Ellsbeth #2
Her fingers hovered over Bertie’s number.
She wanted to talk about what happened tonight with someone, to talk out loud in order to make sense of her own thoughts.
The date hadn’t been bad; there had been nothing wrong with Oscar.
But he had left her feeling removed and clinical.
An evening out with Oscar making polite small talk had been a reminder of how much more she enjoyed her time spent with Rawlins, their knees just far enough apart that the static electricity of their skin made her hairs stand on end.
She was herself with him, a better version of herself—smarter, funnier, quicker, able to make any joke, any reference, and know that he would understand.
It was a strange and rare intimacy that she didn’t know she had lacked until this moment: the peace you feel when you’re able to be completely yourself with somebody else.
The only person she wanted to talk to was Rawlins. And so instead of dialing Bertie’s number, she opened her email app and began clicking out a message to Professor Rawlins.
From: Storer.Ellsbeth
To: Rawlins.T.M.
Subject: (No Subject)
Are you home? Can I come over?
She hit Send before the flood of adrenaline left her system, and she had a panicked moment of wondering if she’d made a mistake. But the reply was in her inbox as soon as she hit Refresh.
From: Rawlins.T.M.
To: Storer.Ellsbeth
Subject: Re: (No Subject)
Come over.
She flew out her door. The cold air stung her cheeks—she hadn’t grabbed a jacket—but she didn’t slow her pace.
She walked like a woman possessed, each step sure, each stride long.
The campus had never seemed so expansive, each quad of inky-black grass somehow, impossibly, a football field now.
She passed the late-night commissary on her left, the place where chicken fingers and quesadillas could be bought with a swipe of a student ID card after midnight, and managed to avoid a few drunken underclassmen calling out what might have been compliments in her direction.
Ellsbeth kept her clip as her thighs burned until she was through campus and climbing the hill where Professor Rawlins’s Victorian house sat perched.
Once she reached his house, the dreamlike quality of the entire situation began to fade.
She was standing outside her professor’s door, breathing heavily, with her sneakers and the hems of her jeans damp with mud.
What would he say when he opened the door?
There was a chance, Ellsbeth knew, that he would admonish her, send her home.
Worse, that he wouldn’t open the door at all.
Had she imagined his email response? She almost reached into her pocket to check her phone when the door swung open.
Rawlins was wearing a T-shirt stretched low enough to expose his chest hair, and a pair of jeans. She had never seen him in jeans before. He was barefoot.
“I saw you out on the porch,” he said. “Do you want to come in?” Ellsbeth didn’t answer.
It was like gravity, then, a movement so fast and inevitable that it would be impossible to know who had started it, and how it had started.
Ellsbeth had been standing on Rawlins’s porch, and then she had taken a step forward through his door, and then they were entangled in each other, kissing harder and deeper than seemed possible.
His arms wrapped around her, pulling her in closer and she felt her hands make their way behind his head, her fingers entangling themselves in his thick hair.
He pulled away quicker than she would have liked, and stared at her. “This is a bad idea,” he said.
Ellsbeth didn’t argue. She just leaned in to kiss him again.
They kissed as if they needed each other like air, their bodies pressing in to fill in all the empty space between them. Rawlins’s arms were thin, but they were surprisingly strong, pulling Ellsbeth closer into his warm chest.
Her brain was on fire. There were no rational thoughts to be had.
The only thing in her mind was more. More of his tongue in her mouth, more of his fist in her hair, more of his lips as they made their way down her neck.
She was drunk on his touch, hungry for him in a way she didn’t know was possible.
Had this been what the movies and songs had always been about?
Had everyone else been feeling this the entire time?
They were still standing in his foyer, Ellsbeth’s hands running down Rawlins’s chest, when he broke the kiss and pulled back.
“Ellsbeth,” he said, and the way he said her name sounded like prayer.
His eyes moved over her, studying her, like he was trying to memorize her.
It was nothing like the meticulous way she had seen him study the pages of books or proposals.
He was gazing at her with such an earnestness, she knew with abject certainty that the strange and inexplicable hunger gnawing at her from the inside out—the vise-grip like a clenched fist in the center of her chest—was something he felt, too.
“Your eyes look different in this light,” she said.
She had only ever been this close to him during the ritual, when her wrists were immobilized and her hands were around his neck.
But now her hands trailed down his chest, feeling the ridges of his stomach muscles through his T-shirt.
“They’re a little green in the middle, did you know that? ”
Rawlins kept staring at Ellsbeth, kept his hands touching her body like he was afraid if he broke contact with her she would disappear.
After a moment of silence, he inhaled a ragged breath.
“Ellsbeth, I don’t want to fuck any of this up.
You’re…You’re brilliant. And your thesis is—” He swallowed.
“Your work is so important. Your future is so important. If this is a mistake…” He trailed off, but she understood what he was trying to say, even if the words weren’t coming out the way he wanted them to.
There was a threshold they were crossing here, a step into the unknown with consequences that might unravel them both.
“It’s not against any rules,” Ellsbeth said.
“It’s against the spirit of the rules,” he said, but he didn’t remove his hands from her hips.
