But Jamie was different. He was a knight, he was in my society. We’d have plenty of time together, even after graduation.
Too bad I couldn’t tap Michelle.
1*At least, the confessor assumes that was the general gist behind a “snow”-themed initiation. After all, it was in May.
2*All times are Diggers-time.
3*The confessor is being somewhat less than fair, here, given as atmospheric change and greenhouse gas buildup is a serious issue that deserves attention from everyone, not just Geology majors. And no, she was not coerced into saying that.
Dark water, thick as syrup, closed over my head. I thrashed and thrashed, but my legs seemed to be bound to some great weight that pulled me ever downward. I couldn’t get free, I couldn’t get air, I couldn’t stop it from happening.
“Amy! Shhh, it’s a dream.”
I woke covered in a thin sheen of sweat and blinked up into Jamie’s concerned eyes. He was leaning on one elbow, his bare shoulders bathed in moonlight, his face half in shadow. “Drowning again?”
“Yes.” I slipped from between the sheets and yanked Jamie’s borrowed T-shirt down over the top of my thighs as I padded into his bathroom to splash some cold water on my face.
“Do you notice you only have those dreams here?” He followed me and leaned against the door. I stared, bleary-eyed, at his reflection in the mirror. “Concerned” had a tendency to look like “angry” on Jamie. It always took me a minute to recalibrate my understanding when I saw him like this. It was too easy to imagine he was mad at me.
“No, I have them at home, too,” I said, and then slurped a few handfuls of water from the sink. “Just not when you’re there.”
“We should fix that.”
We got back into bed, and I pulled the covers up to my waist. Boys are like little heat engines. I hardly ever need to use a blanket when I sleep with one.
And that was all we’d been doing. Sleeping. Well, that and some seriously heavy make-out sessions. “Petting,” my mother would probably call it.
Somehow, without ever discussing it, we’d realized that a late night study-session-turned-sleepover was not the most momentous occasion during which to go all the way. At least, I think that was the reason. It just never seemed right to have first-time sex with Jamie on the couch of his apartment, our textbooks strewn across the coffee table or the floor. It never seemed good enough to do it after he’d brushed his teeth and pulled me into his arms in his bed (full-sized, but still using the dorm-room comforter designed to fit a single bed). It never seemed natural to do it in my bedroom in Prescott College, with Lydia and Josh only a thin wall away.
I wasn’t sure when the correct time would be, though. It wasn’t as if we could afford a weekend away at a hotel or some romantic upstate bed-and-breakfast. I didn’t have the time; Jamie didn’t have the money. Besides, I’d never felt the need to make an occasion out of the first time in any of my other relationships. Dorm rooms were always just fine. You’re talking to the girl who lost her virginity at an after-prom party in the bedroom of the kid sister of the party-giver.
Of course, that relationship hadn’t worked out. None of them had. So maybe it was time to change things up.
“Sleepy?” Jamie’s voice floated across the pillows in the darkness.
“No.”
“Not sleepy?” His hand brushed against my torso, an invitation.
I took a deep breath. “Darren called me last week.”
Jamie’s hand stilled on my skin. “Oh?”
“His father apparently made him. They chucked him in rehab.”
“They have rehab for sociopaths?”
“That’s what everyone else has been wondering, too.”
Jamie was very quiet for a moment. “Everyone else?”
Oh, crap.
“Who?” he asked.
“My club.”
“I see.” More silence.
“They’re my club, Jamie. I took an oath to tell them everything.”
“I’m your boyfriend and a Digger. Where does that put me on the hierarchy of communication? For curiosity’s sake.”
Jenny had basically said the same thing. Considering their entirely mutual dislike, I bet they’d both hate the fact that they agreed with each other. And then they’d hate that agreement, too. “How do you feel right now?”
And Jamie, as always, was straightforward. “Trying hard to keep my anger directed at Darren and not you.”
“Exactly!” I cried and sat up. “I knew you’d get mad, so I didn’t tell you.”
“Extraordinary plan.” He rolled away from me, his shoulders and back hunched down around the pillow. “You always do come up with the best ones.”
Oh, give me a break. What was the purpose of telling him? I knew this script already:
Step One: Jamie would say that Darren should be brought up on charges.
Step Two: I’d reluctantly agree.
Step Three: Jamie would tell me, with the law-student caveat that it was not legal advice, that I could still press charges against Darren if I wanted.
Step Four: I’d consider it, then remember I’d made Kurt Gehry a promise, and from what I could tell, he’d been keeping to his end of it. Darren wouldn’t be fixed in a week or two. Let him call me in a year, and we’d see what he’d learned.
Step Five: Jamie would lose another smidgen of respect for me.
“He should be in jail,” Jamie grumbled, still facing away from me.
“I know.”
“You realize that you can still press charges, right?”
Here we go.
“I don’t want to talk about this with you.” I flopped back against the pillow.
“Believe me, I’m aware of that.” He rolled over. “Perhaps you should consider making a list of forbidden topics for me to reference at times like this.”
“Great!” I snapped, facing him. “We can put your past relationships right at the top.”
“Are you kidding me with this?” He sat up. “Amy, you don’t really want to know.”
