The Wild One (19 page)

“Not always alone,” I say. “I bet some boyfriends are supportive.”

“Probably.” Joe doesn't sound like he believes it. “My sister's boyfriend dumped her the night before she had to go to England.”

“That's awful,” I say.

“I got him back,” says Joe. “I saw him in a bar in town a couple of weeks later. I punched him. Broke his nose.”

“You're a nice brother.”

“I wish I hadn't had to do it.”

“I wish I hadn't had to do it too,” I say. Suddenly, I know I'm going to cry. I close my eyes, and the tears roll down my cheeks. “I was stupid. I was so naïve. It wasn't even a year ago, but I've changed so much since then. If I could go back in time, I would never have gone home with Eric. I wish— I wish—” I can't talk anymore.

“It's okay,” says Joe, brushing his hands against my cheeks to wipe away the tears. “It's really okay.”

Joe wraps his arms around me and I snuggle right in to him. He's so warm and lovely, and I feel so safe that I stop crying. I take some big, shaky breaths, calming myself down.

“You okay?”

“I'm okay. Talk to me about something else. Tell me stories about the hundreds of women you've slept with.”

“Okay,” Joe says, says, stroking my hair. “Would you like to hear about the wonderful events of my first time?”

“Yes.”

“Last year of school. My girlfriend. And she had to tell me I wasn't putting it in the place that I, uh, thought it was in.”

I crack up.

“It was fine! I found all the right bits eventually. You know. Trial and error. It was nice. Special. For me, anyway.” Joe pauses. “Then she cheated on me.”

“Bitch,” I say. “What happened?”

“The usual. She went away for college, met someone else, couldn't bear to break up with me. I found out because someone else I know posted photos of a party on Instagram. Some guy was kissing her.”

I make an involuntary
urgh
sound. “That's bad.”

Joe shrugs. “She was just young. That's what I think now. We both were. Shit happens. It's all part of growing up.”

I nod. “That's what I think now too. About Eric, and everything after. It's just part of my past. Like everything else, good and bad.”

We lie in silence for a moment. Then I run my fingers along the muscles on his back.

When I touch him, he takes a deep breath and makes a peaceful little
hmmmm
sound, and I get that nervous flutter again. It's the same feeling as when I'm with Topher, but somehow … warmer, safer.

I gaze at up him, willing Joe to open his eyes and look at me, to feel what I'm feeling.

Bizarrely, he does.

We stare at each other for a moment.

Without warning, Joe shifts and pulls me under him so he's pinning me to the bed with the entire length of his body. He looks serious, more serious than I've ever seen him and, my God, so perfect.

He kisses me slowly.

Then he pulls back and looks into my eyes. I feel totally exposed, emotionally naked, if that makes any sense, lying here, nose-to-nose, so close, in the lamplight.

Joe smiles. “Beautiful.”

I frown when he says it. He clears his throat and says it again, his voice low and intense.

“Really. You are. You're so beautiful.”

Then we start kissing. Real kissing. Kissing with intent. The kind of kisses that make your entire body tingle and your lips feel swollen. We undress each other, still with the light on, and I try my hardest to cover myself, especially my thighs, but then—

“So perfect,” Joe says, almost under his voice, running his hands down my thighs. “Soft and smooth. Your body is incredible. Just the way women are meant to be.” Then he says that word again. The word I've never thought about myself. “Beautiful.”

“I…” I can't find the words to contradict him. I look down at our naked bodies and think,
Maybe he's right.
His body is long, hard, muscled. My body is soft and smooth and voluptuous. It's meant to be like this.

And then we … well, you know.

This time it's different. This time I feel like I'm here, really here, present in the moment. My body, my soul, my brain: all acting in unison. I'm not just using him for his body, and I'm not closing my eyes and pretending I'm someone else. I'm here.

We're here, together.

An hour later, when we're lying half-draped over each other, sticky and sated, Joe moves his head to my stomach, and I absently stroke his wild man hair. My nervous tummy is finally gone.

I am perfectly content. “Oh, Coco,” Joe murmurs. “That was amazing.”

I don't even know what to say. It was more than amazing. It was sex like I always imagined sex would be.

“Thank hell we became friends, right?”

My chest clutches for a second. Is he making a joke? I can't tell.

“Friends…” I repeat. “Of course. That's us. Friends.”

“Friends who get to see each other naked and have fun, isn't that what you said?”

“Yup.” My voice is barely a whisper.

Joe must sense that I thought there was more between us. He's warning me there's not. So I don't get hurt again. Because he's just a womanizer, a total player, the kind of guy you can be friends with, hook up with, but never date.

And
boom.
My happiness is shattered.

We're just friends.

I was stupid for thinking I felt anything else. I will never make that mistake again.

 

CHAPTER
21

I love walking the Greenwich Village streets around New York University.

Even now, on a sunny midsummer morning, when most students are on vacation, it feels special. A huge college, with over fifty thousand students, in the middle of the best city in the world. Isn't that wild? I always thought of college as something isolated way out in a small town in the middle of nowhere, you know, where you're just stuck all the time and the food sucks and the locals hate you, but NYU is in the middle of downtown Manhattan. It's so cool.

Topher e-mailed me back the assignment and asked me to proofread it one more time, print it out, and drop it off at Professor Guffey's office for him. She's requested that everyone print them out and deliver them in person, rather than e-mail them.

I finally get to her office, on the top floor of a nondescript building on Greene Street, just a couple of blocks from Washington Square Park. There's a plaque on her door.
ROSEMARY GUFFEY. PROFESSOR OF LITERATURE, PROFESSOR OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANALYSIS.
She won't be here—she has a class on the other side of campus. I checked. (I'm not stupid.)

I slide the assignment under the door, stand up, and walk down the hall.