Ellsbeth leaned in to feel the rough shadow of his stubble against her cheek, nuzzling him like an animal, already addicted to his smell. “I’m twenty-four years old,” she murmured into his ear. “I’m an adult. A colleague.”
Rawlins moaned and took a step back. “I’m finding you a new adviser tomorrow morning,” he said.
“Don’t you dare.”
And then they were kissing again, frenetic with the energy of teenagers, hands and mouths and tongues and skin pressing against each other until somehow they fell onto Rawlins’s overstuffed leather couch.
Ellsbeth swung one leg over him, straddling him, pressing their foreheads together.
She pulled off her shirt and then tugged at Rawlins’s.
He understood, ripping the shirt off with a single clean motion, revealing his chest hair and his toned stomach.
She could feel his erection through his jeans, but he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to take off more clothes.
His arms stayed wrapped around Ellsbeth, holding her tight, and his gaze stayed locked on her.
She mussed his hair and bit his ear. She ran her teeth down his neck and then took his hand and kissed every one of his fingers.
He closed his hand around hers and brought her hand up to his lips to kiss it like an old-fashioned beau.
Something in her heart burst open then, a back cellar she hadn’t even realized was boarded shut.
His touch felt like yellow sunlight streaming through a clean window, and suddenly being here, touching him, was the only thing in the world that mattered.
“Ellsbeth,” he said quietly, “how is it possible I want you this much?”
She kissed him and couldn’t stop the wide, spreading smile that caused their teeth to clink. She pulled away, wondering if her teenage thrill at touching him was visible on her face. “Do you have a condom?” she asked.
He blinked as her words registered. “Yes,” he said, scrambling to his feet. “Somewhere. Don’t move.”
“You can always use writ magic on me,” Ellsbeth said as he strode to the bathroom.
“Tempting,” he called back from the bathroom.
She heard him rummaging through a medicine cabinet when the buzzing started from his phone, which had somehow landed on the floor halfway underneath the couch.
She leaned forward to peek at the screen and saw it flashing with the name: Margaret Lennox.
Ellsbeth stared, perplexed, wondering why the dean might possibly be calling him this late—but as she heard his footsteps, she shifted back where she could not see the phone.
Rawlins returned, his erection visibly pressing against the fabric of his jeans, holding up the foil square. “Found it.”
“Your phone is ringing,” Ellsbeth said. “It’s on the floor.”
Rawlins lowered himself onto the couch and pressed into Ellsbeth to kiss her again. “I could not care less about anything in the world right now.”
Ellsbeth twisted her head away from him. “What if it’s important? No one calls this late if it’s not something important.”
Rawlins’s mouth tightened but he acquiesced, reaching down to pick up the violently vibrating phone. “Hello?”
He listened for a moment, his face growing tight. Ellsbeth could faintly hear the dean’s voice on the other line, but she couldn’t make out any of the words. Without looking at Ellsbeth, Rawlins walked into another room of his home and closed the door.
Ellsbeth had begun putting her shirt back on before Rawlins even hung up the phone.
The real world had arrived at their evening together and shifted the temperature.
“I’m sorry,” Rawlins said. “It’s something of an emergency.
I have to go…handle something.” He didn’t offer any more of an explanation.
Ellsbeth felt herself wanting to ask, but she stopped the question before it made it out.
He clearly didn’t want to tell her, whatever it was, and if she asked, he might lie.
She had lied to him, hadn’t she? When she had been going to the police station.
There were things about her life that she wasn’t willing to tell him, and she realized at that moment with a small chill that the same might certainly be true for him.
“You can stay if you want,” Rawlins said, lacing his shoes. “I’m sure it won’t be longer than a few hours.”
It was an idle offer, not a request. It was bad enough to be the graduate student lusting after her professor.
Ellsbeth’s sense of internal shame and pity wouldn’t let her be the girl hanging around a man’s home if he didn’t want her to.
Ellsbeth shook her head. “I should get home. Try to actually get some sleep.”
Rawlins looked as though he’d aged ten years in the span of a ten-minute phone call.
His lips were tight and eyes bloodshot. They finished getting dressed together in silence, Ellsbeth wondering the entire time if she should say something, but unable to come up with a good answer for what that something might be.
Rawlins put on his shoes and grabbed his coat. “You didn’t bring a jacket,” he said.
“No.”
“Please, borrow one of mine. I insist.” He shrugged the heavy waxed coat off his shoulders and wrapped it around Ellsbeth. It was still warm from his body heat.
They stood by the door for an awkward moment, Ellsbeth feeling very small in his oversized jacket, unsure how to say goodbye. Rawlins leaned down then and kissed Ellsbeth square on the forehead. “Ellsbeth Storer,” he said in an exhale. “You have no idea how much I wish I didn’t have to go.”
The walk back to her apartment seemed to take no time at all, and within an hour she had brushed her teeth and pulled herself into bed.
Had that really happened? Had she really done that?
She would have thought the entire thing was a dream, if it hadn’t been for the coat that hung neatly on the hook behind her door, and hunger that still gnawed in the center of her chest, and the way that if she closed her eyes, she could feel his fingertips brushing her skin as vividly as if he were there in bed beside her.