by Julia Kent
“Uh, Mal?” His voice is strangely muffled. “Can’t breathe.”
I look down and realize he’s half an inch from being smothered to death by the girls.
“Sorry!” I jump back, dropping the gauze in his lap, heart pounding.
A lazy smile turns his mouth into a weapon of mass destruction, if by mass you mean my sense of propriety. “I can think of worse ways to die.”
Bzzzz.
My phone startles me. Will rescues the gauze and presses it back against his head while I fumble for the phone. It falls at his feet. He picks it up, the text stream right there on the screen.
“Erections have no correlation with Neanderthal genes,” he reads slowly, wincing as I try to grab the phone, brushing against his ribs and shoulders, his warmth driving me nuts.
“Give that to me!”
He looks down at his crotch. “Never thought about caveman genes and my junk before.”
“Junk? You call it your... junk?”
“What else should I call it?”
“Penis. That’s what it is.”
My fourteen-year-old self has her hand in the air, jumping in her ninth-grade desk chair, begging to be called on because omigod I am in Will Lotham’s bedroom and my boobs almost smothered him and we’re talking about his penis.
“Do you use the proper terms for everything, Mallory?” He makes an inarticulate sound as I peel the gauze off the cut, wiping gently. “You call your pretty place a vulva, right? And you use the word vagina.”
“'Pretty place'?”
He shrugs.
“And yes, I do. Vulva and vagina. And then there’s the clitoris,” I say primly.
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“A clitoris. Never heard of it.”
I freeze and look down at him. Bright eyes meet mine. Is he serious?
“The clitoris is a nerve cluster above the opening to the vagina,” I begin, taking a breath to continue my impromptu human sexuality lecture, because when a man tells you they don’t know what a clitoris is, you educate them immediately.
For the sisterhood. All the women Will is going to sleep with from here on out will thank me later.
He starts to laugh. I’m so tempted to pour the small bottle of isopropyl alcohol directly on his wound, but I’m a kind, compassionate woman, so instead I dab it on with a swab.
“OW!” he bellows.
“Sorry.”
“You’re not sorry at all.”
“I’m sorry for your sex partners that you have no idea what a clitoris is, Will.”
“I know what it is. And my tongue knows how to find one. Blindfolded.”
“Why would you blindfold your tongue?”
Bzzz.
This time, it’s his phone. Turning away, I resist the urge to fan myself. Lord have mercy.
“Huh. Wedding.” I can't help but notice the knuckles on his right hand, the bruising from his brawl with Beastman still evident. Then I realize what he's just said.
“You’re getting married?” I choke out, appalled.
He laughs. “That would be pretty bizarre, given I’m not dating anyone.”
I file that bit of information in the THANK GOD folder in my brain.
“Don’t underestimate how quickly those internet mail-order brides can be delivered, Will.”
“I'm not the groom.” His eyes dim a bit as he says that. “I’m in the wedding party. I’ve got a–” He frowns. “A thing I have to do.”
“You want antibiotic cream?”
He shakes his head. “I'm good.”
“The risk of infection from being hit with a ten-year-old statue is probably small.”
Squinting, he looks at me, hair disheveled, drops of blood on his collar. He’s never been more attractive. Maybe I was a vampire in another life.
Wait. That's not technically possible. Vampires are immortal, so how could I have been one in another life when they get one, eternal life?
Never mind. Will's staring at me staring at his collar. I lick my lips.
“You’re really invested in getting this house under contract. We should talk more about it,” he says, his eyes on me.
On my mouth.
“We should?” Where's this coming from suddenly?
“In a location where you do not have access to weapons.”
I cross my arms over the girls and lift my eyebrows. “Don’t startle women when they’re vulnerable and alone, and–”
“Are you free for dinner tonight?”
11
Words catch in my throat. I just stare and blink, until finally he asks, “Mallory?”
“Dinner?”
“A business dinner,” he says, suddenly looking away. There's a wet spot where I hit him, the hair darker than the rest, slightly matted. Regret kicks in and I feel about two feet tall. “Talk about design trends, real estate, you know.”
I nod. Right. “I can't tonight. I have a date,” I blurt out, remembering David. The app. The asshole who isn't an asshole.
Yet. I haven't met him, so that judgment remains withheld.
“A date?”
“Yes. A date. You know, that thing where you go out with someone who has no intention of really getting to know you and you spend the entire time eating bread that doesn’t taste as good as your date claims and trying to decide whether to initiate rescue-text sequences with your mom.”
“That’s your idea of a date?”
“That is my actual experience of every date I’ve had since college.”
“You’re dating the wrong guys.” He holds my gaze for just a little too long. I look away.
“I have to keep fishing in the pond if I ever want to catch a different one.”
“If that’s the way you talk to your dates, I am beginning to understand why they all turn out so badly.”
“Hey!”
“What?”
