“Of course. She was one of our best.” His voice cracked. “Did you come all the way down here just to drop these off?” He checked his watch. “Come to my office. Let’s chat awhile. This here is Nina Nelson.” He turned to Nina. “I do believe you were a friend of Layne’s, correct?”
Nina cleared her throat. “Yes, yes, I did know Layne,” she answered and then looked at me with her hand extended. “I’m so sorry for your loss. . . .” She paused when my hand rested in hers. “Your name again?”
“Taryn. Layne’s wife.” I shook her hand hard.
“Come, ladies.” Dean Henry walked in front of me and Nina as he headed into his office. Behind him, she and I glanced at one another briefly before we sat on the love seat near the back of his office, which seemed more like a mini library, with shelves of books and comfortable seating. Dean Henry sat in a matching single chair to my right.
“How are things at the center?” he asked.
“Well, thank you. Seems like we continue to grow with each year, thanks to the support of so many in the community and throughout Chicago.”
“It’s been some time since Layne sat on the board, but perhaps the school could make a donation on her behalf.” He opened his portfolio and jotted a note on the yellow pad.
“That’s a generous offer. Thank you.”
“It’s no problem. Nina, how well did you know Layne? I thought I saw the two of you together from time to time. Or maybe it was this old man’s eyesight playing tricks on me.” He gave a throaty chuckle at his corny jest.
Nina responded with an exaggerated laugh, her breasts jiggling. “Oh, Charles, you are a funny guy. About Layne . . . yes, we met years ago and became good friends, and I agree with what you said earlier. She was one of the best.”
I turned my head to Nina, annoyed by her sly implication, and her eyes met mine. She continued talking.
“Layne was incredibly dedicated to the school and to the students. She talked about her love for teaching all the time.”
Charles’s head wobbled in agreement. “She would work the longest hours. Her students meant the world to her.”
“She was focused on giving all that she had to what was important to her,” Nina said, chiming in again. “Her late hours . . . You know, she never wanted to leave anyone at the school dissatisfied.”
“You seem to have known Layne well. Funny she never mentioned you to me,” I interjected.
Nina grinned. She appeared happy that I had acquiesced to playing the private game she’d started. She waved my comment off with the flip of her wrist. “I’m certain that wasn’t intentional. I mean, why mention a friend at work? There wasn’t much to tell.”
“She talked about work at home a lot.” I turned to Charles. “She adored you,” I told him. To Nina, I said, “I know the names of all the people she was close to here at the university, and still, you are unfamiliar.”
“Interesting. Surely, there were no secrets with us,” she teased. “I’m glad you came today. I just remembered there’s something of Layne’s in my office. It’s a pen, one she said she treasured. She left it just before . . .” She paused for emphasis. “Before the accident. Come to my office. I’ll give it to you. Charles?”
He waved a hand in our direction. “Oh, sure. You two young ladies go ahead.”
We all stood.
“Again, so good to see you. You’ll receive information regarding Layne’s memorial from Beth, my assistant, via mail,” Dean Henry told me.
“That sounds great. Thanks,” I said.
“I’ll get back to you, Charles, on the meeting we just had,” Nina told him on our way out. “This way, Taryn.”
I followed the heel-to-toe click of Nina’s shoes to the end of the hall. Her office was tucked around a corner to our right, cove-like. One would have thought it was a janitor’s closet were it not for the nameplate on the door.
The air in her office was warm, despite the swirl of cool air that blew in from the crack of a window. Nina closed the door behind me. Her space had minimal detail. Her walls were sparse, with nothing other than framed accolades in her favor. Behind her petite desk were a few shelves of books. There were no personal pictures of her with family or friends. It was nothing but a bare-bones, polished, crisp, clean work space with one window. Outside, a concrete path less than five feet away connected the buildings to the left and right, and the main atrium stood straight ahead.
“Do you see that woman right there?” Nina asked me.
We stood at the office window while she admired a woman walking across the courtyard. She walked alone, carrying a warm drink in one hand, her smartphone in the other. She was tall, with fluffy, layered blond hair that bounced with each energetic step. She wore black-rimmed glasses perched on a thin nose. Her lips, colored burgundy red, stood out.
