“Hey” I said. “I love you.”
Jamie could hardly kiss me for smiling.
After the floor there was the shower, cool tile and thick steam taking the place of robes and rain, and then we adjourned to his bed, still dripping with water and lust, wrapped ourselves up in each other and his ragged bedspread, and dozed. I woke sometime later to feel reverent kisses against the small of my back—no, against the Rose & Grave tattoo placed there—and I smiled sleepily.
“Odile was right,” I mumbled.
“About what?”
“You do have a kink. A fetish for Diggers.”
“Hmmm …” He traced the outline of the hexagon with his tongue. “Lucky you.”
I fell asleep again, and the next time I woke, I was alone. The bathroom light was off, so I grabbed one of Poe’s discarded T-shirts, tugged it down to cover my ass, and tiptoed out of the bedroom.
The living room was dark as well. Poe sat at his desk, illuminated in blue light from his computer screen. I inched closer. Checking e-mail in the middle of the night?
“Holy shit,” I heard him whisper.
I swallowed, feeling suddenly intrusive, and began to back away. I saw him straighten, and start to turn his head, and I ducked back behind the bedroom door. Did he see me? Should I reveal myself?
A few moments passed, and he didn’t come in, so I went back to bed, but I fell asleep again before he returned.
I awoke to morning light and the scent of waffles. I padded back out into the living room. Poe was in sweatpants and no shirt, bustling around the kitchen.
“Hi,” I said.
“You stole my T-shirt.” He got out the syrup. “I was hoping to bring this to you in bed, but, uh, I don’t really have a tray.”
“It’s fine. Waffles anywhere are good.” I leaned against the counter and yawned. I bet my hair was a disaster, all dried in tangles. Jamie’s hair was mussed, too, and there were shadows beneath his eyes. “How long have you been up?”
“Pretty long,” he admitted, and handed me a plate. “You have class?”
“Yeah, at eleven-thirty. What time is it?”
“Eight-thirty.”
I gaped at him and put down my fork. “I’m going back to bed.”
He grabbed me around the waist. “No, you don’t. Welcome to the post-grad world, Miss Second Semester Senior. I’ve got a study group in half an hour.”
What the hell kind of study group met at the crack of dawn? “Are you kicking me out?”
“Amy, if you want to spend the day naked in my bed, it’ll be a great fantasy to sustain me through ConLaw. But either way, I have to go.”
I pouted. “Ditch school.”
“Can’t.” His expression sobered. “What are you doing tonight? I want to take you to dinner. Something nice, since you claim we have been lacking in real dates.”
“Jamie, you don’t have to do that.”
“I want to. I want you in a dress, and candlelight, and tablecloths, and appetizers.”
I tilted my head. “You want me in appetizers?”
“And dessert.”
“Dessert sounds really good.” I kissed him.
He groaned. “And a table between us so I can concentrate for five minutes and talk to you.”
“Talk about what?” I narrowed my eyes. Since when did “we need to talk”?
“Just talk.” He checked his watch. “I have to hurry. I hate that I need to run, but I do. Look,” he kissed me, “I had an amazing time last night. Drop me an e-mail when you know where you want to go for dinner. Stay as long as you want, borrow my clothes if yours are still wet, the door locks automatically.” He started to walk away then came back and scooped me into his arms. “Love you.”
“You too,” I whispered. He bolted out of the kitchen, stopped by Reepicheep’s tank to drop some food into her dish and give her a pat on her head, then rushed on.
Talk about what?
The rest of the morning passed in a cloud of “I got laid” euphoria. No, that’s not right, either. After all, I’d been in that state quite a bit last semester, and this felt way different. More like … I got loved.
And in this admittedly disgustingly cheesy state, I floated. I floated, unashamed, to my Nabokov class in Poe’s clothes. I floated, gleeful, into a quick conference with my thesis advisor about preparing for both final drafts and England. (I decided not to admonish him for not telling me about the colloquium, and Professor Burak, bless his heart, decided to ignore my obvious walk-of-shame attire.) I floated, smug, back to my suite to smirk at Lydia’s messages on our white board:
A: Your mom called. I told her you
were off being naughty.—L
The phone rang as I floated out of the shower and back to my bedroom. Probably my mother in a paroxysm of parental woe.
