry of keys, the angry backspace. A symphony only a stressed-out writer could understand.

My eyes catch on his Rowan sweatshirt again, visible through the open doors of his closet. I close my eyes and let my mind fill with images. Just something to work with on a page. I begin typing phrases in a Word doc.

Chapped lips

Blazer boys

Plaid skirt girls

The sounds of a pep rally

It’s not much. My mind flits to the possibility of writing in the voice of Rory Gilmore. A poem taking place in high school. Coming of age.

The sounds of a pep rally

Cheerleaders

Loud cheering

Cracked-voice cheers

Yes, that one. Nice. Specific. I like the prickliness of crah and ch in my mouth, how it conveys being on the edge of adulthood. I start moving phrases around, compiling couplets that sound like this:

She inhales root beer Chapstick

to cracked-voice cheers

“I think it’s illegal to look that happy when you’re writing a poem.”

I’m broken out of my reverie by Will’s voice, light and loose.

“This is hardly a poem. I’m just jotting down random things. Maybe it’ll become a poem.”

He stands up from his chair and walks behind the couch, close, his heat against my shoulder blades.

I lower my screen. “It’s too embarrassing. You can see the finished thing in workshop at some point.”

His mouth is on my neck when he says, “Show me.”

“There’s nothing to see. It’s just the inside of my brain. I’m blabbering on the page.”

“The inside of your brain is not nothing .” His hand touches the screen and I comply, releasing my grip and letting him see.

It’s not much. Just couplets that don’t fit together yet.

His hands are on either side of me, caging me in from behind, and he takes the cursor and highlights a few in the middle.

She inhales root beer Chapstick

to cracked-voice cheers

off the lacrosse captain, smirking

like the rest of the needy

blazer boys. She just wants

to be friends

“This is interesting.” He rests his chin on top of my head. I feel the vibration of his voice with every word. “I like the darkness here, even though none of the words, at face value, are dark. It’s all between the lines, which is compelling. Feels like something hiding underneath. Maybe something darker. But also maybe something brighter, depending on where you want to go with it.”

I tilt my head up to face him. “You’re good at that. At figuring out what I’m doing before I even know. You’re always the best commenter in workshop.”

He releases my computer and walks back to the table. “I don’t know about that.”

“You are. Everyone else is so prescriptive. They want to, like, impose what they would do to a poem. You provide options. You’re like the perfect reader.”

The candle’s light dances in the reflection off his glasses. His face droops when he turns to look at his own work.

“What are you writing about?” I ask.

“An elegy. But it’s shit. Every word I come up with looks wrong on the page. Why do we do this to ourselves? Poetry?” He takes his glasses off and puts his hands over his temples.

Now it’s my turn to stand up. I close the screen of his laptop and sit on his lap.

“We do it because we love it,” I whisper.

He captures my lips in a kiss, then pulls back, his finger tracing my cheek until I open my eyes.

“Write your poem in your own voice. Don’t do a fictional character this time.”

My arms tense around his shoulders. “I’ll leave that to the pros.”

He chuckles and stands up, carefully depositing me on the floor. He goes to take a book off his bookshelf and hands it to me.

“‘ Death Is a Peach We Refuse to Eat .’” I read aloud the title of the slim poetry collection. “Sounds like a feel-good book for the bedside table.”

“I think you’d like it. Every poem is like a meditation on the poet’s phobias. Death, spiders, social events, whatever. He’s into wordplay like you and he does a lot of modern pop-culture references, but it still has this vulnerable side that’s really moving.”

I flip to the back. The author photo is of a scraggly-haired man with gaunt cheeks and thick eyebrows, his lips thin and straight, not a smile in sight. I read his bio, and it’s filled with the kind of keywords that would make Hazel’s mouth water. Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Stegner fellow at Stanford University, previously seen in Kenyon Review , American Poetry Review , and on and on. I know from his face that this man would’ve rather gagged himself with a spoon than gone to a Phi Psi party in neon polyester—unironically or ironically.

“Sounds interesting.” I’m sure to Will it’s a good book. But to me, it looks like the kind of poetry that makes me feel dumb. Totally inaccessible, just men complaining about man things—

“Go ahead—you take it.”

“What?”

