I wished I could paint her like this. The sight of her, sprawled on my bed, naked, open to me…like the sun, it was almost too much to bear looking at, yet I wanted desperately to preserve the image forever.
She started holding her breath for little stretches, which was what she’d done last time just before she came, so I let myself slam into her, grinding hard when I was buried to the hilt and letting my own eyes close so I could submit to the torrent washing over me. I came to the edge, both relieved and resentful that it was about to be over. The last thing I remember, before I let the drowning happen, was Jenny exclaiming, wonder in her tone, “I’m going to come again!”
When it was over and I had swum back to the shore, heart pounding, chest heaving, she was quiet—for once. I didn’t quite know what to do with that. But also, if she wasn’t going to speak, I certainly didn’t know what to say. I was afraid if we started talking, it would puncture this…balance we had achieved, and she would go back to her room. And whatever else happened, I didn’t want her to encounter her shitty roommate tonight. Or, worse, Royce. The idea of Royce bothering her. The idea of Royce looking at her. No.
The silence that had settled wasn’t an uncomfortable one, so I thought it was probably okay to just let it be. So I held her, her head on my chest, and listened to the sound of her breathing ratcheting down. The spaces between each inhale grew longer. Her body grew heavier. I could feel myself losing the battle against sleep, too. I didn’t want to, though, not quite yet. So I gently eased her off my chest, praying she wouldn’t wake up.
It was nearly dark. To think, the day had started with me drawing her, and ended with her shattering beneath me. It had started with me trying to blend the right colors to capture the ridiculous blue of her ridiculous dress, and now that ridiculous dress was wadded up on the floor of my room. I pulled the covers up over her, leaving only her face exposed to the dim extraneous light filtering in from the courtyard through the crack in the curtains. I’d always called her Rainbow Brite, but when she didn’t have her fluffy, colorful clothes on, she was actually quite pale. Her lips, pink and plump against her porcelain skin, were the only shot of color on her tonight. It reminded me of a muted version of the woman on the Duran Duran cover.
I lowered my lips, placing them, feather-light, against hers.
The movement was gentle, measured, calculated not to startle her.
But the thought that whipped into my consciousness as I did so was the reverse: unexpected, unbidden, jarring.
I was made to kiss Jenny Fields.
Chapter Six
Jenny
Well, I’d finally gotten my money’s worth from the dress, I thought, grinning as I picked it up off the floor of Matthew’s room and shimmied back into it while he slept. A slice of bright sunshine razored into the room where the curtains stood open a few inches. There were no clocks of any sort in his room, so I had no idea what time it was.
But I did know that I had to pee something fierce—not to mention get that sponge out. (Please let the sponge have worked.)
But no. I wasn’t going to think about reality yet. Sponges and Nessa and Royce and the art building and graduation and Dad—none of it. When I reached the door to the bathroom, I pretended it was all those things and pushed them away as I straightened my arms to open it.
What if I just decided to ignore reality for a little while? I had never done that. I peed and got rid of the sponge. I didn’t even say a prayer for its efficacy, because I decided that anxiety was part of the reality I was now officially on hiatus from. I gave myself a quick glance in the mirror, but who cared what I looked like, right? Reality: not interested. See? This was fun.
The one reality I couldn’t escape was my morning breath, so, lacking a toothbrush, I swished with water as hot as I could stand and hoped for the best. Given the…amazingness of last night, I was pretty sure Matthew wasn’t going to care.
Besides, I thought, unable to resist a little skip as I padded back down the hall to his room, I had learned that there were plenty of other places he could put his mouth. My face heated as the parts in question jumped to attention. My attraction to Matthew had been well established before last night. It was, in fact, why I had thrown the sponge in my bag when he called and asked if he could draw me. I hadn’t assumed it would happen, but a part of me had hoped it would.
And when it had…dear God, I’d had no idea.
I had been thinking of my virginity like a cast that had come off. I didn’t want it anymore, and sex was what I had to do to saw it off. It wasn’t that I’d been expecting it to be unpleasant. I just hadn’t known it was possible for someone to be so tender and deliciously rough at the same time. So solicitous yet ravenous. My whole body tingled from the memory. My poor, poor body had had a taste of what was possible and, I feared, was never going to let me forget it.
I stood with my hands pressed against another door, the door to Matthew’s room. I had no idea what was going to happen, but I knew one thing with certainty. This time I didn’t want to push anything away. I didn’t even want to fix anything. I didn’t want to talk about what he was going to do after graduation. At this moment, I didn’t even care about the art building. (I didn’t care about the art building!)
I just wanted more of the person who had made me feel this way, like reality was just an inconvenience to be postponed for later. So I pushed open the door that stood between us.
He was bent over, pulling on his jeans, and disappointment cut through me. But it was probably late. He probably had to be in class.
“Hey,” I ventured, not even trying to temper the grin I could feel splaying across my face. God, to look at that bare, gently sculpted chest. At those arms and hands, so capable of so many things: punching Royce, drawing something so beautiful it hurt, bringing me to orgasm. To have them displayed like that, like I had enough ownership to see him so casually bared, made my stomach flutter.
