Chapter 4 #3
“It would be a strange hand for an angel,” Bell agreed as he stood again.
He reached up and ruffled his curls as he took another look around the studio.
The hem of his shirt lifted around one of his hips as he did, revealing a thin wedge of firm, suntanned skin.
The groove of an iliac furrow. The gone-in-an-instant glint of gold hair.
A peculiar awareness trickled from the place below my ribs and down into my belly.
No.
I couldn’t—
God, please, no. Don’t let that be real.
I ducked my head, feeling queasy shame rise with the fresh embarrassment.
He was twenty-two, and I would be thirty within the year.
He was my student. I could not—I could not be aware of him like that.
It was one thing to notice his beauty, the breadth of his shoulders, his hair.
I carved human likenesses—it was more or less my job to notice those things—but to feel lust—
A sin. It was a sin.
Lust was an infrequent iniquity of mine, but when it did curl itself into my life, it was always in a shocking way.
The dreams that woke me up with hard, wet pulses between my legs, dreams with more than two people, dreams about strangers, dreams about other women, dreams where I was used like an object…
dreams that made me afraid something was wrong with me.
And then there’d been the party. Something Kaitlyn had dragged me to, a raucous melee at a frat house where my shyness had the perverse effect of gathering people’s attention around me.
At some point, a girl was dared to give me a lap dance, a dare that was supposed to cheer me up or loosen me up or induct me into the wonders of the house party or something else equally unlikely.
A drunk Kaitlyn had goaded me into putting my hands on the girl’s hips as she sat in my lap, and the girl had winked at me as she started throwing herself forward, grinding into me to the cheers of the partygoers.
For one of the very few times in my life, the awareness of other people had faded away and my only thoughts were of her hips in my hands, the stretch of the denim over her backside, the shimmery gel on her cheeks and chest. Intrusive fantasies had exploded and piled like popcorn in my mind.
I could have leaned forward and pressed my face against her breasts; I could have slid my hand behind the button of her jeans and down into her panties; I could have woven my fingers into her hair and pulled her face down to mine.
Just like in my unconfessed dreams, there had been no right or wrong in that moment—nothing but possibilities and a squeezing, imperial ache beneath my belly button that demanded a satisfaction I had no idea how to deliver.
It had only been after the party, as I’d driven a puking Kaitlyn home, that the burning in my body had finally smoldered, turned to ash, and cooled into bitter shame.
And now here it was again, that imperial ache, and for a student, a boy seven years younger than me.
Twenty-two and still paying the extra fees on car insurance.
Twenty-two and with every girl on campus making eyes at him, every girl who was happy and young and normal, who wasn’t reclusive and awkward and dull and too old to notice someone like Bell.
It was wrong, and it was pitiable.
He had to go, or I had to go; someone had to go. I couldn’t—I couldn’t handle what it felt like to be perceived by him, and I certainly couldn’t handle this new…responsiveness.
“I forgot that I’m supposed to be”—I searched my mind for anything, any lie, hoping God would count a lie as the lesser sin—“at the department mixer.”
I’d drifted to the far wall and the old chalkboard that had been mounted decades ago for some unknowable campus reason. And Bell had somehow drifted with me. He was only four or five feet away now, which was too close. He was far too close.
He smiled at me. It wasn’t the largest smile I’d seen from him, but his dimples were deep and his eyes sparkled.
My stomach swooped. My cheeks burned.
“We both know you aren’t going to the department mixer,” he said gently.
“If you were going, you’d already be there.
You would have been there ten minutes before it started.
Even I’m not there because I don’t need to give the alumni yet another tour of the fine arts facilities and then show them where the donation envelopes are. And neither do you.”
“I—” He was correct on all counts, including his rather cynical take on how the mixers functioned.
But it wasn’t at all how I imagined him thinking about events like these; he always seemed like such an earnest and amiable participant in all of it.
“You’re so good at it” was how I finished, pointlessly.
But I couldn’t wrap my head around that, how he could be so effortlessly good at things like networking and facilities tours and also sound so privately bored by them.
I was about to renew my lie—God, I’m so sorry—just to escape, but then Bell walked over to a chair I’d built for the sole purpose of looking at statues from pew height.
He dropped his satchel on the seat and then braced his hands on the back.
When he looked up at me, that smile was still on his face and his fingers drummed idly on the wooden back.
“Did you like my pomegranates, Birdie?”