“I do,” I said. “You just don’t want me to.”
“It’s incredibly morbid.”
“I thought you were into the morbid topics, Poe.”
He didn’t bother to dignify that with a fine. “Not that morbid.”
“Says the man who tried to sit in on my C.B. last fall.” Oops, perhaps it was a bad move to bring up that occasion.
His tone was tight when he replied. Yeah, I’d messed up. “That was different.”
“How?”
“Because you weren’t my girlfriend then.”
“So you didn’t care what I did until you decided I was your property? That’s nice and healthy.”
“You used the word ‘property.’ I used ‘girlfriend,’” Jamie clarified. “And though I’m sure you’d love to hang any misogynistic label you can on me, you’re wrong. I don’t care that you had sex with other guys, I just don’t want to know.”
I caught my breath. His voice had dropped, turned husky. His face was shadowed in the orange light filtering in from the street lamps. And what’s more, he was telling the truth, about both of us. He didn’t have a used-goods complex at all, and I—well, I couldn’t stop acting as if he did. Even half in jest, I still treated him like the man I’d thought he was last year. I didn’t stand up for him to the other knights in my club—even they had noticed it.
I reached for him in the darkness. “Jamie, I—”
He leaned over me. “I don’t want to hear about some other guy who touched you. I don’t want to think about how, and where, and whether or not you liked it. And because I’m so sure I don’t want to hear about you, I am positive you don’t want to hear about me.” He lowered himself over my body as he spoke, and his voice became a whisper against my skin. “You don’t want to know if I kissed her neck, like this.”
Oh, God. His mouth was hot and moist, and moved over my throat with the most precise, most intoxicating combination of pressure and
suction. My hands slid over his arms and across his back, pulling him in closer. My legs parted and his hips fell between them. Through layers of sheets and shorts, I could feel his pelvis pressing the inside of my thighs.
“You don’t want to know if we only had sex in the dark, so that I could feel her body, but not see it.” His hands slipped beneath my T-shirt and slid it up to my armpits. “You don’t want to know how much hotter that made it.” His thumbs traced the undersides of my breasts. My lips parted on a gasp. “You don’t want to hear if we made love in this bed—”
“Made love?” I giggled. “You’re right, I don’t want to know that you’re secretly fifty.”
He collapsed on top of me and laughed into my neck. “Amy, Amy …”
“Jamie, Jamie,” I replied. But then, involuntarily, a picture arose in my mind of him having sex with another girl right here, just like this, and I shuddered. He was right; I didn’t want to know any of it. And despite the way he was touching me, I didn’t want to have sex with him at this moment, my head crowded with her—her little moans and breaths and her incredibly infuriating way of staring into his gray eyes just so …
The sour sting of jealousy washed over me, filled my sinuses, clogged in my throat. “Wait.”
“Wait?” He lifted his head.
What was wrong with me? I’d managed to sleep with George Prescott without forcing him to enumerate his legions of lovers. Without ever picturing him with any of them while we were in bed (or in the tomb, or in the Buttery, or any of the other places where we were concurrently in flagrante delicto). I’d never been like this before. I wriggled out from beneath Jamie and stood up.
“I—I need to go.”
“You what?” He caught my arm as I went for my jeans. “Go? Absolutely not.”
I yanked out of his grip. “Excuse me?”
“I’m not letting you walk through this neighborhood at 4 A.M.”
Oh. Good point. I sat down on the bed, jeans in hand. Jamie sat a decent distance away. “I’m sorry,” I said, and swallowed. “I think you’re right—about not knowing.”
“I’d tell you if I thought it would end this …” He shook his head, placed his hands on his knees. “I wish you …”
“What?”
He said nothing.
“What?” I coaxed. What did he want from me?
“I wish you trusted me.”
“I do.”
He snorted. “I wish you loved me.”
I bit my lip. That’s what he meant. In the stillness that followed, I thought I could hear the soil erosion in the front yard. Now would be the perfect time to brave the rough streets and leave. Muggers would be better than this.
“Forget I said that.” His words fell into the silence.
“Do you?”
“Forget? Yes.”
No. Did he love me? But I was as likely to get an answer out of him about that as I was about his ex-girlfriends.
“You should go to sleep,” he said at last. “You have a big week. The party. The interviews.” He scooted back over to his side of the bed.
I left my jeans on the floor and scooted, too. Maybe we didn’t love each other—maybe we weren’t willing to admit that—but we did care for each other. And I did like the way I fit into the crook of his arm. I liked the way the sheets in his house smelled like him. I liked to hear him breathe while he slept.
“Still feeling good about Kalani?”
Way to change the subject. I traced his arm with my fingertips. “Yeah. She’s perfect. Everyone’s going to love her.”
“What are you going to do about Lionel Drake?”
I kissed Jamie’s collarbone, then shrugged. “He’ll survive.”
“Pissing off the patriarchs is a cornerstone of your club’s strategy, then.”
“I’d rather piss them off than bring Topher Cox into Rose & Grave. I don’t want that guy playing in my sandbox.” Let’s not even get into the fact that he’s fond of likening himself to a serial killer. Talk about morbid.