“I really think you’ll like it,” he says again, and it’s with such earnestness that I already know my response. “And then hey, we can discuss.” He smiles, running his hand across my back.

“Yeah, okay.” I offer a smile and set the book next to my purse. “Thanks.”

He scoops me back into his arms and we curl up on the couch together.

“Have you picked poems for the reading series?” he asks.

“I have a few options. Guess I still have some time. Have you? Decided?”

“Yeah.” He looks off into the distance instead of at me. “They’re two of the ones I submitted. For the fellowship.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s funny you think you’re going to get that.” I grin, and for a second, I almost forget Daniel’s words in my head. Will makes it so easy to forget.

He chuckles, then pulls me into his chest. “I usually get what I want.” His voice, low and gravelly, in my ear, causes my throat to dry.

“Oh, yeah? I seem to remember you once saying that historically that hasn’t been the case.”

“I’ve turned over a new leaf.”

“We’ll see.” I shrug him off, a transparent ploy to make him do what he does next.

He laughs and sharply draws me back into him. “Yeah, we will.”

And in the dimming light of late afternoon, he shows me—how it feels, looks, tastes—when he gets what he wants.

We get into a routine. Sometimes, we go to my place, but more often his. I like all his books, how the entire place smells like him, how he cooks for me, and I feel like I’ve been plucked from my old, boring existence into a new role as his muse.

“Want to go to the store? I was thinking salmon for dinner,” he says one night, as if I’ve been his wife for ten years. It’s a thought that’s both scary and delicious, the way it’s taken root in my stomach like a weed.

I’m horizontal on his couch, my legs leaning off the arm, my laptop on my chest. None of the poems I’ve tentatively decided on for the reading series feel like they’re working anymore. I stare at a Word doc of “Taylor Swift Sleeps with Someone New for the First Time,” and the stream of couplets mocks me in its refusal to sound exactly how I want it to in my head. I’ve been tinkering with the same three stanzas for the last ten minutes. This followed, of course, twenty silent minutes spent reading old Hazel poems on my phone, trying to decipher what Paul and Daniel see in her over me—and how I can replicate it in my own work.

Here is where I start to build: lips trail

kisses like a crescendo saved for later, like tracing

zig-zags on a steamed-up car’s misty window

and no, not yet as he tugs the hem of my dress

as I search for a chorus in his freckles

“Yes… let’s,” I murmur. I delete the last line of the poem with a huff and an eyeroll that’s solely for myself. Hazel would never work with this subject matter, to start.

Will’s in front of me now, kneeling next to the couch so we’re at eye level. “Keep writing.” He presses a light kiss to my temple. “I’ll go, you stay.”

“You sure?” I turn my head to face him. “I can be done soon.”

He shakes his head and returns to his full height. “You’re in the zone. Keep going and I’ll be back in like forty-five.”

“Thank you.” I run my hand up his thigh as he stands over me.

When he’s gone, I put my laptop to the side and stand up to stretch my legs. No good comes from staring at one poem for too long.

I pace the room, walk to his desk in the far right corner, see papers from workshop scattered over every inch. I think back to my Taylor Swift poem as I run my fingers over his words.

Forget Hazel. What would Will do?

Because whatever he’s doing is working. Paul loves him, Daniel loves him, Erica’s about to love him. Is it just our difference in subject matter? Is it because his poems deal with death, the ultimate obsession of all the great male poets before him? Or is there something happening on the line level—some facility with language he and Hazel have that’s out of my grasp?

I pick up one of the poems on top, from workshop a month ago: “The Weekend Wake.” It’s a thin block stanza now covered in Will’s obsessive notes, taken during class as we all talked about it. He managed to create a subtle internal rhyme that appears as a call-and-response in every other line, a faint heartbeat that fades as the poem ends.

It’s the kind of finesse I can’t even dream of.

I re-read two, three more of his pieces. They’re better now than when I first saw them in workshop. They’ve had a chance to fester under my skin.

I walk back to the couch, flop down, and re-open my laptop, scanning my Taylor poem with fresh eyes. The detail, the aural satisfaction of words that ring into each other like wind chimes in rain—I have that, too. Just because two old guys love Will’s poems doesn’t mean Erica will. And doesn’t Erica ultimately pick who she works with? Daniel and Paul’s input surely matters, but I can’t imagine they can override her in this decision.