“Hello?” I said dreamily, pushing for the full effect.
“Amy,” said Michelle. “I’m confused.”
Crash. “You got the envelope, right?” I said.
“Uh, yeah? But …”
“Follow the directions.” Seriously, I was not going to hold her hand through every step of the initiation. I’d already moved heaven and earth for this girl. Was I this whiny when I’d been tapped? I must remind myself to ask Malcolm next time I saw him.1*
“Okay, yeah, fine, but what about the flowers?”
I adjusted my towel. “What flowers?”
“The dead roses. On my doorstep this morning?”
“Uh …”
“There was a note, with your—um, the, uh, symbol on it?”
Huh? That wasn’t us.
“So I’m just wondering which set of directions I should follow.”
“What did this note say?” I asked, baffled.
Michelle hesitated for a second. “Coming to get you.”
“But what doesn’t make any sense,” I said, “is that he had to know, somehow, that we were tapping her. I mean, dead roses and a note with the seal? Left somehow in the middle of the night after we tapped her?”
“Hmm,” said Jamie, and took a sip of his wine. He was back in the black pinstripes from the night of the party. I’d borrowed one of Lydia’s springy, flowered dresses she’d bought for Spain. The restaurant was everything Jamie had requested: candles, tablecloths, romance.
“So how did Blake know?” I went on. “And how did he even get into her place? You saw that doorman. He was like a frickin’ security guard.”
“But we got in.”
“After we called up to her,” I pointed out. “Don’t you think if someone called up and then didn’t actually come into her place that she would have remembered it?”
“Maybe he dressed up in a robe and pretended to be one of us, saying he’d forgotten something in her apartment, and the guy had no idea, because of our costumes,” Jamie said.
That was a possibility. “So you’re saying that he’d been watching us all along, and just happened to have a copy of our seal, a spare black robe, and a bunch of dead roses for her?” Sounded a bit far-fetched.
My boyfriend2* shrugged. “Assuming that it was, in fact, Blake who left those flowers.”
“Who else has been terrorizing her?”
“Not her, Amy.” Jamie lifted his wineglass and eyed me over the rim.
And then it clicked. “Dragon’s Head?”
“Or another society. Yesterday, you were worried that Dragon’s Head was going to steal your tap list. What if they just planned to mess with them, make sure the initiation was a disaster by delivering conflicting instructions to all your taps?”
“And since they tapped their class the previous evening, they weren’t busy last night,” I added. Of course! Well, that would be a relief to Michelle. Not Blake, but a whole new hassle. Welcome to secret societies, kiddo! “Unlike the rest of the societies on campus, they could have easily followed us around and pulled this trick. Do you think that’s it?”
“I think it’s a possibility.” Poe consulted his menu. “And one that’s much more in keeping w
ith standard society pranks than stalker ex-boyfriends.”
“You’re right,” I said. “That makes so much more sense. It’s a good thing I have you around to explain these arcane society ways.” I smiled coyly and, under the table, ran the toe of my pump along his instep.
“Are you ready to order?” he asked abruptly. I saw the waiter approaching the table. I picked the risotto; Jamie, the ravioli. As soon as the server was out of earshot, Jamie spoke again.
“So I have … some news.”
“Good news?” I asked, and took a long drink from my wineglass. Mmm, Prosecco. I wished every night could be fancy date night with the man I loved.
“Yes and no.”
I placed the glass back on the tablecloth.
“I’ve been offered a job.”
I shook my head. “You already have a job. You’re working for that firm this summer in Manhattan, the one with the ridiculous name.”
“Not a summer associate job,” Poe said. “A real job. A full-time job.”
“Can you do that while you’re a full-time student?” I asked.
