by Audrey Bell
“Where? Who? Why didn’t you say something sooner?”
“Okay, you’ve got to stop yanking my arm,” I said, as he pulled me back towards where I had been when I fell. “I mean, I think you’re going to dislocate my shoulder.”
The rain started with a few fat and icy drops and quickly picked up. Some people screamed dramatically and began to flee. Others cheered and turned up the music.
“FUCK!” David shouted, throwing his head back. “Where is he?”
“In a plaid shirt.”
“Of course, you would want to make out with someone in the middle of a stampede,” he shouted at me.
“I don’t want to make out with anybody!"
He rolled his eyes as someone’s shoulder banged roughly into mine and he pulled me closer to him. The rain turned from soft drops to a steady stream. I shuddered as it ran down my hair and my back. The wind whistled across the parking lot and empty plastic cups skittered across the ground around my feet.
“There!” I said. “He’s right there.”
And he was right there, with a handful of boys who seemed totally undisturbed by the rain. He was leaning against a red pickup truck with that easy smile on his face. He glanced up at the rain, like he was happy to see it.
David pulled me closer. “Him?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Go talk to him.”
“What? No.”
“Yes.” He gave me a little push.
“Wait, what am I going to say to him?” I asked David.
“Just talk. You’re smart.”
“No, no, no, no,” I said, digging in my heels, literally. “This is a bad idea. This is like…”
Then, he saw us. He stood up and smiled at me. And David disappeared.
“Hey!”
I looked behind me to see whom the Plaid Stranger was talking to. Nobody.
Or rather to me.
And I was David-less and I had nothing to say. My throat closed up.
“I was wondering where you went,” he said.
I nodded. “Uh-huh?”
Jesus, Hadley. All you can come up with is syllables?
Tree branches swayed and rustled overhead. Dead leaves whipped around in circles in the parking lot. He reached me in three easy steps. I looked at his hands. That was easier than looking at him. They were stained with blue and red ink and I thought maybe I could ask him about that, but that also seemed really weird.
Where the hell had David gone? I turned my head once more behind me. He was nowhere. I looked at the handsome doe-eyed stranger and smiled, uncomfortably.
"Do you want a beer?"
"It's raining," I pointed out.
He smiled. "We’ve got the waterproof kind of can.”
I nodded. "Okay. Yeah, sure."
He stepped back towards the pickup and tossed me a beer, which I caught, barely.
“Sorry,” he smiled.
“No worries, I got it.”
“We’re going to wait it out,” he said, nodding up at the sky.
"Yeah," I said. I looked up at the sky, too. That was even easier than looking at his hands was. Flirt, I reminded myself. You think he’s cute. So flirt.
"It seems like a lot of shit like this has been happening all week,” he mused.
"Rain? Or people raining on your parade?"
"My tailgate," he amended, grinning. The rain picked up.
“Yeah.” I needed a drink. Or a funny story to tell. I tried to open my beer, and found that my hands were scraped and shaky. He took it, wordlessly, cracked it open and handed it back to me.
"Thanks." I said. "I know what you mean. About the rain."
"Yeah? Who’s ruined your week?"
I smiled. I looked up at him. His eyes were just as soft now. And I hadn't hit my head. That was a real thing that his eyes were actually soft. "I don't know. Nobody. Myself. The Cairo bureau. In Egypt. Sorry, you're not stupid. I'm sure you know Cairo is in Egypt. Anyways, this woman named Suzanne works there and she...well, it's kind of her fault. Actually, I don't think it’s her fault. It’s totally my fault. She was really nice about it. But, yeah, rain." I looked at him again, unable to shut up, maybe because he didn't appear to be totally horrified. He just looked like he was listening. Although, I was horrified. "Sorry, I'm drunk. I mean, all that's true, but I'm also drunk, and my life is kind of a mess. Or, it feels like a mess. I guess it's not actually a mess. I just thought I knew exactly what to do to get exactly what I wanted, and I never really considered that maybe it wouldn't work out. And then, like, the second it didn't work out, I just immediately talked myself out of believing I ever even wanted it. And I feel like I was so sure of everything that it would be embarrassing to admit that things didn’t work out like I planned. You know? I was always the sensible one. And if it turns out I wasn’t sensible—and that I just deluded myself into thinking I was—I would feel like such a fraud.”
I caught my breath. “I mean, I kind of am a fraud, I’ve realized. So, I'm pretending that it's all good. And so far nobody's noticed. But I’m a mess. You can probably tell. I'm a drunk mess. You're way too polite, by the way. You should make a face or something before I say anything really embarrassing."
"I don't think you've said anything embarrassing," he said quietly.
"Right. Well, that's because you have no idea what I'm talking about. It makes no sense."
He grinned and cocked his head. "It makes some sense."
"Doesn't make any sense." I shook my head and took a sip of the beer.
"No. It does.” He stepped closer. "I mean, I don't know about Egypt or Suzanne, but I get that feeling. Not knowing why you're doing what you're doing? And feeling like a fraud? I get that way sometimes, too."
He was so goddamn handsome. And there was something gentle about him and I was cold and drunk and it was raining and I hadn’t gotten the job and for once I felt really like I didn’t have anything to lose.