“Who is she?”
“Her name is Amber. She’s the only woman I would have given up everyone for.” Nina turned to face me. “Everyone.”
“By everyone you mean Layne?”
Nina turned back to Amber, catching her backside before she entered an adjacent building. “Yes. Remember when I told you I’ve been in your shoes? I ran miles in them for her. We used to be a couple. We had an undercover, secret relationship, and she refused to come out of the closet, with her family name and all. She gave in to the pressure to settle down and marry, and I didn’t know that about three years into our relationship, she began seeing a man. Even when I found out, I stayed with her.” Nina sighed. “Everyone has their weakness, Taryn, and she’s mine.”
“Did Layne know about her?”
Nina took a seat behind her desk. “Yes, she knew Amber and I were once a couple.”
“Did the three of you ever . . . ?” I didn’t finish my question, afraid of what she might say.
Nina frowned. “No, we didn’t. I would never share Amber with anyone else.”
“Layne’s gone, so is there any chance the two of you can be together?”
She snorted. “Are you kidding? Charles loves me, but he doesn’t love me that much.”
“Excuse me? I don’t understand.”
“Amber is Dean Henry’s granddaughter.”
“You had a relationship with his granddaughter, and he doesn’t know about it?”
Nina shook her head from side to side. “To this day, he has no idea that his cherished Amber is the love of my life.” She fiddled with a lone piece of paper on her desk. I took a seat in front of Nina as she reminisced, her eyes lowered to her desk.
“Amber is the one who introduced me to voyeurism. During our time together we were monogamous, but she loved to watch and be watched. I fell in love with it from my first experience. There’s nothing like it. You’ll see.”
“How are you so sure about that?” I asked, though I did not doubt her words. She ignored me and continued her story.
“Once she got engaged, she ended our relationship, but she didn’t want to let go of the sex. I was devastated, but I agreed.” She lifted her eyes to me. “I needed something else to do, and I needed somebody to occupy my time, so I pursued Layne intentionally to make Amber jealous.”
“Did it work?”
“No. Amber thought it was cute, my desire to make her feel like she was missing out. She continued to flaunt herself in front of me and taunt me with her presence. Still, after all these years, she can call and I’ll drop anything.”
“So you’re still friends? More?”
“We have lunch every couple of months in my office.” Nina grinned.
I understood and wondered how many women besides Layne and Amber had laid their bare asses across Nina’s desk. “Did Layne know?”
“No. That’s one secret I kept from Layne. She didn’t know Amber and I were still intimate. You know, Taryn, I would have chosen someone else had I known Layne had a wife,” she confessed, thoughtful for a moment.
“Yes, well, that’s neither here nor there, is it? What’s done is done. Anyway, I take it there’s no pen.” We w
ere opposite one another, she still behind her desk, leaning forward with her palms flat, exposing a small gape between her breasts.
“There is no pen, no,” she confessed. “I had to get you out of there sooner than later, or Charles would have had us in his office all afternoon.” Slowly, she walked around her desk and sat on it in front of me. “Plus, you came to see me, not him.”
I stared into the alternating bronze and brown mutations in her eyes. “Yes, I did. So tell me . . .” I walked to the window and looked out at the students. A few were sitting on benches with open books and chatting with one another next to the waterfall. Some sat alone with their eyes closed, headphones on the ears, while others walked back and forth between buildings. “How did you do it? How did you two manage not to get caught with so much activity all around you?”
“It wasn’t always easy. There were some narrow escapes, times when we had only seconds to get ourselves together. It was dangerous, and that’s what made it exciting.” Nina’s desk creaked as she got up to stand behind me at the window. “Once, I was standing exactly where you are, blinds up, everyone right outside this window. For those who walked past, it appeared that I was simply looking out at the space, enjoying the view. No one could see that Layne was on her knees behind me, tossing my salad, as people like to say,” she told me casually.