“So you’re not even inviting him to the party?”
I looked up at him. “What would be the benefit of that?”
Jamie shifted so I was lying more fully in his arms. “It could go either way. On one hand, inviting him would send a signal to Drake that you are at least considering his grandson as a prospect.”
“On the other, it might give them both false hope.”
“Exactly.”
I frowned and snuggled closer. “So what should I do?”
“No way in hell am I answering that for you.”
I pinched him. “You’re so mean. Seriously, what would you do?”
“You know what I’d do, Amy, because you know what I did. I tapped the legacy, even though I wasn’t overly fond of him.”
“George is not Topher.” And not just because I’d slept with the former.
“I’ll give you that. But a society is only as good as its network. If it crumbles due to lack of support, there’s no point.”
“A society is only as good as its members,” I argued back. “If we tap degenerates, we only beggar future generations.”
Jamie pulled me close and kissed me hard on the mouth. It was all the response I needed.
In the end, I invited Topher to the party. Our next encounter displayed a decided increase in the deference and respect quotient, which made a firm case for someone—most likely Grandpa Drake—having gotten to our boy in the interim. Perversely, I enjoyed Topher’s sycophancy, though I’d resented it in Arielle.
Her party invitation was still burning a hole in my backpack. Clarissa had made one for everyone on our stated short lists (except for the celebrities on George’s) as a matter of course, but I didn’t want to instill any false hope in the poor girl. If I invited Arielle to the party, would she view it as rubbing salt in the wound?
Or maybe I should just frame it as a chance to get free champagne out of us Diggers?
Try as I might, I couldn’t think of a low-key way to accidentally bump into Kalani a third time. Her high-powered EDN position meant that when she wasn’t actively in class, she could usually be found holed away in the Gothic castle of newspaper headquarters. I’d heard a rumor that she occasionally worked out on the elliptical machines at the gym, but the girl clearly wasn’t in a fitness frame of mind that week, and her stupid roommate had apparently even offered to pick up her stupid dry cleaning on Monday afternoon, so my stakeout at the campus cleaners was for naught.
Most frustrating.
By Wednesday, I was getting desperate. The party was the following evening, and I hadn’t managed to slip an invite to my chosen tap. I decided to pay another visit to the Russian Novel class. This time, I chose to sneak in at the end of the lecture, in hopes of catching my prey without being forced to listen to fifty minutes on The Brothers Karamazov.
The lecture hall was packed as usual, and I scanned the room twice before I spotted her halfway up the rows on the left side of the auditorium. I stationed myself at the end of the last row, adjacent to the door she’d have to take to leave, and tried to think of an innocuous conversation starter.
Why was this so hard? I felt like I was trying to pick her up. Hey, Kalani. Wanna go with me to a party tomorrow night? Yeah, real subtle. Besides, who invites a girl they’ve talked with exactly once to a party? That behavior might fly the first week of freshman year, when no one had any friends and everyone pretended that the people you met crossing the campus were destined to be your future best friends forever. Seniors had grown out of that nonsense. Juniors had as well. She would think I was a total loser to be pulling that move at this stage in my Eli career.
The lecture ended and the room bustled with noise as students rose in a wave, chattering, powering up cell phones, packing away books and notepads and laptops. For a moment I lost sight of Kalani. No, there she was, down in the front, talking to a classmate. I ran through my ice-breaking options.
A) Hey, Kalani. Thanks so much for those notes. They sure came
in handy. How’d your paper go?
B) Hey, Kalani. Look, here’s the thing. I’d like to tap you into Rose & Grave. Game?
C) Hey there, good lookin’. Going my way?
Kalani was ascending the stairs now, headed toward my row. Her fingers fumbled with the clasp of her bag, as her attention was partially focused on the girl climbing the stairs at her side. Think, Amy, think. Great lecture. Great editorial in last Sunday’s opinion column. Great skirt. Anything. Just get the ball rolling, then invite her to the party.
She was almost to my row now. I opened my mouth. Hey, Kalani. Hey, Kalani. Hey, Kalani.
I looked up. She was laughing at whatever her friend was saying. My eyes slid toward said friend.
Felicity Bower. Felicity, of Dragon’s Head. Felicity, who was dating my ex-boyfriend Brandon. Felicity, who had done her best to make my life a living hell for the first few months of this semester. Felicity, who would gleefully step over my cold, dead corpse if given half the chance.
I froze. Abort, abort!
“Hey, Kalani,” my mouth said, because it has this pesky habit of working independently of my brain.
“Oh, hi, Amy,” said Kalani. Felicity stopped, turned toward me, and her mouth condensed into a tiny, irritated moue. “Great lecture, huh?”
“I’m still trying to figure out that whole metaphor with the aqueous globe,” my mouth said, heedless of my brain’s new strategy. The one that involved me running for my life from the crazy rival society member with the huge, Amy-shaped chip on her shoulder.
“I didn’t know you were enrolled in this class, Amy,” said Felicity in an even tone. “In fact, I thought you took it last year.”
Kalani’s brow furrowed. Dammit.
Strike earlier plan. New plan involves sticking a fist through Felicity’s smug face.
Tap & Gown Page 9
