Chapter 14 #PhD #2
“Right.” I nod, even as panic continues to burst through my open chest wall. My broken promises. My lies. They’re coming home to roost and lodging in my throat.
West reaches over and switches the projector on.
We both look out as it lights the screen at the front of the auditorium with my favorite painting.
A Monk by the Sea by Caspar Friedrich. In it, a small man stands before a looming gray sea covered with oppressive clouds.
It’s sobering and heartbreaking. It’s exactly how I feel right now. Sobered, heartbroken, and oppressed.
“You mind if I give Jayne a call? I wanted to ask her about something,” West says.
“I don’t care,” I reply, attempting to straighten my tie.
“You want help with that?”
Jesus, it’s like he never left. “When did we get married, exactly?”
“All right, all right.” He backs off. “Have a good one. We’ll catch up later.”
“Goodbye, West,” I say pointedly.
“Let me just say one more thing.” He hasn’t moved an inch. We’re still abnormally close, facing each other in the small room.
“Fuck. What?”
“You’re all right.”
“That’s what you wanna say?” I ask, agitated. “Was that a question?”
“No… no. I want to remind you life is good. You just achieved a huge goal. You’ve got a gorgeous girlfriend, your best friend made it back in one piece. You’re all right. All right?”
Am I? I yank at my tie. It’s way too tight.
He straightens the loosened version, looking me in the eyes.
“I’m glad you’re back,” I mumble at him.
“You should be. Past is past. Time to move on.”
“Right.” I take a breath.
“You’re all right,” he reminds me.
“I’m all right. Thanks, brother.”
He and I descend the spiral staircase, and we both stop at the classroom door.
I run my hands through my hair. I remember this feeling. The unsteadiness, the uncertainty—the plank.
When I woke up this morning, I knew this was the day my life would change, but I am more nervous now than I was sitting before that doctoral committee, because this is the real dime my life is spinning on.
With a glance into the room, Tristan is an explosion of light as everything else fades to gray. It reminds me so much of the day on the hospital patio. How I couldn’t see anything but him. How does he still have so much power over me? He’s been gone so long.
My eyes lock on his, and he visibly startles. I catch my breath, blown back by the memories. Before I can get a handle on my facial expression, he’s already blinked and looked away.
Can I do this? Can I pretend this is any other day?
Or will I fumble my words like I’m fumbling my thoughts, flip the slides backwards instead of forwards, drop the battery pack of my microphone down the back of my pants?
I can feel him in the air around me—like he’s inside me. I am incapable of shutting it down.
How did I do it that summer? How did I convince myself that my feelings for him had been alcohol-fueled and imaginary?
That they’d been based on a lie. His lie.
They obviously weren’t, because those same feelings are running rampant through my entire body three and a half years later, stone cold sober.
The reality is I mourned him, and I have missed him beyond all reason.
If nothing else proves it, the aching tug in my heart does.
Like it’s been there all along. I mistook it for something else.
Disappointment maybe, or inertia. But it’s Tristan.
It has always—always been Tristan.
Which is patently ridiculous. I don’t believe in any of this shit.
I don’t believe anyone is meant for me any more than I believe I’m meant for someone else.
So why, then, is this pull so fucking painful?
Why the fuck haven’t I felt even a shadow of it since he left?
I’m reminded of the clawing sensation that needed him so badly that one night—that had to be closer—had to take everything.
I told myself then it wasn’t love or anything like it. It was too ugly and messy to be love.
But it’s scratching at me again, the claws ready to come out.
West brings my attention back to him with a hand on my shoulder. “What are you gonna say?”
“I’m gonna tell him…” I close my eyes and take another shaky breath. “It’s nice to see him again.”
I start class, and except for losing my train of thought a few times, the slide show moves forward as it’s supposed to, the hands of the clock sweep around, my mic stays where I put it, and I manage to regurgitate my knowledge of early Renaissance art without anything too embarrassing happening.
When the class ends, my anxiety surrounding Tristan’s persistent presence rises.
There’s a huge part of me that wishes I’d never seen him again, but there’s another part that’s louder screaming don’t let him get away.
In that respect, it feels exactly like he’s about to move to Houston.
I am bombarded with students with questions, but I catch Tristan’s eyes, needing him to read my mind. Needing him to wait for me.
But he doesn’t wait. He gets up and leaves, and I am crushed. It fucking crushes me. I’m a total dick to the people who separate me from him. It takes a good five minutes to extricate myself from them, and I leave the room intending to go up to my office and bang my head against the wall.
But there he is. On the stairs. I stop where I stand, gathering my words—my stupid, scrambling longing that hasn’t learned a damn thing.
“Remember me?” he asks as I start my approach, my heart hammering in my chest.
