“I’m so sorry.” My body trembles, up my spine, down my arms, along my legs, making them weak and so unsupportive, I slide to the floor.
Abony’s hand reaches down and takes mine. Though she looks unbearably exhausted, she yanks me to my feet without straining.
“Don’t apologize for mistakes you had nothing to do with,” she says when our faces are close in the dark. “But don’t be stupid enough to make the same mistakes in a whole new way, either.”
She pulls my neck down and kisses me on the side of the mouth before she wanders to bed, the door closed tight behind her. The tiny band of glowing light that spills over the threshold is the only evidence that lets me know she isn’t sleeping.
The images my aunt transferred to my head spear at my brain and gnaw on my conscience as I strip down and wiggle under the covers. My skin is tired. My muscles and bones are tired. But my brain is whirring with a slideshow of negative images, specters of my family’s past and my life’s possible future that I can’t escape and don’t want to watch.
The sheets tangle tight as ropes around my legs while I thrash on the mattress, silently begging for a sleep that finally, finally arrives.
I hoped that waking up would lead me to some resolution, that I’d have sifted through my problems in my dreams like a kid at the beach sifting through sand for some lost trinket. But I’m more confused now than I was before.
I pull on a pair of shorts, a clean tank, and sneakers, throw my hair in a ponytail, brush my teeth, and nab my hoodie on the way out the door too early the next morning.
The air is still cool and slightly damp from the night’s dew, and at first I’m walking with no destination in mind, walking just to force my blood to pump strong and hard through my body and flush out some of the clogged confusion in my head.
Because I don’t know what to think.
I believe my aunt. That isn’t the kind of story anyone would lie about. And I know the way
Akos threw his words around, with such arrogance and general disregard, that he wasn’t saying them to elicit a reaction in me; he was just speaking a truth he assumed I embraced.
I tilt my head back and watch the sky wash from a deep, still purple to a brightening blue and know I should just ask my father.
But Abony’s words trip through my brain with an unignorable clatter;
...they let you think you were a woman without treating you with the respect a woman deserves. They gave you all the shallow trappings, but didn’t fortify you with the foundation you needed.
I don’t know if they’ll tell me the truth. I don’t know if I want to know it. I don’t know what I want. Maybe I don’t want anything.
And then I find myself outside his apartment.
The morning sun is shining off his windows, blinding me when I try to squint up and see if he’s around. I stoop down and scoop up a handful of pebbles, but it’s hard to take aim when the sun is intent on singing my retinas.
I throw and hear the wild patter of rock on glass, then pick up another bunch and am about to throw when I hear his voice.
“I definitely deserve to have rocks thrown at me after how I acted yesterday. But then I’d need your nursing again.
Which may be more fair punishment. Also, good morning.”
He’s leaned out the window, his hair mussed, his mouth, that perfect mouth, twisted in an unsure smile, one eye squinted shut, a purple ring around the outside of it.
And he’s not wearing a shirt.
I hate to be that kind of girl, who’s thinking of
pecs and triceps and biceps and deltoids when what I’ve always known and trusted about my family might just be shattering in front of me. But...
There they are. And there he is. Half-naked, framed by the window, the morning sun warm on all that exposed
skin, I realize Cormac only gives the impression of being skinny with his clothes on. Stipped down, he’s more a lean, lethal stretch of man, his muscles nicely curved and flattened in all the perfect places, and this realization registers a telltale heat between my legs.
“Good morning,” I
say, my voice surprisingly calm considering my rioting, sexually crazed thoughts. But that’s the extent of my calm, reasonable conversation. After that greeting, I’m all out of comments.
“If I ignore the fact that you could, at any moment, pummel me with that entire handful of rocks, I might assume that you’re actually not completely pissed to see me?” His smile spreads wide across his face, dopey and pleading and...
irresistible.
Smiling.
It’s the antithesis of what I thought I’d be doing this morning, but here I am, smiling up at him as he gazes down at me like the world didn’t just spiral out of control last night.
“No even remotely pissed,” I assure him, and, to prove it, I hold out my fist and open it, letting all the rocks
plummet to the ground below. “How are your hands?”
“They are swollen, painful reminders of my near-constant stupidity. How are yours?”
The smiling turns to laughter, and the sound of our laughs mingling makes the a warm heat radiate low in me.
“Fine.
Then again, I didn’t slam them into some meathead’s jaw then have a friend douse them in wart remover, so, there’s that. Um, by the way...” I trail off and he raises one dark eyebrow expectantly. “In the middle of all that insanity yesterday, I don’t think I had a chance to say...well, to say thank you. I’m not saying you should have done what you did,” I rush to add when his smile morphs into a smirk. “You shouldn’t have. It was idiotic. But not unappreciated.”
“It was my absolute pleasure,
Benelli.” I startle at how perfect my name sounds coming from his mouth. “Please let me take you somewhere today. Let’s get something to eat and actually finish our meal this time. Or hike all over hell and creation. Or you can help me translate thousands of pages of Greek epic poetry. Or I could assess graphs in your little notebook with you.”
I stick my hands deep in my hood pockets and curl my toes in my sneakers because I’ve suddenly decided to forget, at least for a little while, all that’s pressing so hard on me and just enjoy being here, now, with him.
“No work. No...” I shake my head and topple over the next words quickly, “No marriage stuff. But food sounds great. Can you get away? Do you have a ton to get done?”
“Nothing I can’t do some other, more boring time, when there isn’t a beautiful woman beckoning at my window.” He pulls his head in, then sticks it back out. “Um, please come in? Would you like to come in? I’ll warn you; it’s tiny and unimpressive up here, but I can’t make peace with the idea of you waiting on the curb for me.”
