9. Chapter 9
Chapter nine
Jessica
I find him outside the languages building with three books tucked under one arm and his coat draped over the other. I've thought about this all afternoon, and I still just say it.
"Walk with me after class?"
Ander stops. "Now?"
"Now's after my class. I'm not responsible for your timetable."
"I have a reading group at four."
"Do you want to go to it?"
He considers it. "No."
"Then walk with me."
I've got Governance at nine tomorrow and a form due for it that I haven't looked at, and for the next hour I would just like to go for a walk.
We go down the steps and he falls in on my right, which he does without making a thing of it. Partway down the path, he says, "Where are we going?"
"Nowhere."
"Which direction is nowhere?"
"That's the whole point of nowhere, Ander. It doesn't have one."
He walks a little farther in silence.
"I would like it on record," he says, "that I'm perfectly capable of doing this. I'm simply unpracticed."
"Nobody's marking you."
"Everybody is always marking me," Ander says. "That's how I was raised."
We end up at the low wall above the north lawn, which is where everybody ends up when they haven't got anywhere to be.
The sun is doing something half-hearted through the clouds.
A group of second-years is running the perimeter, and we sit on the wall and watch them suffer without any guilt whatsoever.
"Faris changed the reading list," I say. "Half of this wasn't there in September."
"Two of the additions aren't even published in English, and I want to know where she got them."
"You're following her course?"
"I've been sitting in when I can." He pushes his sleeves up, and I look at his forearms, and then at the runners, with what I hope is enormous subtlety. "She's better than people say. They call her a fanatic because she makes them prove things they'd rather believe without evidence."
"She's still frightening."
"Deeply."
"Real question," I say. "Roast potatoes or fried."
"That's not a real question."
"It's the realest question available."
"Roast," he says, "obviously — but only if they've been turned at least once, which this kitchen does not do, so in practice the answer here is fried, and it's a disgrace."
"You've thought about this."
"I think about it more often than I'm willing to admit." He looks sideways at me. "You're going to tell your friends."
"I'm going to tell them tonight."
"That's what I assumed," Ander says, "and I find I don't care," and I laugh loudly enough that one of the runners looks over.
Eventually, he asks about America.
"What was your life like in America? Before any of this."
"School. Work. Arguing with my car about starting." I turn my face up to the thin sun. "It was extremely normal and nobody in this school believes me when I say it."
"Why wouldn't they?"
"Because they've decided there must have been something. A sign. Somebody's always asking whether I felt different."
"Did you?"
"No. I felt cold, mostly. It's a cold house." I glance at him. "That's disappointing for everybody. They want a portent and they get a girl who was bad at math."
"How bad?"
"Catastrophically."
"Which part?"
"All of it. Any of it. Put a letter in a sum and I leave the room."
"That's not bad at math, that's—" He stops himself, visibly. "No. You didn't ask me for an opinion about it."
"I did not."
"Then I'll keep it," he says, "at considerable personal cost," and I shove him with my good shoulder.
"What would you do if nobody had planned your day for you?"
He looks across the lawn before answering.
"Fix something," he says. "I like radios. The old valve sets, where you can see what everything is for. There's nothing political about a radio. It works or it doesn't, and it doesn't matter at all whose son you are."
"Do you have one?"
"Two. They're in a cupboard in a house I don't go to."
"Have them sent."
"It would raise questions."
"Ander, have the radios sent."
He looks at me sideways. "You're going to be like this, aren't you."
"Constantly," I say, and our knees are touching, and neither of us moves.
The light goes orange over the roofs and the runners get released and we don't move off the wall.
"Can I ask you something else?" I say.
"Yes."
"I know why you came. You've told me, and Luke's told me, and I've read the log with your name on it." I turn so I can see his face. "What I don't know is what you want now. Not then. Now, sitting on a wall with nothing on fire."
"You," he says. "I want time with you when nobody's bleeding or trying to overthrow anything. I want to find out whether we can be boring together."
I bump my shoulder against his — the good one — and he leans into it.
"I kept you at a distance for a long time," he says. "Some of it was principle. Some of it was fear."
"You were also an ass."
"Yes. Luke has been very clear about that."
"He told me."
Ander closes his eyes briefly. "Of course he did. I've apologized before. I'd rather show you I'm changing."