He’s older, and he’s changed a lot. The quality of his light is dimmer. It makes him easier to look at.
“I said I would,” I say standing before him. After all this time.
“You said a lot of things.”
“So did you,” I say meaningfully.
He clears his throat and sits up straighter. “You should know that in the course catalog it didn't list you as the professor of this class. It just said “Staff.” I wasn't trying to ambush you. I didn’t do this on purpose.”
“I know,” I say, as my eyes scour every inch of his face. His edges are sharper, but he’s the same guy. The same one I’ve thought about every single day for the last three and a half years whether I wanted to or not. Whose photograph is bent and faded in my wallet.
His cheeks darken, and he looks away.
“When did you get back to town?” I ask.
He frowns, looking up at me again. “Archer, don’t,” he says, like it’s the stupidest, most irritating question in the world. He cuts his eyes up and across the room—an eye roll.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know.”
“Know what?”
His glare is ice, freezing me in place. “I’ve been back for like—years.”
“What?” Wait, what did I ask him? What are we talking about? “What?”
“I've been living with Connor. I moved in with him right after I graduated.”
He might as well have slapped me in the face.
“You didn't know,” he says, rather than asks.
I shake my head, unable to form any words.
He has some nice ones for me, though. He’s probably been waiting three years to say them. “Jayne never mentioned it?” The words are all bitterness and disappointment.
Each new land mine exploding around me creates tension in my chest that threatens to suffocate me. He’s right in front of me, but he’s more gone than he’s ever been.
“I guess not,” he says, answering his own question.
My stomach twists, and dizziness spins the lobby around. I have to sit. This is too much. This week and West and Tristan and the PhD and that lying gold digger who’s been living in my house for three years—it’s all too fucking much.
I lower myself onto the stair where he sits, but I keep a healthy distance.
I have no heart or words or breath.
“Surprise, I guess,” he says.
I can’t respond. My mind is blank—erased clean as my essential truths march out the door while this new reality steps in to survey the damage and set up camp. My elbows are on my knees, and then my head is in my hands, my body collapsing by degrees. “This is so fucked up.”
“Really? I mean—it looks like you’re doing fine. Pretty girlfriend, prestigious career, a PhD.”
I don’t bother raising my head. “How’d you know about that?”
“Instagram,” he says. “Your girlfriend shared your story.”
Chilling words. I say that because they leave me cold.
“I’m sorry” isn’t good enough. Maybe no words ever will be to make up for all the mistakes I made with him.
So, I do the opposite. I rub my face with my hands then turn to look at him.
My jaw is both clenched and trembling, already regretting the words I’m about to say.
“You should probably drop the class.” My voice comes out weak.
I clear my throat and avoid his puzzled gaze.
I say it more clearly the second time. “I need you to drop the class.”
His eyes widen. I can’t tell if he’s offended or hurt. But what does he expect? Does he think I can just grade his papers like he’s any other person? That I can pretend what happened between us didn’t mean anything? That it wasn’t completely fucked up? That it didn’t completely fuck me up?
“Sure,” he says eventually. “No problem. It's just an elective. I mean—I don’t need it.” It feels like he’s talking about me. Like I was just an elective, too. It doesn’t seem to bother him much. None of it does, which drives home the point—we were nothing to each other.
We are nothing. Just lies, hormones, and empty promises.
But then his pale turquoise eyes take me in. His teeth grab his bottom lip and hide it in his perfect mouth. For a single second, it’s like no time has passed. It’s just him and me on a concrete walkway in the middle of the night with lips that ache from kissing.
Then his eyes drop to my mouth.
The embers in me that still glow for him roar to flame.
It takes every cell in my body working together not to grab him by the neck and kiss him until—until he wants me back.
Every moment that passed between us—so few of them—they’re all right here.
Everything we said to each other—the parts of myself I lost inside him.
He’s still got them. Locked up tight behind new walls he seems to have built just for me.
I shake the memories from my head. They weren’t anything but words—infused with meaning by a desperate heart.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t bother.”
My back teeth grip at each other, and I nod sharply. “Right. Too little, too late, huh?” I start to stand.
“Something like that,” he murmurs. As I take a step away, he speaks again. “Archer?”
I look down at him. At his pretty eyes and his smooth skin, the gold in his hair.
“Do you remember how you said you'd wait for me?” he asks, his words plucked out of the clear blue sky to slap me in the face again.
I try to swallow as he stands up. He looks into my eyes and gives me a small, sad smile with a slight shake of his head. “You didn’t.”
He walks away. I watch him cross the lobby and vanish beyond the sliding doors, not once looking back to see my heart—cracked open and bleeding on the floor.