It feels like a revelation. Like I could still be in the running. Who’s to say next week’s reading can’t change things? Who knows what could happen when Erica hears my words out loud?

More optimistic now, I go back to Will’s desk to arrange his poems as I found them. My eyes snag on a folder partially hidden under the mess. OLD POEMS , a Post-it note reads in his precise cursive, stuck to the front.

It’s hardly snooping. I’m confident he’d show me, though bashfully, if I asked. Plus, a part of me wants to find the original version of “In a Cleveland Parking Lot, I Break Down,” the one he tore out of my grasp at Middlebury. I want to read it in peace without his red-cheeked color commentary over my shoulder.

I flip through the poems, some dated from when he was in college, others not, a few dotted with stains, as if they’ve been manhandled into different backpacks over the years. The parking lot poem is nowhere to be found. But the last piece in the folder piques my interest. It’s “Invisible Summer,” the one Will mentioned in the car to AWP. The only one his dad ever praised. It’s dated his senior year of Middlebury. Scrawls of messy blue ink drift between the lines, barely readable. It’s reminiscent of my dad’s illegible handwriting. Definitely not Will’s. The only thing I can make out is Very effective , underlined twice at the bottom.

I turn around the room, as if expecting Will to burst through the door. It feels too intimate to read this poem, to try to glean insight into his relationship with his dad back when Will’s father was alive. So I scan just the first line. But as with every Will poem, you can’t just read one line. He grips you by the throat and refuses to let go.

What’s between us—crushed

juice like a dew-slick plum

in high summer, my chin streaked

with words unsaid, sickly

sweet and sticky. How you let it

dry there, how every word you said

There’s more. A lot more. But there’s something weirdly familiar about it, too, like I’ve seen this image before, of the plum. It feels like some brilliant classic literature reference, some callout I’m not well read enough to pick up on.

It’s for sure the kind of thing MFA fellowship winners would know.

I take the poem back to my computer and Google “crushed juice like a dew-slick plum in high summer,” expecting a Spark-Notes analysis of some Mark Twain image to be the first hit.

But it’s not. The first hit is from the archive of a now-defunct online literary magazine, Anathema , dated several months before Will dated his poem.

I remember Anathema . It was one of the few poetry journals I read in college. It felt like they published more interesting, experimental work than the usual university journals, which went with whatever got the establishment’s stamp of approval.

I stare at the door again. Have twenty minutes passed since Will left, or is it thirty?

There’s no need to click the link. My stomach seizes up, my hands sweaty. Somewhere, in a distant shadow of my brain, I feel like I already know.

Don’t click it. Don’t click it. Don’t click it.

But I do, and a long poem cut into three-line stanzas fills the page. It’s called “The Summer We Stopped Talking” by Sophie Wright. There’s a black-and-white picture of her and her messy bun next to her name; she’s smiling into the camera in front of a backdrop of ivy. I start reading:

The last time we spoke was crushed

juice, like a dew-slick plum in the heat

of summer, my chin streaked

with words unsaid, sickly sweet

and sticky, and you let it

dry there, every word, every syllable

The poem continues in the same vein. A bit messy and unwieldy, snagging with S ’s, its alliteration slinking menacingly down the page, like a snake. Like a repeated conversation between parent and child that never quite stuck. It’s good.

It’s the same poem as Will’s.

I read both poems several times. I come up with a litany of reasons for why this could’ve happened. A hilarious coincidence. Maybe Will and Sophie watched the same shows, read the same books. It’d make sense then, why they were drawn to the same images.

Or maybe Sophie’s parent sucked in the exact same way as Will’s dad did, and there was no other way to describe the feeling.

I grow delirious with options and ideas, alternatives to explain why the smartest poet in the cohort—the best writer I know—would blatantly plagiarize another person’s work.

But there’s no good explanation.

The rest of the night is a blur: How I close the link, delete my computer’s history from today. How I tuck “Invisible Summer” back into the folder, slip it under the explosion of paper on Will’s desk. How, when we eat ice cream later, his thumb swipes over the corner of my lip to catch a sickly sweet drip; how, when we curl up on the couch to watch TV, his chin tightens, deep in thought.

But mostly, what I think about are all the words left unsaid. Unnerving and sour and sticky.