"You have changed."
"I'm working on it."
"You sat at our table and argued about pie."
"That was harder than the archive," Ander says.
"Linnea," I say.
"What about her?"
"Is she going to care about this?"
Ander looks genuinely confused. "She's been telling me to ask you out."
"Of course she has."
"She offered to do it for me."
That makes me laugh. "Why didn't you let her?"
"Because I possess some remaining dignity."
"Not much."
"More than I would have if Linnea had formally requested a date on my behalf. She knew I wanted you before I admitted it. She's going to be unbearably pleased when I tell her you asked me to walk with you."
"I asked you to walk. That isn't a proposal."
"I know. I'm trying to manage my excitement."
It's nearly dark when we get back to the quad, and I'm turning toward my staircase when he catches my hand.
"Jessica."
"Mm."
"Can I come up?" His voice comes out quieter than usual.
"Yes," I say.
The suite's empty — Sophia's at her thing, Declan's at his, and Renzo has left a note on the table that says GONE OUT. BE GOOD. NOT TOO GOOD. I turn it facedown before Ander can read it. Judging by his expression, I'm too late.
"Your friends are remarkable."
"They're a nightmare."
He cups my jaw and kisses me, one hand spread at my waist, and every plan I had about being clever goes out of my head.
We get as far as my room and the door shuts behind us and he's still kissing me.
"Is this comfortable?" he says, when my back meets the wall.
"Yes."
He adjusts anyway — turns us slightly so my left side isn't against anything, one hand sliding round to take my weight at the small of my back — and then he's on me again and I stop thinking.
I get his coat off and drop it. He eases my sweater over my head, careful with the left sleeve, and then just stops and looks at me for long enough that I nearly say something stupid.
"Ander."
"You're extremely distracting," he says, rough, "and I'd like a moment to be distracted."
"Take it."
He takes it. Then I've got my hands inside his shirt, and his breath catches and his hands tighten on me.
We end up on the bed. His mouth goes down my throat and along my collarbone and lower. When he finds something that makes me arch, he does it again, watching my face.
"You're doing that deliberately."
"Obviously."
His mouth returns to the spot beneath my breast that made me arch.
"Here?" he asks.
"You know it is."
"I want to hear you say it."
I tell him. His hand shakes against my thigh.
"You're shaking."
"I'm aware." His forehead comes down against my sternum. "I've been in a gun fight. That was easier."
I get a leg over his hip and pull him down, and the noise he makes goes straight through me.
"Come here." I put my hand flat on his chest. "Lie down with me for a bit."
He moves back up and lies beside me. The kisses grow slower, his hand resting at my waist.
After a while, he looks toward the ceiling. "That is going to affect my work."
"Good."
"It isn't good. I have a seminar tomorrow, and now I'm going to spend it thinking about this."
"Sounds like a you problem."
He finds my left hand and turns it over. His thumb continues tracing the arcs on my wrist, and he doesn't say anything about them.
"You're going to have to stay a while," I tell him. "If you walk out now Renzo will have a theory by supper."
"He'll have a theory regardless."
"He'll have a worse theory."
"Then I'll stay." He doesn't move. "Come to dinner with me."
"We eat dinner together every day."
"Not in the hall. I'll have something catered, in my room." His thumb keeps moving. "Tomorrow evening. Dinner."
"Are you asking me out?"
"I appear to be, yes. I've never done it before and I'd be grateful if you didn't examine it too closely."
"It was good."
"It was passable."
"It was good," I say, and lean up and kiss him until he stops arguing with me about it. "Yes. Dinner. And the radios."
"The radios aren't—"
"Have them sent," I say, "or I'll write to your father's office and ask for them myself, in writing, and I'll be extremely polite about it."
Ander puts his face in my hair and laughs until his shoulders shake.
Then his phone starts ringing from inside the coat on my floor.
Ander goes still.
"Your reading group?" I ask.
"My father's office."
The phone stops. A moment later, it starts again.
"That seems determined. Do you need to answer?"
Ander looks at the phone, then at me. "Probably."
"Right now?"
"No," he says. "I’ve got better things to do right now."
The ringing stops. A message appears on the screen.
Ander glances down and reads it. The last of his laughter disappears.
"What does he want?"
"For me to come home."
"When?"
"Tonight."