My stomach turned, and my throat tightened around the acid that rose to the back of my mouth. I didn’t know what had gotten into me. Maybe it was the conversation with Jimmy and Ms. Sheila, combined with Nina’s sideways antagonism, but I had begun to hate Nina, and I hated her more with each second that ticked by.
“It was a game. It was fun. It was a constant test of our limits and what we were capable of. I smiled at a female student as I came that day, and she had no idea.”
I turned to face her. “That’s disgusting.”
“Is it? I don’t think you really believe that, not by the glow of excitement I see in your cheeks.” She studied my face, mistaking my flushed agitation for foreplay. Her face had brightened in hue as well. “Look, I know that everything about this situation is unusual. Bizarre, even. You and Layne, me and Layne, and now you and me. Tell me again. Why are you here?”
“I’m here to figure out why my wife couldn’t love me the way she loved you,” I answered, with half the truth.
“I thought we were getting past that, Taryn. And you might want to rephrase that question and ask yourself why your wife didn’t fuck you the way she fucked me.” She stepped closer. “Isn’t that what you want to know? Why night after night she chose me over you? Even Charles knows she spent more time here than at home.”
My right hand twitched involuntarily. I had always been one to maintain control of my emotions, and even in my moments of deep aggravation, I had never acted impulsively. That quality of passivity I had inherited from my mother. In that moment I could feel the shedding of those layers, to reveal another part of me.
Nina searched my face for an indication of my thoughts. I showed nothing. That skill I had learned from my father. He had never allowed my mother to know if a punch was on its way. I balled my hand into a fist to control the spasms.
When I didn’t answer her, Nina returned to her desk and removed a handheld mirror from one of her drawers. “Come here and tell me what you see.”
I walked over to her and stared at my usual reflection in the mirror, touching the strands that led to the bun at the back of my head. Layne had cherished my hair like a young girl would the synthetic strands glued to the vinyl scalp of her Barbie doll. My hair was long and straight, and nothing more to me than a reminder of my partial Native American heritage. I had wanted to cut it many times, but Layne would never let me.
“What do you mean?” I asked Nina.
“Look at yourself. Tell me what you see. Tell me who you see.”
“I see myself.”
“Anything else?”
What did she want me to say? “No,” I answered impatiently.
“That’s the problem, then. That was both your and Layne’s problem. I see otherwise.”
She handed the mirror to me and stepped behind me. She removed the bobby pins that carefully held my bun in place. It unraveled, like a loosened ball of yarn, and then she released the band that held all the hair together, slowly tugging it down my back. She spread her fingers against my scalp, rubbed aggressively, and shook my hair, creating a longer version of her own sporadic strands.
“Look at yourself. You’re wildly beautiful. Don’t you know that? There’s more to you than what meets the eye. I see it, even if Layne didn’t. I want you to do something for me.”
“What?”
“Let go.”
“Of?”
“Let go of the woman you think you are, and release the alter ego you have inside. She’s in there,” Nina commanded. “We all have one. I do, and your wife sure did.” She walked to the window, closed it, and lowered the blinds.
She taunted me as she walked back to her desk. “Are you really a woman who lets everyone walk all over her, who lets her wife fuck somebody and then come home and lie next to her? What kind of weak woman does that?”
Nina laid her body flat against the wooden surface of the desk and lifted her dress above her waist to reveal bare, panty-less hips. I inhaled the scent that radiated from between her thighs and became light-headed. In front of me Nina blurred into two and then three clouded figures, and her hungry eyes multiplied and crossed one over the other, staring at me with desire and provocation. My skin prickled, from the follicles in my scalp down to the soles of my feet. Inside my chest, my heart pounded louder than it ever had, its drum sound clogging my ears. I couldn’t see and I couldn’t hear properly, but I could breathe, and it was heavy and hard.
Layne’s journals suddenly rushed to me, the words hammering against my brain, smashing my outer shell, cracking and breaking it to reveal the storm inside. I tried to resist the energy that poured through my veins and electrified my skin, but I couldn’t. I felt alive. The air engulfed my skin and heightened my sensitivity. I walked toward Nina and ran my fingertips along the desk. Its grain sent sensations from my hand, up my arm, and into my chest. Onto the desk I crawled, my coat grazing Nina’s bare legs. She turned her head to the left and buried her face in my hair. She inhaled the strands that swept across her face.