“No.” Jamie was watching me very carefully.
“But—” My forehead probably had more wrinkles than a pug. “You mean, drop out of Eli?”
“Defer my studies here, yes.”
“Why? What kind of job is this?” I asked, puzzled.
Poe cleared his throat. “That’s the part I can’t talk about.”
I blinked at him. “Can’t talk about?”
“Yes.”
“To your girlfriend?” I said, and my voice went up a few octaves. “To your fellow knight?”
“To anyone,” he replied. “It’s a security-clearance thing.”
Oh. Oh.
Except, no. “I don’t understand. You were going to go work for a big firm, make your money back. That’s what you told me last fall. Now all of a sudden there’s some sort of government job on the table I knew nothing about? One you’re going to drop out of school for?”
Jamie reached out to me. “It’s complicated—a long story. I wanted this job last year, but I didn’t know if I was going to get it. Eli Law was my backup plan.”
“Your—” I croaked. “Your backup plan?” Lydia and Josh were going to break up over her dream school, and to Jamie it was little more than a backup plan? And then I remembered what he’d said to me right after Spring Break. Play your cards right and no one will ever know it’s a backup plan. Just another of his many secrets.
He took in my expression. “I’m saying that wrong.”
“You bet your ass you are.”
He sighed in frustration. “You have to understand, I always figured that Eli was the reality. This was such a long shot. I couldn’t depend on it. I mean, Kurt Gehry was supposed to help me, but—”
“But you screwed him over,” I finished. “You lost your summer job at the White House and … whatever this was.” A picture was beginning to take focus in my brain. This was no ordinary government job, like my friends who interned at the FBI or the NSA.
“Exactly.” He sat back in his chair. “But now, with Gehry disgraced, things started moving again.”
“I see.” I took another sip of my wine and swirled it around my mouth, but the bitter flavor rising in my throat wouldn’t go away. “Are you going to be a spy?”
“Amy—”
“What? Just last night you were telling me how bad you are at keeping secrets from me. And I’m a marshmallow. I don’t own a waterboard. I don’t even own a skateboard.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It’s not meant to be.”
Our plates arrived, relieving us both. For the next five minutes, I kept my mouth filled with risotto and wine, and reflected on the fact that a fancy public restaurant was a shitty place to break news like this to the girl you just spent half the night having incredibly tender sex with.
“So,” I said slowly, “what does this mean for us?”
He swallowed a piece of ravioli and spoke. “That’s what I wanted to talk about. We’ve been very good, up until now, about not discussing the future.”
“Because we don’t know what that is,” I said. I refilled my glass of wine to the very top. I was going to need it. “I don’t know where I’ll be. And now, well, I don’t know where you’ll be. What’s different?”
“The time line,” Jamie said. “Back then, we didn’t need to make any decisions for another month or two. But I have exams next week, and then, if I … do this, I’ll be gone.”
I choked on my wine. “Next week?”
“And by gone, I don’t mean that I’m going to England for a few weeks and can call you every night. It doesn’t mean I’m moving to Boston or D.C. or Palo Alto. Amy I’ll be gone.” Jamie held my eyes. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Of course I did. Rumors of this were as prevalent on the Eli campus as legends about Rose & Grave. Students who vanished in the middle of their final exams and never showed up to graduation exercises. Never showed up anywhere, until forty years later, when they came back to Eli to tell their old secret societies or singing groups about their decades in Moscow or Nicaragua or Iran. Not that they could ever tell the students who heard the stories too much—classified. State secrets. You know the drill.
How many heads of the CIA had been in Rose & Grave? How many students whose names appeared in the Black Books had suddenly disappeared off the face of the planet? Having gone through their trial by fire as Knights of Persephone, how many graduated to even bigger secrets?
“Then don’t do it,” I whispered. “It sounds horrible. Leaving everyone you love—” Oh, wow. This is a new record for you, Amy Haskel, both in speed and severity of abandonment. One night with you and Jamie’s ready to go into hiding. “When did you know about this?”