He looked up, finished pulling up his jeans, and straightened, echoing my greeting. “Hey.” There was no answering smile as he turned and began stuffing things into his backpack. “So, I gotta get to the studio,” he said, still facing away from me. “I have an appointment with my mentor for my senior portfolio later today.” When he finally stopped messing with his backpack, he had to turn around—there was no way for him to not look at me as he left the room. But the face that turned back to me wore a neutral, bland expression. Not angry or upset. Just…empty. Not the way I imagined a guy should look at a girl when he’d spent a good portion of time the night before with his head between her legs. Or forget that, even—what about the drawings? The confrontation at the pub? The cartoon? Was that all just…gone?
“Right.” I blinked several times in succession, willing the tears that were gathering to dissipate. I knew I was being blown off. It wasn’t like I thought we’d become girlfriend and boyfriend. Not necessarily, anyway. I started to say something to that effect, to reassure him. But I swallowed the words before they could escape, adding them to the bitter lump forming in my throat. Because to say something like that sounded desperate, implied that I had entertained the notion long enough to dismiss it.
But I had. That was the horrible truth I could never admit to anyone. I’d been pushing away reality because I hadn’t wanted to overthink things. I hadn’t wanted to ruin things. I’d decided for one second in my life to just let myself be. But the problem with exorcising reality was that the thing that replaced it was fantasy. Matthew and Jenny, the unlikely couple, striding across campus hand in hand. Me bringing him food. Watching him paint. Publishing his cartoons.
Falling asleep in his arms.
Fantasy. It was, by definition, false. It floated away on the wind.
And once it was gone, it left a vacuum. And what do they say? Nature abhors a vacuum? It must be true, because once fantasy is gone, reality comes whooshing back in, violently filling all the space available to it, clattering up against your insides.
There was nothing left to do bu
t try to save face. I looked around the room and spotted a shoe. As I bent to collect it, he said, “Take your time.”
I glanced up. Had I misinterpreted him saying he had to go to the studio?
“If you can just turn the lock on the doorknob before you shut it behind you, that would be great.”
No. I had read the situation correctly. He was going to leave, and he wasn’t even going to wait two minutes for me to get my stuff together. He couldn’t get away from me fast enough. I didn’t trust my voice, so I just nodded. This was what happened when you didn’t plan, when you shoved reality aside: you weren’t prepared for heartbreak when it came crashing down on you like an anvil falling from the sky in an old-fashioned cartoon.
He paused with his hand on the doorknob and cleared his throat. “See you.”
He didn’t wait for my reaction, which was good, because he didn’t see me start to cry.
Matthew
The thing is, I had never kissed anybody before without getting something out of it. It had always been a prelude to something else. Not a bargaining chip, per se. I wasn’t that calculating. But, in the past, kisses had always been…transactional. The first act in a longer production. Not ends in themselves.
I was made to kiss Jenny Fields. That had been the thought drifting through my mind last night as I succumbed to sleep. As unlikely as the situation was—as unlikely as she was—I hadn’t been able to stop myself from pressing my mouth against her petal-pink lips.
But in the harsh light of day, I could not ignore the question that followed: why? Why on earth would I have bothered kissing someone who wasn’t even awake to feel it?
And as I laid there, pretending to be asleep but peeking at her as she struggled into her dress and slipped out of my room—her bare feet signaling that she was only headed for the bathroom, and not, as my cowardly heart had hoped, actually leaving—I forced myself to confront the truth: I knew what that rib-cracking feeling last night had been.
And that was not happening.
I’d been on my knees before her, for fuck’s sake. Rainbow Brite had literally brought me to my knees.
And I could not afford that kind of distraction. The end was in sight, if I could just wrangle Curry and this senior project. I hadn’t been working myself to the bone for nearly four years to go soft just before the finish line. And that was what Rainbow Brite made me: soft. Soft wasn’t going to get me where I needed to be. Soft was unacceptable. As I stalked across campus, shaky and starving, self-disgust flowed through me. Maybe it would freeze the weakness out of me, harden the lava I’d imagined Jenny pouring through me last night, leaving me strong and unbendable.
As I yanked open the huge, heavy oak door to the art building to get my drawings before I caught the bus into the city, I paused, breathing heavily, and physically rested my forehead against the wood. This door was more than a hundred years old. The thought was oddly grounding. Calming. The door never changed. It had acquired the patina of age, of course, its scrapes and nicks marking the march of years. But it hadn’t changed fundamentally. Hard and difficult to move, it was immune to the generations of students, to their dramas, to the passage of something as insignificant as time.
After a few more deep breaths, the panic began to loosen its hold on my gut enough that I was able to make my way to the studio to fetch the drawings I would bring to Curry. I packed quickly, averting my eyes from the images as I slid them into a portfolio. By the time I pushed against the building’s front door again, I was composed. Solid, like the door. Made of strong, unbreakable wood.