He met my eyes and smiled, sheepishly. “I mean—”
I stepped forward and kissed him.
Suddenly and impulsively.
Because I wanted to. Because I had nothing to lose. Because I believed, for once, there wasn’t anything to lose here.
I saw his eyes dilate before I shut mine tightly. He lifted me off the ground and I wrapped my legs around his waist and he kissed me back.
I knew I had been kissed before. Except for suddenly I was sure I had never been kissed at all. Not really. Not like this. It had never been like this.
I heard someone make a hooting noise, but mainly I just heard the rain falling and the people running around us and the soft sound of his breathing.
Mainly I just felt the way he kissed me and the firmness of his jaw and how he so obviously knew exactly what he was doing.
After a moment, he lowered his mouth to my neck and I threw my head back, letting his warm, soft lips press against the sensitive place underneath my chin while the cold water ran down our faces. I shivered. From him or the water I couldn’t tell.
We both jumped slightly at a wild crack of thunder. He set me onto my feet, laughing. I opened my eyes and looked at him. He stood with his hands open and at his sides, a wide smile on his face as he watched a bolt of lightning split the streaming, gray sky.
I looked up, too, at the lightening crackling across the sky like a scar.
He put a hand on my hip. “Hey. You’re something, you know that?” He breathed.
“Police,” someone shouted. We both turned to see students running and flashing red and blue lights. The sirens of the campus police blared loudly.
I came to my senses. I was in the middle of a parking lot in a thunderstorm, practically in a monsoon, in the arms of a strange man. This was so irresponsible. I stepped back from him and started to run.
“Hey, wait up!”
I didn’t turn back, though. The last thing I needed was to get cited by campus police for public intoxication.
The rain came in torrents, and the students, who were d
runk and disorderly to begin with, moved riotously towards the lot’s gate.
“DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER THE TAILGATE IS CANCELLED. ALL STUDENTS MUST DISPERSE. DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER THE TAILGATE IS CANCELLED. ALL STUDENTS MUST DISPERSE.”
"Hold up!"
I jumped as someone grabbed my arm.
“What the hell, Hadley?”
David, it was just David.
“Are you insane? Or have you been reading a lot of Nicholas Sparks novels?”
“I don’t know,” I shouted at him. “Let’s go.”
We ran through the rain, so fast that David couldn’t ask me any questions, so fast that I couldn’t think about anything but running. When we reached the off-campus bridge, which offered some refuge from the rain, he gave me a toothy, evil grin.
“That was pretty hot,” he said. The rain was louder underneath the bridge.
"I cannot believe I did that,” I said breathlessly.
“Neither can I,” he said.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“He was delicious. Nicely done.”
"Do you know his name?"
“No clue. Was he a good kisser?”
“Yes,” I said. I closed my eyes. “I think I’m having a heart attack. Actually.”
“Wow. That is good.”
“From sprinting. Not from him,” I said. I leaned against the bridge’s rough brick wall, trying to calm my heart rate and my breathing.
“Well, my plan worked.”
“We are stuck under a bridge in a rainstorm and I’m not wearing a coat and I’m wet, and guess what? I’m not so drunk that I can’t feel the cold. I’m cold. If this was your plan, then you’re going to need to rethink your definition of success. And where is Nigel?"
"With Snookums.”
I exhaled.
“That was extremely sexy.”
"Shut up."
"Epic, almost."
“I’ll hurt you.”
“Like, The Notebook.”
“Or maybe I’ll just murder you. I’m going to murder you. Yep. The Notebook with a side of murder.”
He laughed happily. “You looked like you were enjoying it."
I rolled my eyes. "Well, I'm drunk."
"Do you regret it?"
No. I didn't. But I didn't quite want to admit that, either. "Ask me when I'm sober."
I told myself I was just out of practice. I only thought it had been amazing because it had been so long.
Still, I knew I didn’t want to take it back. I wouldn’t take it back for anything. I touched my hands to my lips. I wished I’d told him my name.
Chapter Four
The stranger and the kiss stayed with me for an embarrassingly long period of time. Like, all through my hangover the next day and right through to the next weekend—the weekend before my very last exams, when I felt like I was too busy to breathe.
Somehow, it kept coming back. I thought about his soft lips. His hands on my legs. I thought about it almost as much as I thought about the New York Times.
I hadn't told anyone else that I didn’t get the job. I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened.
Justin Shelter handed in his piece on alcohol poisoning on Sunday which meant it would run in the last edition of the paper. That worked to his advantage. He would be off-campus for the initial backlash.
Nobody from the fraternity had offered a comment, but Justin had followed my advice to interview other people and pulled a few telling quotes. The piece was excellent. For some members of the fraternity, it would probably be explosive.
Justin had talked to one of the students who'd been hospitalized, and she said that the hospital had told her that her drink had been laced with ruphonyl, the date-rape drug. He had even managed to get a student health administrator on the record, admitting that the university was only aware of the students who had been hospitalized, not where they had come from.