“Last night,” he said. “After we … I got an e-mail sometime during Tap Night preparations. And then this morning I had to meet them.”
“You didn’t have a study group,” I realized aloud.
“No.”
I wondered if we were being watched right now, and for a split second, my mind concocted several desperate plans to get Poe’s offer—whatever it was—withdrawn.
DESPERATE PLANS
1) The Plame Approach: Stand up and shout, “This man is a secret government operative working for the NCS.”
2) The Narcotics Strategy: “Why, darling, do you think that’s wise, given your ongoing and debilitating addiction to heroin/crack cocaine/crystal meth?” (Note: Quickly find way to spike wine with drugs.)
3) The Madonna Gambit: “But what about our baby?”
Sadly none of these would achieve the desired result of a continued relationship with Jamie. I didn’t even know if I had the power to screw him over like that. Only someone like Kurt Gehry could submarine Jamie’s chances. But Gehry was no longer in a position to do anything either, and hadn’t been for several months.
Another thought came to me. “That night, in January, when I caught you in the tomb with all those old files? What were you doing?”
He hesitated before answering, not once looking me in the face. “What I had to.”
“And what was that? Contacting other Diggers who could help you?”
“Sort of.”
Because what could other Diggers—even ones in the CIA—do if Kurt Gehry had tabled Jamie’s application? If he were hired, Gehry would know, and he was not above making the guilty parties pay, just like he’d made Jamie pay for helping D177 last spring. No, Gehry had to be brought down before there’d be any movement for my boyfriend.
“You did it,” I said in a voice little more than a breath. “The Gehry scandal, his resignation.”
Now Jamie raised his gaze to meet mine. “Yes.”
“You—” My throat had gone dry. “How did you—”
“I talk to servants, Amy” he said. “Cooks, maids, butlers, gardeners. They’re who I am, and they’ve always been the ones with the dirt. When I visited Gehry for my White
House interview last year, I talked to his. And it paid off. I contacted a few Diggers who had their own grudges against Gehry, and they took it from there.”
I stared at him in disbelief.
“You think they offered me this job because of my fashion sense?” The sardonic glint was back in his eyes. “Now, take the next step.” His tone was cold, manipulative. At this moment, he was the Poe who’d put me in the coffin. The one who’d played the Grim Reaper. “You know you want to.”
The risotto began to churn in my stomach and I took a deep breath. “Darren was right. Gehry did have Rose & Grave to blame for his humiliation. But it wasn’t D177. It wasn’t me.”
“No,” said Jamie. “It was me.”
I fell against the back of my chair, speechless, breathless.
“You okay?” he said, and pushed my glass toward me. “Have some water.”
“I’ve had quite enough water, I think,” I snapped. “You know all that stuff you said about not being able to keep secrets from me is bullshit, right?”
“Well, you know them all now,” he said. “And I was afraid to tell you that one. Way more afraid than I was to tell you that I loved you. I knew if I did, if you thought I was at fault for what happened to you, you’d leave me.”
“And you’re not afraid I’ll leave you now?” I said, much more harshly than I’d intended.
Jamie was silent.
Last night, I’d told him that I loved him, too. Whatever series of events led to my kidnapping, he couldn’t have known. It wasn’t Jamie’s fault that Darren was a psychotic little snot. It was an accidental consequence, and one that someone who loved him as I did couldn’t possibly hold against him. All this time, I thought his guilt about Darren had the same genesis as all my friends’: He hadn’t been there when Darren had found me. But it went deeper than that.
“I’m not afraid of it,” he said sadly. “I know it’s going to happen. Not because of Gehry. Because I’m taking the job.”
“No!”
“Amy,” he said, “what are you imagining for us? Pretend it’s not me. Pretend it’s Lydia. She’s been with Josh for months and months, and you’re still urging her not to make life decisions based on her boyfriend. I wouldn’t want you to make decisions based on me, and I can’t make decisions based on you, either.”
Tap & Gown Page 21
