Chapter 16 #2
“Yeah.” Although Emily had been the one to tell Gen to leave, Gen’s rejection of her had been clear. “My roommate says it was a classic freshman breakup: two people from the same high school think they can make a long-distance relationship work but it falls apart as soon as college starts.”
“You’ve never been with anyone else?”
“I dated, but didn’t like anyone else enough to sleep with them.” He was silent for a long time. “You look shocked.”
He touched her cheek. “I would have done things differently if I had known. I’m shocked because I can’t believe anyone would break up with you.”
“Not because I had a girlfriend?”
“Yes, that is a little shocking. I’m also flattered that somehow I’m the lucky guy you chose to be with. But who cares that you had a girlfriend? That was a long time ago, right?”
“Yes,” she said, though it didn’t always feel that way.
“Do you want to be with another woman?”
She smiled. “Not at the moment.”
“And you like men?”
Her tone was arch. “For now.”
He took the glass from her hand and set it on the bedside table. “Maybe you could like me even more, under certain circumstances.” The towel around his waist had shifted. Emily could see that he was aroused again. “I have an idea. Do you trust me?”
She didn’t, not quite—she barely knew him—but she was curious. “Yes.”
He pulled the sheet from her breasts, drew it all the way down to her toes. “Get on your knees.”
She did, upright, arms loose at her sides, unsure what might come next.
He got behind her, his hard chest flush against her back.
“I want to find out what you like,” he murmured in her ear.
“Do what I tell you.” A heat grew between her legs.
It was impossible not to remember Gen, whose orders Emily had loved to obey. “Okay?” Jack said.
“Yes.” The word came out in a sigh.
He brushed her hair away from her face and held it.
He tugged, gently, and when she made a small sound, he let go, set his hand flat against her back, and bent her toward the bed.
He stroked the inside of her thighs. He told her to open for him.
He touched her, lightly, and told her how wet she felt.
He traced where she was still sore. When he found her clit, he told her to tell him that she liked it.
She did. He was still touching her when he slid into her.
He stuffed himself in, then didn’t move.
He held her against him, his fingertips swifter now.
He told her to tell him when she was going to come, but she didn’t—she couldn’t.
Pleasure gripped her too suddenly. Her face was against the mattress and he was beginning to thrust when she fully burst against his hand, her cry muffled yet deep.
He charmed her friends. He and Violet talked about a Rachmaninoff performance he had seen in New York.
He ordered the steak and said it was delicious but nothing like steak in Buenos Aires, and when Florencia asked him if he had been to Argentina, they talked for a long time about her favorite childhood places and where she liked to ski.
Although the Ryall twins didn’t know his family, they discovered that his parents and theirs had mutual friends.
He picked up the check at dinner, batting away everyone’s thanks, and kissed Emily, saying that he had to catch the train back to New York so that he could be at the office the next morning, but they shouldn’t let his departure break up the fun.
After he left, Florencia reached across the table and seized Emily’s wrist. “Oh my God .”
“He adores you,” said Violet.
“And you said the sex was good, right?” asked Rory.
“Honey,” Elizabeth told Emily, “you need to land him like a plane .”
Emily and Jack had been dating for a month when Emily caught a bad case of the flu and had to cancel their weekend together.
“Are you sure?” Jack said over the phone. “Maybe you’ll feel better by Saturday.”
“I can’t even get out of bed. Florencia has been joking about painting a plague cross on our door.”
“I wish I weren’t stuck in New York. I miss you.”
Despite the ache in her head and chest, Emily smiled. She missed him, too.
The next day, an armful of flowers arrived.
Roses ended up in coffee mugs and tulips in empty soda bottles, the tops sawed off.
A Waterford crystal vase arrived later. The next day, a new delivery: a hot-water bottle inside a cashmere cover.
Then two silver boxes of chocolates and pates de fruits, one box labeled with Florencia’s name.
It hurt to swallow, so Emily gave her box to Florencia.
“I hate him,” Florencia said. “He’s ruining all other men for me.”
Emily couldn’t smell the flowers, but loved the tulips’ dramatic swoon and the roses’ slow, pornographic spread. She and Jack talked every night on the phone until she coughed too much to continue. “Will you keep talking?” she said, throat raw. “I like the sound of your voice.”