“Coco?”

My entire body seizes with panic.

I turn around. “Professor Guffey!”

Professor Guffey smiles and stoops to pick up the paper. Without looking at the paper, or the name on the front—
Topher Amies—
she beckons for me to come inside.

“I was hoping to talk to you,” she says. “Come into my office.”

Oh, my God, I'm so busted.

Why isn't she in her class?

I follow her in, feeling icy dread in the pit of my stomach. She hasn't looked at the name on the assignment yet, and as she walks behind her desk, she opens a file, drops it in, and closes it, all without glancing at the name.

She doesn't know I just handed in Topher's assignment and not my own.

Yet.

The walls of her office are lined with books. My eyes nervously flick around.

“Wow, you have so many books,” I blurt out. “I mean, of course you do, but, um…”

“I'm a book person,” she says. “I know it's old-fashioned, but I can't see myself on a Kindle anytime soon.”

“Oh, me too,” I say. “If I'm getting the train home to Rochester, or whatever, you know, it's a long journey, and books are so heavy, then maybe I'll use the Kindle app on my iPad. But I like the feel of books. I like the permanence of them.” I'm gabbling now, my eyes darting around the shelves, desperately searching for something to distract her. “The smell. The weight. The whole thing.”

“Exactly,” she says. “Now—”

“Oh, look!
Jane Eyre,
I love that book, and
Little Women,
of course, I know that one by heart, I've read it what feels like a million times. I first read it when I was, like, eight years old,” I know it's rude to interrupt, but I can't bear for her to ask me if I'm really a student here. I can't lie to her face, but if I don't, Topher might be expelled, right? “Um, and we studied
A Doll's House
in high school, but I never really clicked with it.”

Professor Guffey laughs. “High school has a way of destroying any real love for the written word. I hated Shakespeare in high school, truly, I did. I thought it was overrated, at best. Then I read
Much Ado About Nothing
of my own accord when I was twenty-three, and I just … got it.”

I grin. “I never got Shakespeare either. Maybe I should try him again in a couple of years.”

Professor Guffey nods. “Maybe you should.”

She pauses, thinking.

My breath catches in my throat. Then she leans over to her laptop, taps a few buttons, and walks over to her printer. A moment later, it prints out a sheet, which she picks up and hands to me.

“I was thinking about you last night. I made a list of books you should—I mean, might like to read,” she says, leaning against her desk.

“You did? Why? I mean—thanks, but why?”

“The summer course list is a good start, but it's Russian-centric, of course, and there's so much more out there. Particularly novels by women, about what it felt like to be a woman in eighteenth-century London or nineteenth-century France or New York or … well, you get the gist.”

I am not sure what to say. No teacher has ever taken a special interest in me before.

“This isn't for studying,” she adds quickly. “And it's not compulsory. This is just because I think you'll enjoy them.”

“Um … thank you. Seriously, so much.”

I look at the list. I've never read the books on it, even if I've heard of them.
Indiana
by George Sand.
Villette
by Charlotte Brontë.
Ruth Hall
by Fanny Fern.
The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton.
The Coquette
by Hannah W. Foster.
The Awakening
by Kate Chopin.
Evelina
by Fanny Burney.
North and South
by Elizabeth Gaskell.
Middlemarch
by George Eliot.

“I'll read them, but I probably won't understand them,” I say, trying to joke.

But Professor Guffey frowns. “Of course you will. They're not difficult. They're just stories. There's nothing intimidatingly intellectual to understand … you just need to feel them.”

“But…” I pause. “I'm just not smart enough.”

“Coco, I know you're smart. It's in everything that you do, what you say, how you say it—”

I laugh, despite myself. “That's not what my father says. And my high school grades were not exactly stellar—”

“High school is nothing,” interrupts Professor Guffey, snapping her fingers to emphasize her point. “It is
not
an indicator of the rest of your life. Your teachers didn't encourage you like they did some other students? So what? That's their mistake. Don't make it yours. High school teachers are not the masters of the damn universe. Neither is your father. He doesn't decide your fate.”

I am stunned by her intensity. She really seems to care. “Okay, I will. I'll read them. Thank you, Professor Guffey.”

I stand up to leave.

“I'm sure you'll like those books,” says Professor Guffey. “Even if you're not at NYU studying them, you'll enjoy them.”

Something goes clunk in my stomach.

She knows.

I can't bear to turn around and meet her eyes. I walk out, closing the door behind me.

She knows I'm not a student here.

She knows I'm stealing education.

She knows I'm a liar.

But why should I care? I won't get in trouble; I can't get kicked out of a school I don't even go to, right? And Topher can't get into trouble either. She doesn't even know that I practically wrote Topher's assignment. I mean, I could have been just dropping it off for him, right?

It still feels wrong. I feel guilty. I feel like a bad person. I'm never a bad person.

Maybe deep down, I'll always be a good girl.

My brain whirring, I walk in the blazing sunshine all the way down to SoHo, stopping for a coconut water, and then all the way down Broadway to City Hall and over the Brooklyn Bridge. I walk and walk and walk.

As I walk, I think back to my stupid Happy List.

My Happy List

1. Be thin

2. Fall in love

3. Figure out what to do with the rest of my life

I thought I'd made such headway toward happiness this summer: having casual fun sex with Joe, hanging out with Topher, working in a bar for cash, learning for free during the day.

But I'm no closer to achieving any of those things than I ever was.

I'm still not thin, I'm still not in love, and I still don't know what to do with the rest of my life. I'm still the kind of good girl who feels bad for getting in trouble with a teacher, and she's
not even my teacher.

I worry about Professor Guffey all the way home.

But I stop at BookCourt on Court Street and pick up
Middlemarch,
and then go home, walk right up to my attic room, and read.

 

CHAPTER
22