I ran through the article one last time, checking for split infinitives and stray commas. When I was confident it was flawless, I closed out of the editing window. I scrolled through the pages once more, saved all changes, uploaded the edition to our website, and sent the final design files over to our printer. I pushed back from the computer and sighed.
Done. Last issue of the semester.
I should have printed out my Arabic paper and read it one final time, but instead I opened a new tab in my browser and logged onto Facebook.
I'd done this a few times this week: logged on and started clicking through random profiles, looking for him. It was pathetic. And stalkerish. And I kept doing it.
I told myself that if I had his name the mystery would be solved and I'd stop thinking about it. I told myself that I'd always been an information addict and knowing nothing about the stranger I’d kissed forced me to do some research. But, I knew I was deceiving myself. I liked kissing him and I wanted to know who he was.
Twenty fruitless minutes later, our printers emailed me and confirmed receipt of the production files. It snapped me out of my social media trance. I thanked them, shut down my computer, and printed my Arabic paper.
I felt sorry for myself as I walked to my car in the cold. I told myself to get a grip—I'd be going back to San Francisco tomorrow with David for winter break.
Last I'd heard from my mother, she'd been dating someone new named Sol. That had been in August, but I hadn't been home since last December. I missed San Francisco. And it would be nice to have nothing to do for a few weeks.
And maybe there I could forget about the stranger in the parking lot and The New York Times.
Chapter Five
Campus was quiet the morning Justin's article ran. I snapped a photo of the issue and texted it to Justin: Looks good!!
Haha, on a plane home. Save me a copy!
I cut through the library and dropped my Arabic paper in the box outside of Professor Haskell's office.
David was packing when I got back to our apartment.
"Do I need sunglasses?"
“Do you know anything about San Francisco?”
He looked at me blankly. “It’s like in Northern California and you went to high school there.”
“It’s a permanent cloud. The sun is not a thing in San Francisco.”
“It doesn’t say that on the Wikipedia page,” he replied blandly. “I’m packing sunglasses.”
“Waste of space.”
“They're very small. And they will help me sleep at night.” He yawned. “So, have you tracked down the Nicholas Sparks boy?”
“That never happened. He doesn’t exist."
“Normally, people introduce themselves before making out. I don’t think I fully explained the art of the drunken make out to you.”
I rolled my eyes. "Don't bring sunglasses.”
“Well, what should I pack?”
“Normal clothing,” I said. “My mom’s pretty casual about Christmas.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Your mother is too fabulous to be casual about anything."
"Except holidays," I smiled at him. I tried not to complain about my parents to David. They were annoying, but they had never tried to hurt me. David's had. They threw him out of their home when he was a junior in high school. He had told them he was gay, thinking that they might find a new church—one that wasn't so homophobic. It had backfired.
He'd lived with his sister and her husband after that. They were kind, but David knew they partly resented having to provide for him when they had young children of their own.
David still made an effort—every now and again when he thought they might come around. He'd tried last year at Christmas and returned from break early, white-faced and quieter than I'd ever seen him. He hadn't spoken to them since.
"Are we going to your church or anything?" he asked. "Do I need a suit?"
"No," I smiled. "Just bring your fine self, no sunglasses, and stop talking about the stranger. Oh, and don't tell my mom I didn't get the job at the Times."
"You didn't tell h
er?"
"No. And you aren’t going to either. She'll, like, think I need to see a therapist," I said. I went into my room and grabbed my suitcase. "Come on. We've got to get going."
I checked my phone a few times on the way to the airport while David read Justin's article.
"This is the kid you want me to date?"
"Nigel wants you to date. I'm not even sure he's gay."
"He's in the GSA."
"So am I," I pointed out. "Gay-straight."
"There are no straight boys in the GSA," David replied. "Girls, fine. Boys, no." He folded the paper. "Good article, though. He sounds feisty."
I smiled. "I guess."
"He's not feisty?"
“He’s quiet at first,” I said. “But, yeah. He’s a little feisty.”
"Well, you've got to look out for the quiet ones.” He nodded. “Like you.”
When we reached the airport, I got the first and only email complaining about Justin's article—from Alexander Faulk, the president of the fraternity.
Hi Hadley:
I wanted to let you know that I saw Justin Shelter’s article in the paper. I'd like to be able to speak on the record, if possible. I'm the President of the fraternity in question. Maybe we could do a follow-up piece. Please let me know if we could organize something.
Best,
Alexander Faulk
It was a reasonable request, even though I knew Justin had given them the opportunity to get on the record a half-dozen times. I tapped out a reply while we checked our bags:
Alexander, thank you for reaching out. I've left campus for winter break, and I will not be able to assign a staff writer to a follow-up piece until January. However, if you would like to write a letter to the editor, we could post it online until we have a chance to run a piece with your statement in it in January. Let me know if you'd like to do that.
All best,
Hadley
I felt reassured by the reaction, though. Perhaps he had told the rest of the brothers to let him handle it.
When we stepped out from baggage claim in San Francisco, the damp cooling air whispered across my neck. It felt gentle and clean. San Francisco’s air was soft—humid, but almost never too hot or too cold. I felt the tension in my neck and back dissolve underneath its soothing touch.