“You do?” He talked about everything—the pressure of working for his father, how he wished he weren’t an only child, the plots of his favorite movies, learning to sail on the Charles.
A young boy, he ran away from home and crossed traffic to the Common, where he joined a kids’ soccer team and played until dusk and the police came.
Drowsy from Theraflu, Emily drifted to sleep as he described his childhood home in Beacon Hill, where his parents still lived.
Emily found herself wandering into a dream of it, opening doors, touching the green majolica fireplace tile.
She lit an oil lamp. Later, she asked him what had been real. The oil lamp? No. The green tile, yes.
On Saturday morning, Florencia said, “I think you should shower.”
“Later.”
“Or now?”
“Leave me alone, I’m dying.”
“At least change your pajamas.”
“I like them.” They were fleecy ones from Kohl’s, a gift from her mother. Emily blew her nose.
“Brush your hair? Look, I don’t want to spoil anything but maybe you can fake surprise, because friends don’t let friends look like mushrooms. You look kind of spongy and pallid.
Did you know that mushrooms are older than land plants?
They are millions of years old. Older than dinosaurs.
What is life? Basically, at its origin, spores. ”
“Why are you going on about mushrooms? Why am I supposed to fake surprise?”
Emily did not, in fact, have time to shower before Elizabeth and Rory knocked on the door, accompanied by Jack, freshly shaved and carrying a pot of homemade chicken soup.
Florencia grabbed a packed duffel bag and disappeared with the twins.
Emily, still in bed, pulled the blanket over her head. “I’m a mess,” she groaned.
“That’s okay. You’re sick.”
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Do you want me to go?”
“No.”
“Good. Can I see you now?”
Emily emerged from the blanket. Her nose was running. She reached for the tissue box, but he reached it first and passed it to her. “I thought, if you wanted, I could spend the weekend here,” he said. “Florencia said it’s okay with her if it’s okay with you.”
“In my dorm room?” He had seen it only briefly; they always spent weekends at his apartment.
She looked at the room through his eyes.
It looked embarrassingly young. There was a dirty coffeepot and an unkillable pothos plant.
On the walls were a poster of the original cover of To the Lighthouse (Florencia’s) and another of Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe’s hands (Emily’s).
Books filled the shelves; others towered in stacks on the floor.
Greek and Latin phrases were taped above Emily’s bed.
The only beautiful thing, other than the flowers Jack had sent, was a wooden antique incubator for chicks that Emily had found at a flea market.
She and Florencia often left notes for each other in the incubator, tucked inside plastic Easter eggs bought at CVS.
Emily wasn’t sure what her room smelled like.
Laundry hadn’t been done in a long time.
Jack took a bowl from a collection stolen from the dining hall and gave her chicken soup. “Let me take care of you.”
Emily no longer cared about being gross and disheveled or about the state of her room. She felt warm inside. The soup was good. A kind, handsome man sat on the edge of her bed and said, “There’s a Simpsons marathon going.”
They watched Homer Simpson invent a chair impossible to tip over.
They watched him eat his pet lobster. They watched Lisa cheat on a test. They watched Marge hold the family’s one remaining possession: a washcloth.
Clouds appeared in the cartoon blue sky over and over as they heard the three opening notes, then a trumpet’s phlegmy buzz.
At first, Emily and Jack were wedged together in her narrow bed, but when it got late, he made Emily another cup of Theraflu in the microwave, took Florencia’s mattress from her bed, and set it on the floor next to Emily’s.
Near sleep, Emily reached down to hold Jack’s hand. “Why are you so good to me?”
“Because I love you.”
He had never said this before. Few people had.
Her parents—her father often, her mother rarely.
Her little sisters out of nowhere—a surprise, almost like a hiccup.
When Emily and Gen had been together, she had believed that their love was certain—knit into the muscle, marrow at the bone.
But that was over, and Emily, remembering that time, had the impression that she had been very young then, and that now, though only a few years later, she was on the brink of becoming a new person.
She saw her new self in the eyes of Jack, looking up at her from the floor, his smile tender in the muted television’s light.
She realized that she wanted to become a new person, and that she loved him, too.
“Well done,” said Elizabeth when she saw the ring after the trip to Positano.