Beneath me, her eyes were low, her eyebrows relaxed, and her lips wet. I wanted to taste their sweetness as Layne had described. I kissed her, and her mouth was warm and salty with sweat.
With my right hand, which was still pulsating, I stroked her thighs, gripping her creamy skin between my fingers. I whispered delicious words in her ear and bit the lobe tightly between my teeth. I grazed her neck with an open mouth, leaving her to guess where I would bite next. I rested at her jugular, sucking at it and digging into the skin around it. She winced in pain. I asked Nina if she liked it. She muttered yes through clenched teeth. In hushed, fast-paced words, she sputtered her delight. She moaned with pleasure and murmured my name repeatedly. I lost myself. Every kiss, every lick, every grope, and every bite became more forceful.
Without warning, I thrust fingers into her, which her body enveloped anxiously. I moved fast and hard until Nina was a blur underneath my body. With my left hand around her neck and the other penetrating her deeply and aggressively, I showed her that I was in control and that I wasn’t the weak woman she and Layne thought I was. That I could be just as intentional in hurting the woman next to me as Layne had been each night she crept into bed with me after having sex with Nina. I squeezed tighter and thrust harder until I became dizzy with exhaustion, and still I didn’t stop.
In my mind I replayed every lie and every deception and released my pain on to Nina. For every time they made love behind my back, I dove deeper, my fingernails clawing at her sensitive insides. For every unanswered call, late lunch, and missed dinner, my grip became stronger. Only when Nina’s sounds changed from moans to gasps for air did I slow my pace and then
release my fingers from her throbbing tender space. I stared into her fearful eyes and felt vindicated. Inside and out I smiled, the same smug smile my father gave to my mother when he dared her to respond to his actions. Nina’s face was the color of cranberry, and her eyes were glazed with unfallen tears. She had both her hands around my wrist, and I realized I hadn’t yet loosened my hold around her neck. I clutched the ridges of her throat once more and then let go.
Nina grabbed her neck and rolled over and coughed, inhaling and exhaling with effort to regain her breath. It took several minutes, but the color in her face returned to its golden-brown hue, and she finally calmed and took in air at a controlled pace. Her eyes, now dry and light with hazel glints, looked at me.
“Yes,” she muttered, her voice strained and ragged, a perverse grin on her lips. “Yes, I knew she was in there.”
Above Nina, I smiled, wiped my fingers across her chest, and then lifted myself off the desk. I straightened my coat, picked up my purse, walked to her closed office door, and placed my hand on the knob. I imagined my hair was a tossed mess, damp with sweat around the edges, and I didn’t care. I opened the door, breathed in the cool air about the hallway, and left. As I, flushed and in disarray, passed well-dressed employees of the university, I continued to smile to myself. Whoever I was becoming, my mind was both fascinated by, and afraid of, what she was capable of.
Chapter Five
Layne hadn’t allowed me to drink often. When she was alive, I would partake in libations with her and her friends, all a bunch of uppity, pretentious men and women who celebrated their successes through raised glasses of Dom Pérignon during private yacht parties or in a secluded room in Chicago’s upscale restaurants. Even at those events where Layne and her counterparts inhaled drink after drink, Layne would always restrict me to just one.
Even at Layne’s repast, which had been as stuffy and stiff as her friends, I had found myself abiding by Layne’s rules, limiting my intake to one glass of wine, although I had craved more. At that time I had still loved Layne and had wanted to honor her and represent her properly from six feet above. Her friends had been gracious, kind, even, paying attention to me for the first time. I wondered what those friends would think if they knew of Layne’s truest feeling about them, how she had scrutinized their careers, their homes, their clothing, and the schools their children attended. Layne, with her superiority complex, had defamed her counterparts, though they had done nothing but adore her. They, like me, had been clueless about the person Layne really was.
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