Chapter 39
JOEL
When Shay returned to the room, she did not look at Joel, but it was clear she was unsettled.
It had been difficult to hear her and William, the sounds of their muffled conversation no more than rising and falling tones, reminding Joel of when she’d slip into his dorm’s hallway to take a phone call, and how he’d known to give her privacy then.
To never crack open the door or press his ear against the wall.
That she wouldn’t forgive him for something like that, because it wouldn’t just be a violation of her but of William.
“Is everything all right?” he asked as Shay disappeared into the bathroom. The door remained half-open, though he could not see her.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
He smiled at the quick reversal, though any levity was short-lived. “I feel like there’s a lot to talk about. We haven’t really seen each other since I came to Riverside.”
“I know, but I think I just need to sleep right now,” she said from the bathroom.
Though still on edge, she seemed calmer when she emerged in a nightshirt that fell to her knees, more of her skin covered than with the dress she had been wearing, but the vulnerability of the thin, boxy cotton made her seem more exposed.
He tried to look away as she pulled back the covers.
Even before they’d slept together, she was always this comfortable around him, like she could relax the pose she rigidly kept around everyone else.
Her fingernails scratched the sheet, making the hairs on his forearms lift.
It frustrated him, how immediately his body responded to hers.
“Do you want to sleep here?” she asked.
“What?”
“I’m assuming you’re banished from your room, and we both know you won’t really be able to sleep downstairs.”
She said it so matter-of-factly, like she was proposing that they split a taxi uptown.
He knew he should think of Carmen, of Andrew, to see this proposition through their eyes.
To even see it like a scene in a book he was editing, and how he would urge the character to stand up from his chair and slam the door behind him.
Would he do this? he might write in the margins with his red pencil.
After everything? But he and Shay had their own logic.
Perhaps it was like a religion—or whatever Shay had experienced in that building on Riverside—that made something that seemed wrong to anyone else feel incontrovertibly right within their world.
“Okay,” he said.
Her face thawed, ever so slightly, with relief, and he could see that she needed him there.
She got into the bed, and he took off his shoes and then unbuttoned to just his undershirt.
He’d leave his trousers on. When he unclasped his wristwatch, he was surprised that it was just one in the morning.
The evening had felt like a week. When he looked up, he found Shay watching him, her fingers lightly pulling at a strand of hair behind her ear.
He thought of the last time they’d slept together, the night before they’d found out about her father.
His slick forehead pressed to her collarbone, her hands clutching his shoulder blades.
He gingerly laid his glasses on the bedside table and got into the bed, angling his body toward her, though they did not touch. The pillow was cool beneath his cheek.
They stared at each other for a moment. He thought distantly of the person by the shore, but Joel was in this bed, and Shay’s face eclipsed everything else until she reached out her arm, clicking off the light.
* * *
At first, it felt like a dream—something with no beginning—and so it was impossible to know which one of them had reached for the other.
All he knew was that he was asleep, and then his hand was on Shay’s hip, hers on his stomach, pulling up the fabric of his T-shirt so she could feel the whorl of hair at his belly button.
There was no thought, only the blunt jut of bone, the softness of her upper thighs.
The sensation that their skin was the exact same temperature, hot as a pane of glass baked by the sun, so that they seemed to melt into each other, making him feel boundless, infinite.
When she found his mouth, his eyes were still closed.
They separated only to take off their clothes.
She lifted his T-shirt higher, up over his head, and then slipped off her nightshirt.
Her skin was the ivory blue of teeth. In that brief gasp, he remembered where they were, the tall posts of the bed thrusting like spears through the darkness, the doorframes taking shape, the ocean singing at the window.
Are you sure? He believed that he said this out loud, could feel the contraction of his throat, but she acted like she did not hear him. She laced her fingers together at the nape of his neck.
When she kissed him again, all thought dissolved.
He could hear the wind brush against the trees, the island’s tulip poplars, their campus’s great oaks, older than the siltstone buildings built by men no one could name.
He ran his thumb down her vertebrae, and she hummed.
Her body was unchanged. She still had the same fierce strength that he’d sensed the first moment he saw her, that he’d first felt on the stiff pallet in his dorm, the mattress that was beneath them now, his copy of Middlemarch sleeping nearby on his desk, his track shorts hanging from the winged back of the velvet armchair.
He reached for a fistful of her hair but found only skin.
It shocked him, but then his trousers were off, their underwear at their ankles and then flicked onto the floor, and suddenly there was nothing else to tether them to the people they had been hours or years ago—the boxers he had purchased at Alexander’s, the paper bag crisp in his hands as he walked out into the rain of an afternoon in May, a memory that dropped off the cliff of his existence because it was not now; it was not here with Shay.
She slid beneath him, her palms pressed against his hips, as if holding him together. They looked at each other, their breath fast and shallow.
If this was not love, he did not want to know what was. Anything greater would destroy him.