Chapter 14 Reece
FOURTEEN
REECE
I don’t go to the bench again for a week.
That’s the rule I make. I made it sitting on the bench, while we were sitting there not talking, with his hand a foot from mine on the wood between us and the ducks doing what the ducks were doing.
I made the rule that I could come once. I came once.
The proseminar is not over. The proseminar continues.
I sit across from him on Tuesday and on Thursday.
We both contribute to the discussion of the readings.
We don’t look at each other except when one of us is responding to a thing the other has said — in which case we look at each other like classmates and not like the people we are.
Min has decided I am someone she wants to be friends with.
Min stops me after class on Thursday and tells me about a paper she’s working on.
I listen. I respond in the right places.
I notice Griffin notices Min talking to me.
I notice him not looking. I notice him deciding not to look.
The whole interaction takes ninety seconds.
I work on the response paper that’s due at the end of next week.
I make coffee one cup at a time over the cone.
I do not call Mendez. It has been twenty-eight days since the coffee shop.
I am counting now. I have stopped pretending I’m not counting.
Twenty-eight days of not calling Mendez is not a thing the program is going to be okay with when I do call.
The longer I wait, the worse the conversation will be.
I know this. I keep waiting. On Friday at four-thirty I’m leaving Carrigan after a different class, a methods seminar that’s not the proseminar.
I’m coming down the stairs from the third floor when Griffin comes out of his office on the second floor.
We meet at the landing. He’s putting his coat on.
He has his bag over his shoulder. He sees me on the stairs and stops with one arm in his coat sleeve.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“Where are you going.”
“Home.”
“Okay.”
He finishes putting his coat on. He starts down the stairs.
I’m two steps above the landing. He stops at the landing instead of going down.
He waits. I come down to the landing. We are on the second-floor landing of Carrigan at four-thirty on a Friday.
It’s a Friday in mid-November and the light outside the stairwell window is the gray late-afternoon light that means winter is starting.
We are between classes and the building is mostly empty. We are on a landing.
“You weren’t at the bench yesterday,” he says.
“No.”
“Or last Wednesday. Or the Monday before.”
“No.”
“Is that a thing you are doing.”
“What.”
“Is not coming to the bench a thing you are doing on purpose. I am asking.”
I look at him.
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
“I came once. I told myself I could come once.”
“Okay.”
“And then I shouldn’t keep coming.”
“Why.”
“Griffin.”
“Why, Reed.”
“You know why.”
“I want you to say it.”
I look at him. I look at his face for a long time.
He’s standing on the landing in his coat with his bag over his shoulder, and he has waited on a landing for me — that is a thing he’s doing.
He came out of his office at the right time to be on the stairs when I came down.
I didn’t register this until just now. He waited.
He’s been figuring out my schedule — from the proseminar, from my office hours which he could have looked up, from my methods class which he must have asked about.
He has timed himself to be on the stairs at the right minute.
He’s on the landing in his coat with his bag, and he’s asking me why I do not come to the bench.
“Because if I keep coming,” I say, “we are going to do this.”
“Do what.”
“This.”
“What is this, Reed.”
“Griffin.”
“I want you to say it.”
I do not say it. I don’t say it because I don’t have a word for it.
The word is going to be the wrong word. I don’t know what this is.
This is the proseminar. This is the bench.
This is the toothpaste and the article about Hartman and the brush of his coat against mine in a library stack.
This is the question. This is everything I do not have a word for.
“You came once,” he says.
“Yes.”
“And then you decided you could not come again.”
“Yes.”
“Because you decided what would happen if you kept coming.”
“Yes.”
“What did you decide would happen.”
“Griffin.”
“What.”
“Don’t.”
“What did you decide would happen, Reed.”
I look at him. I look at his face and his face is doing a thing it has not done since the sidewalk outside Hartwell.
The face is moving. The eyes are doing the work but the face is moving with them now.
His mouth tightens. His jaw works. He’s not letting it be still.
He’s making me see it. That’s on purpose too.
“I have to go,” I say.
“Okay.”
“I have to go, Griffin.”
“Okay.”
He does not move. I do not move. The stairwell is very quiet.
There’s a fluorescent light above us that’s doing the buzzing thing fluorescent lights do, low, on the edge of being a sound.
Somewhere below us a door opens and closes.
Footsteps come up the lower stairs. They turn into the first-floor hallway.
The door closes again. We are alone in the stairwell.
I’m two feet from him. The bag on his shoulder is between us.
His coat is open at the collar and I can see the edge of a sweater I do not know.
I take a step. I do not decide to. The step happens.
I take a step and I am closer to him and his face has not moved.
I take another step. I’m close enough to him now that I can see his eyes are not blue.
His eyes have never been blue. His eyes have been this color the entire time.
I have been telling myself for two years that I remembered the color and I had remembered it slightly wrong.
Now I’m close enough to see I had not remembered it wrong.
His eyes are exactly what they have always been. That is somehow worse.
I kiss him. I kiss him on the second-floor landing of Carrigan at four-thirty on a Friday in mid-November.
The mouth I have not kissed in more than two years.
His mouth is open. My tongue finds the chip at the corner of his front tooth, the small one, the one from when he fell off his bike at eleven, the one I have known by feel for six years.
Finding it is like being thrown back into a body that was mine and is mine again.
His mouth kisses me back. His hand comes up and is on the back of my neck.
The hand from the bench. The hand on the back of the chair on Friday a month ago.
I am kissing him and he is kissing me and we are on a landing in a building and a fluorescent light is buzzing above us.
He pulls back. Not far, three inches, maybe four.
His hand stays on the back of my neck. He looks at me.
His face is moving and he doesn’t know what to do with it.
I look at his face. I think I have just done a very bad thing and I cannot take it back.
I think I have wanted to do that thing for more than two years.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t.”
“I…“
“Don’t say sorry. I told you. Pick a different word.”
I do not have a different word. He looks at me.
“Get away from me,” he says.
He says it quiet.
“Right now. Get away from me, Reed. Get away from me right now or I am going to do something I am not ready to do.”
I step back. I step back and his hand falls off the back of my neck and his hand is at his side. I step back further and I am at the wall of the stairwell now, against it. He’s on the landing in his coat, with his bag, and he is looking at the floor.
“Go,” he says. “Please go.”
I go. I go down the stairs and out the side door of Carrigan and I walk in the direction of my apartment.
I walk fast. I do not stop. I do not check over my shoulder.
I walk until the building is behind me. Then I keep walking.
At some point I realize I am walking in the wrong direction, that I have walked four blocks past my own street.
I turn around. I walk back. I get to my apartment.
I unlock the door. I sit on the couch in my coat.
I do not move for a long time. He kissed me back.
He kissed me back and then he told me to get away from him, and he was right to, and I went.
He’s in his apartment now or he’s still in the stairwell or he’s somewhere else and I don’t know where he is.
I am sitting on my couch with my coat on.
I have just kissed Griffin in a stairwell.
I have not called Mendez. I am not going to call Mendez tonight either. I sit on the couch.
The bag on the coat hook is the bag I had at the pharmacy. I have not moved it. The bag is empty and I have not thrown it out and I have not moved it from the hook for ten days. I look at the bag. I sit on the couch.