Alone in his tiny room with him, half-naked.
It feels like the nagging beginning of a bad idea.
A wonderfully bad idea. And right now, I decide I just don’t care.
“I’d love to.”
He points to the wide wooden door next to the street and instructs me to wait and, while I do, I feel this swell of anticipation that I haven’t felt in a long time.
I can remember a time when excitement had to do with me and my girlfriend,
Lala, getting ready for a night out, slipping into our highest heels, pouring ourselves into our sexiest dresses, and smudging on our smokiest makeup so we could entice and charm any and every guy we set our sights on.
Excitement was dancing until our feet blistered, giggling over never having to pay our own tab at a bar, and comparing notes on the guys we met: how fat their bank accounts were, how impressive their degrees were, their golden employment opportunities and gym-bound physiques.
It was on one of those nights when I caught Damian watching me with dark, eager eyes that had a possessive, slightly arrogant quality. He caught my attention from across the entire dance floor.
“He’s no good for you,”
Lala sing-songed, swinging her long blond hair as she shook her hips in time to the music. She narrowed her eyes and puckered those shiny, pink lips, then threw an arm around my waist. “Or maybe he’s exactly what you need. I haven’t seen that look in your eyes...ever.”
And back then, with Damian, I felt wild and free,
unsprung, unhinged, undone.
But then everything slowly tightened up and screwed down into some miserable, serious, boring routine that grated on both of us until all the romance fizzled and we were left with the flat, syrupy backwash of our initial love affair.
Cormac opens the door, and I yank the leash of my disappointment over the fact that he put a shirt on before he came down.
“You look like you’re a million miles away.” I watch his hand grip the door until his fingernails bleach white and bloodless.
“I was,” I say, sliding past him and into the cool, damp-smelling hallway. “But I’m here now. And I’m glad.”
I head up the stairs,
Cormac close at my back and my nerves flick and pass series of fragmented, electric messages to my brain:
“Yes, now, him, this, you.”
I ignore them because they’re nothing but gibberish.
Even if gibberish happens to be the language I’m currently most fluent in.
Cormac
3
I might need a
dramamine after following the sway of her hips as she mounts the stairs in front of me. I’m so busy appreciating the careening beauty, I let her lead me down the right side of the hallway and straight to the door of the old man who hoards cats, rather than to my door on the left. I move one hand to her hip to redirect her, and my index finger and thumb skim over an inch of exposed skin.
She and I draw identically sharp breaths in and our eyes nail down twin looks of blatant want.
The logical sentinel of my brain, the guard that knows all too well that this girl is a beautiful, energetic waft of fresh air I will never be able to truly draw into my lungs, smacks a sword against my gut and tells me to back away. Slowly.
But the part of my brain that’s nothing more than a dense bog of pheromones and concentrated testosterone explodes its heady hormones all around those pesky logical forces and drowns out any rational thoughts.
My ears burn and hone on the whispery rush of her breathing, my nostrils suck in the intoxicating swirl of her scent, and my skin feels the transmission of the electrical pulse rising off her.
She pushes past me and grabs my doorknob without asking or waiting for an introduction, because the spill of crazy feelings is more than we know how to deal with and definitely much more than either one of us considers safe to navigate.
“I know, it’s, um, it’s pretty Spartan. The university covers room and board, so I sweat and starve. Not that I’m complaining.”
Shut up, shut up,
I order myself.
She sits on my desk chair and looks around, her sharp blue eyes flitting from my books to my calligraphy pens to my neat stacks of folded clothes and my cracked desk lamp.
“You, um...” She clears her throat delicately because her voice disrupts some kind of unspoken peace we agreed to practice after transferring those heady currents in the hall. “You weren’t kidding about the Spartan thing.”
Spartan, of course, as in
clean and sparse.
Not as in
warrior and heroic.
I’m wishing there was a piece of sporting equipment or...I’m not sure. Maybe some kind of cool weapon? Perhaps a small collection of action movies? Or a nudey magazine?
That might be pushing it.
Maybe I’m over-worrying about my lack of traditionally male accoutrements. I did just start fight in a convoluted attempt to defend her honor. And she was sorely disappointed by that.
Though she kissed me in the garden like she was on fire.
And thanked me...verbally.
My head is
spinning, top-like and so quickly it makes all the mental terror of ancient Greek III seem like child’s play.
“I’m a simple man.” I say it and feel an instant rage at my own stupidity.
She examines some nibs and her smile is the prelude to her laughter. At me.
“So, you do calligraphy?” Her words are innocent enough, but they’re laced through with this smug, condescending smile I wish I didn’t see on her face.
“Of course.” I try to shield the last shreds of my manhood from her disintegrating mocking. “Maybe you can use my services for your upcoming fairytale nuptials.”
My words are as innocent as hers were, but there’s a trickle of venom leaked over them, and it doesn’t go undetected. Her hands still over the nibs and her shoulders stiffen. I’m choked with equal amounts of shame and reckless desire to throw her onto my crisply made bed and erase any doubts she may have about my ability with my...pen.
Awful pun. Ugh. I’m disgusting myself on multiple levels. This girl is making my head feel like a cruelly beaten pi
ñ
ata. Rather than stand another second in this purgatory, I flee to the bathroom.
“I’ll be just a minute.” I say as I close the door between us.
I’m nervous leaving her alone. I’m nervous she’ll realize there are an overabundance of guys who aren’t abusive meatheads or snarky, over-educated asshats and go find one.
She should.
But I don’t want that.