“Don’t accuse me of being a bad date. I’m a great date! I Google the guy in advance and read his LinkedIn profile. I make sure I don’t wear super-tall heels in case he lied about his height on his dating profile. I pretend to care about all his hobbies and don’t reveal that I’m secretly tallying all the micro-aggressions he’s sending my way during appetizers and wine. And if he makes it to dessert, well–” I falter.
“You never make it to dessert, do you?” Will asks, eyebrows up. He drops them quickly, wincing.
“I–well–it’s not that I don’t. He doesn’t!”
“He ditches you?”
“No! No! It’s just that he always has a thing.”
“A thing?”
“A work emergency. Or a dog with a twisted bowel. Or a grandma in the ER.”
“How many guys used the twisted-canine-intestine thing?”
“Three.” I sit down and sag against his teenage desk, elbows sliding forward, fingers deep in my hair. “I looked it up. There’s an entire subreddit devoted to inventive ways to get out of a bad date.”
“And yet here you are.” He leans against the edge of his desk. “Trying again.”
“I’m a masochist.”
His eyes gleam. “Maybe you should start your dates with that line. ‘Hi. I’m Mallory Monahan. I’m a masochist.’ You’d definitely make it to dessert.”
“I’d make it into the headlines, too. ‘Woman found in cage, collar attached to washing machine after online date goes wrong. News at eleven.’”
I stand and grab my purse while Will laughs.
“Good luck,” he says, voice a little quiet. “I hope this one works out.”
“Why should it? None of the other ones do.”
“Why not?”
I shrug. “I wish I knew.” Sigh. “Perky thinks it’s because I won’t make myself smaller.”
Appreciative eyes look at my body. “You don’t need to be smaller. You’re... great.”
Did Will Lotham just size me up?
“No, no, not this,” I say, patting my hips. “Not my body. I mean me. My mind.
My way of talking.”
“Way of talking?”
“I don’t... hide it.”
“Hide what?”
“The fact that I’m smart.” There. I said it.
“Why would you hide the fact that you’re smart from a guy?”
Laughter, fourteen years of it, all bottled up and fizzy, comes shooting out of me like I’m Diet Coke and his words are Mentos.
“Are you kidding me? You of all people are asking me why I would need to play dumb?”
“What makes me so special?”
Talk about a loaded question.
Nodding toward the door, he motions for me to follow him. We walk down the hallway and into the kitchen, where he grabs something to drink from the mostly empty fridge.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean? You just said you in a way that was loaded with some hidden meaning.” Opening a soda, he raises his eyebrows, then flinches. “Want a drink?”
“No, thank you,” I choke out.
We move over to the breakfast area and sit at the antique pedestal table, beautifully scarred from generations of use. I think briefly about all the important conversations that must have taken place around it, before this one.
He really doesn’t know. Really, really doesn’t know. I knew I was shy. I knew I was also careful. But to sit here ten years after graduation and realize I spent four years of my emerging adulthood hiding my feelings about this guy and being extremely successful at it makes a part of me feel so stupid.
Mostly the teenage part.
A mature, worldly woman would admit it. Make it a joke. Turn the past into a whimsical ha ha, a shared laugh that would display how far she’d come since high school graduation. A mature, worldly woman would invite Will out for drinks, talk over martinis, and wax nostalgic about those carefree years.
I, unfortunately, am neither mature nor worldly.
“I just mean, you know.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Remember ninth grade? When we had to debate in English class?”
“You mean the debate about animal rights in laboratory research to cure cancer?”
“Yes.”
“What about it?”
“You said, in front of the entire class, that I couldn’t possibly make a reasoned argument because I was emotionally attached to the animals.”
“You were!”
“You then made the broad generalization that all girls were impossibly biased.”
He’s halfway through a swallow of soda and starts choking. “I said that?”
“You did.”
“I don’t remember that!”
“Maybe the memory is buried by the sound of all your football buddies laughing their asses off.”
“Oh.” He frowns. “I guess I do remember that.”
“So.” I cross my arms over my chest. Point made.
“So?”
I shrug with one shoulder.
“That proves nothing. You took that away from some cocky comment I made while I was trying to win a debate and get a better grade? You didn’t have to dumb yourself down. ”
“Didn’t I?”
“Why would you take that lesson away from some random comment a dumbass fourteen-year-old boy made? I wasn’t exactly enlightened. That was half our lives ago! I used to think all kinds of bullshit.”
“Because I was a supersensitive fourteen-year-old girl, Will.”
“How could something I barely remember hurt you so much?”
“I didn’t say it hurt. Just that it made me dumb myself down.”
“No. No way. There's no way one comment like that did it.”
“I–”
He’s watching me in a way that makes it clear he’s studying me. Figuring me out. This isn’t about his being right. It’s about Will trying to find the truth.
Dear God. He’s more dangerous than I thought.
