Chapter 23 #2
“It was good. Lily and her boyfriend dropped me at the dorm. They were going somewhere to be alone, and Jane was staying at the Stratton’s, so I decided to change and come over here and get a couple of hours of work done.”
It was nearly eleven. I had been thinking about packing it in and heading home before Nora had called. Now I was happy that her call had made me stay until Syd arrived.
“Oh, I wanted to ask you something,” she said as she extricated herself from the pile of papers on—and around—the couch and came over to me, pulling something up on her phone.
I rolled my chair back and moved my laptop over so she could sit on my desk and face me, as she often did when we were talking about one of my student’s papers that I asked her opinion on, or one of my characters that she was working on.
My desk chair was kind of cool in an old-school kind of way, but with its high, curved, wooden arms, it wasn’t ideal for her to sit on my lap, or straddle me.
Though we’d tried like hell a couple of times. We had kind of gotten it to a point though, if she straddled me, but put her legs up high, over the arms, then leaned back to the desk—
“Is this the guy from the wedding?” she said, holding a pic on her phone in front of me, pulling me from my carnal memories.
“What guy? What wedding?” I said, as I took the phone from her. She hoisted herself to sit in the space on the desk I’d cleared for her.
“From Betsy Stratton’s wedding. The one who Jane kissed.”
I looked at the photo. It was of Jane Winters in a green dress, looking very different than she normally did, standing next to a young man in a tux. I enlarged the photo to see their faces better.
It was obvious they didn’t know Syd had taken the photo—they only had eyes for each other. What may have begun that night on the dance floor of Betsy’s wedding had definitely developed into something…deep. I almost felt like I was prying in on a very private moment.
“Yeah, that’s him. His hair’s not in the ponytail, but it’s him.” I handed the phone back to Syd who studied it again.
“Hmmm, the plot thickens.”
She went on to recap Jane’s party, which, for reasons Syd didn’t know for sure, had been held at Caro Stratton’s estate. A home I knew a little bit from when the gang would go for an occasional weekend away from Brown. It’d been a lot of years since I’d been there.
“It’s all tied to Joe Stratton running for governor?” I asked Syd when she’d finished.
She shrugged. “I guess. There was a big undercurrent of secrecy all evening, but I wasn’t sure of what.
But, my take is that this guy—Stick is his name, by the way—is doing some auto mechanic work for Mrs. Stratton, and somehow met Jane and…
I think they’ve got something going.” She was still gazing at the picture.
“It would appear that way from the way they’re looking at each other,” I said.
“But why keep it secret?” she said, more to herself than me. She seemed to remember she and I were in a top-secret relationship, because after a moment she softly nodded, like she understood. She clicked her phone off, and put it down next to her hip on the desk.
“I wish…” I said, not really sure I could tell her everything I did wish about her and me. About us. “I wish we weren’t secret. I wish I could have been your date tonight. Besides being with you, it would have been nice to see Caro.”
Her legs swinging softly into the desk well, she said, “That’s okay. It was really small. You didn’t miss much.”
I placed my hands on her calves, stilling her movement. “But…I’m sorry,” I said, trying to convey my feelings of regret that we couldn’t be public. That I couldn’t publicly let the Bribury campus know that I was crazy about Syd O’Brien.
A student. And my employee.
She placed her sock-clad feet on my knees. “It’s okay, I know the score,” she said.
“Yeah, but…”
“Would I have loved to go to the party with you tonight? Yes. Would I like for my friends to know you’re my—” She stopped, and chewed a little on her bottom lip, a mannerism she produced when she felt a little insecure. Yeah, I knew her that well.
“Valentine?” I finished for her. I was happy for her to call me anything she wanted, but of course she couldn’t. At least not to anybody else.
“Exactly. That you’re my Valentine.” She smiled and I moved my hands up and down her calves. “But,” she continued, “there is something kind of hot about the secret lover thing.”
“Nah, it’s just us. There’s something kind of hot about us,” I joked, but the teasing tone in my voice quickly died as she looked at me with those huge brown eyes.
Just as I was about to move her foot higher up my leg, she pulled away. “Unh-uh. I need to get some work done…first.”
Happy to know there would be a “second,” I let her go and watched as she returned to the couch.
I couldn’t tell anybody how I felt about Syd.
And, to be truthful, my feelings for her scared the shit out of me.
I hadn’t felt like this about anybody since Diandra.
And what was especially scary, I was pretty sure I hadn’t felt as deeply about Diandra in the several years we’d been together as I did about Syd after only months.
No, I couldn’t publicly announce my feelings for Syd. And, because I couldn’t articulate them myself (some writer!) I couldn’t even tell her privately how I felt.
Or maybe I could…
I put my hands on my keyboard and pressed the space bar, waking up my laptop to the Down in Flames doc I’d been working on when Nora called.
“Hey,” I said, and Syd looked up with a question in her eyes. “How would you like to read something I’m working on? I’d like your thoughts.”
I could tell she was trying to temper her reaction, to act cool about my offer, and I think I fell a little in love with her right then.
She put down the stuff she was working on and did a nonchalant stretch of her arms over her head, like she was getting ready to read just another box of my existential meanderings on paper. “Sure. Whatever. This pile can wait.”
Yeah. Definitely a little in love. Maybe even a lot.
“Cool,” I said, trying to match her nonchalance.
But my hand trembled as I did a keyboard command I hadn’t done for anything original in…shit, I didn’t know how long.
Print.