Chapter Seven
Jenny
It was days like this I wished Dad wasn’t so far away. It wasn’t that I expected him ever to get his shit together enough that I could confide in him so he could comfort me. (Besides, I don’t think even fathers who are paragons of mental health want to hear about how their daughters gave it up to a boy who turned out to be a total jerkface.) But sometimes I envied students whose families lived close enough that they could go home for the weekend. Because right about now, climbing into my childhood bed, pulling the covers over my head, and hiding from the world long enough to get my self back without everyone’s eyes on me sounded like heaven.
I took a deep breath at the door to my room and tried to tell myself that facing Nessa couldn’t be worse than the hateful version of Matthew I’d encountered earlier. Part of me hoped she wouldn’t be there. But it was probably better to get it over with. I had resolved to tell her about Royce. Then we’d have to find a way to get on. It was too close to the end of the year to expect housing services to reassign us, but if worse came to worst, I could crash at Tony’s off-campus apartment, assuming he wasn’t entertaining one of his legions of female admirers.
Just as I was about go to the door, it opened from the inside.
I jumped, and so did Nessa.
Then she threw her arms around me and started crying.
* * *
It hadn’t been nearly as hard as I’d anticipated to tell Nessa about my scary encounter with Royce at freshman orientation. I had expected her to be angry, and she was, but not in the way I’d been braced for. I’d prepared myself for her to be defensive, to not believe me, to take Royce’s part.
But instead, after informing me that she’d broken up with Royce the night before, she started laying into me about not telling her earlier. “I don’t even mean once I started dating him, Jenny. Like, earlier-earlier. Why have you been carrying this around for three and a half years without talking to anyone?”
I shrugged. “I dunno. He just grabbed my boobs. It’s not like he—”
“Don’t make excuses for him. God. I’m such a dipstick.” She’d been sitting next to me on my bed, but she stood and walked over to her own and gave her pillow a hearty thwack. “Ugh! I wish I could hit him.”
“Well, actually…” I said, grinning at the memory of Matthew decking Royce, even though thinking about Matthew at all was sort of like taking a razor blade to my heart. I hadn’t been planning to tell her about Matthew. But then, I hadn’t been expecting the old Nessa, the one who was funny and smart and sympathetic and not brainwashed. So it all came out.
She was hugging me again by the time I was done with my tale of woe. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, sitting on my bed and holding me in her arms while I cried.
I shrugged. “I wanted to lose my virginity.”
“Not about that. Well, I am sorry about that. But I meant I’m sorry I pretty much abandoned you this year. I feel like if I had been…more present, maybe none of this stuff with Matthew would have happened.”
I shook my head. “I abandoned you too. I hate myself for not telling you about Royce earlier. I feel like I let you walk into the lion’s den with no warning.” The guilt was stronger than ever now that I had my old friend back. What had been wrong with me? How could I not have warned her?
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” she said. “Lots of people told me he was bad news. Like Dawn Hathaway—if anyone should know, it would be the gossip columnist, right? But I didn’t listen. I was determined to be with him.”
“Why?” I asked, as gently as I could.
“I’m not as strong as you, Jenny. I mean, who am I? I get B-minuses. I never talk in class. I’m the production coordinator of the newspaper. You know why I went for that job?”
It had never occurred to me to ask. “Why?”
“Because when you’re production coordinator, you don’t have to go out into the world and ask people questions. You just have to make sure everything’s running smoothly.”
“It’s an important job,” I protested.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t. But it’s also an invisible job.”
I sighed. I got it. “And then Royce takes notice, and suddenly you’re not invisible anymore.”
“The parties, the beautiful people, the gifts. It was a whirlwind.” She shook her head, clearly frustrated with herself. “And the truth is, I didn’t want to resist. I wanted to…pre
tend for a while.” Her voice caught. “Even though, somewhere in my heart, I knew it wasn’t real.”
It was my turn to hug her. We sat like that for a while; then she sniffed and pulled away, flashing me a crooked smile. “You know what? I’m kind of wondering now if he pursued me because of you.”
“How do you mean?” I asked, though I knew full well what she meant.
“He talked about you all the time. It was almost like he was obsessed with you.” She cocked her head and stared at the ceiling for a moment. “You know, I met him at that frat party in September. You remember? The Delta Chi back-to-school bash? You took Beth home early because she was sick.”
I did remember. The youngest member of the newspaper had miscalibrated a bit on her first big college party, and I’d felt responsible for her. Ironically, I hadn’t wanted Royce to get her in his sights. I couldn’t have imagined my roommate would roll in hours later, aflutter because she’d kissed the guy and he was taking her sailing that weekend.
“I knew Royce, of course,” said Nessa. We all did. You didn’t go to Allenhurst without knowing its golden boy, at least by reputation. “But I’d never spoken a word to him in three years. But that night, right after you left with Beth, he came up to me and asked if I knew you. He had seen us talking earlier. I told him we’d been roommates since the beginning.” She huffed a bitter laugh. “And then he asked me out.”
God. It only confirmed my suspicions, but I felt terrible for Nessa, grappling not only with the news that her boyfriend was a horrible person, but that he had been using her this whole time. “Yeah, I don’t think anyone has ever told Royce ‘no’ before. I feel like maybe he has been a little obsessed with me. Not because he likes me, but because…” It was hard to explain.
The Fixer: New Wave Newsroom Page 7