My heart starts to pound hard, the drumbeat moving up under my collarbone as I wait him out. He’s patient, but he’s far less practiced. I have a treasure trove from four years of turning Will Lotham into my unofficial honors class, an independent-study project that no teacher supervised. If you could earn an A+ in Will, I’d have that shiny grade on my high school transcript.
But never, ever, did I imagine he’d study me right back.
“Mal.” His frown is miles deep. “What else?”
“It was your friends.”
“Which ones?”
“The big, hulking ones.”
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
“Ramini. Osgood. Fletch.” A mental image of them in their football jerseys, one of them half sitting on the edge of my rickety desk, makes my stomach sour.
“What about them?”
“After the debate. They... said stuff. Did stuff.”
He goes tense. “Did stuff? To you?”
“No, not like that.”
“Then like what?”
“They told me you were right. Later on, in the hallway as we walked to lunch. They said a girl couldn’t beat Will Lotham. Said I was being stupid for even trying. They told me I talked too much in class.”
“You didn’t.”
“Does it matter? They said I did. And then they told me to give them copies of my study guides.”
“What?” Real outrage flashes in his eyes. “I assume you said no.”
“Of course.” I look over at the pine server, where a pile of Zen stacking stones sits with great anticipation. The expectation of stress release is mocking me, telling me I’m derelict in not doing what I need to relax. Pressured by Zen.
Classic Mallory.
“And?”
“And they got mad.”
“And...?” This time, the word is drawn out in that way people say it when they’re really listening. He’s caught up in my story, half participant, half observer. I’m connecting him to behind-the-scenes events when all he has is the center stage. What’s in front of the backdrop is all Will’s memory has.
“One of them called me a name. It starts with c.”
Will growls.
“He told me I would regret it. He looked at his own hand and curled it into a fist.”
Will’s eyes go wide with astonishment, a small, incredulous laugh slipping out of him. But it’s a low sound, protective, and it’s invoking something dormant in me, a feeling that I can’t fight even if I try.
Leaning closer to me, as if entering my space to keep me safe, Will asks, “He threatened you?”
“It was implied.”
“Did you do anything about it?”
“Like what? Punch a two-hundred-pound freshman football player in the face?”
“No, like tell a teacher.”
“Tell her what? That he looked at his fist? Of course not. Really good bullies know how to skirt the line. He was gifted. If Harmony Hills had a gifted and talented class for bullying, Ramini would have been the teacher’s pet. Osgood could have been an extra on The Sopranos. And Fletch looked like the high school equivalent of a bouncer.”
“So it was Ramini? He could be a jerk sometimes.”
“He could be a jerk all the time, to some of us. But I'm not telling you which one it was.”
“It was Ramini, Osgood, or Fletch, though.”
I shrug.
“I–” Will deflates slightly, a hopelessly confused look on his face. “I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
“I know I didn’t do it, but it feels like someone should tell that sensitive fourteen-year-old girl 'I’m sorry.'”
“I didn’t bring this up to have a pity party.” I stand, thoroughly reeling, turning to leave.
“Mallory,” he says, grabbing my arm, making me stay. He has no idea what he is doing to my pulse. “I don’t think you’re doing that.”
“I know I’m not.”
“I want to make sure you know I know you’re not.”
We freeze. I’m wearing a short-sleeved wrap shirt, and
his fingers curl around my elbow, the touch firm but respectful. His palm is soft, the kind of skin men have when they don’t use their hands to work for a living. He has long fingers, elegant and tapered. I should know. I’m staring at his hand.
Breathing together becomes an end in itself, our chests rising and falling as if choreographed. I’m looking at his hand and he’s looking at me. My face can feel it, the intensity palpable, the ache of my past self turning quickly into a very different ache in lower parts of my body. The woman I am becoming is deeply appreciative of this extraordinarily handsome man standing before me, breathing with me.
And touching me.
“The minute I came home, the past came rushing forward, like it had been waiting this whole time, impatient and fidgety. Waiting for its turn,” Will says as his fingers open and drop, one by one, from my arm. As the brush of his thumb removes our connection, I feel hollow.
I didn’t know how full I felt just from that touch.
“Were you running away from the past?”
“No. Running toward my future. The past wasn’t fast enough to catch up.”
“You sound like most of our graduating class.”
“That’s because most of us left. But you didn’t.”
“No.” I look him in the eye and have no reaction. I’ve cultivated this response. He’s not original in his topic. Most people wonder why the class valedictorian stayed so close to home. Brown was only ninety minutes away. My job with the Tollesons was here. My apartment, my friends–the continuity in my life is strong.
Tilting his head just so, for a brief second Will’s eyes flicker with questions I can tell he thinks he doesn’t have a right to ask. Not yet, those eyes say.
But soon.
What do you do when you can’t read another person as well as you want to?
You divert.
“Wait a minute.” I bite my lower lip and activate the movie reel of memory in my mind. “That day on the porn set, here at your parents’ house.”
“What about it?” His head shake tells me my distraction technique is working a little too well.
“I have a question.”
