Relatively Honest

by Molly Ringle

  “Hi.”

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Breakfast. Brunch, rather.”

  “With Sinter?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is he?”

  “Er…not bad, but you know…”

  “Never mind. You can’t answer while he’s right there. So, can you go out with me today?”

  “I should think so.”

  “Okay. Tell Sinter you’re meeting a study group at the library at two o’clock. I’ll tell Clare I’m going shopping. I’ll pick you up in my car at the corner by the bookstore. Sound good?”

  “Yep. Great.”

  “Now pretend I’m one of the people from the study group, if Sinter asks.”

  “That’s what I planned.”

  “You’re such a smart boy. See you there. Bye bye.”

  I hung up and turned to Sinter, whose admirer had walked away after obtaining his signature on the back of an envelope. I diverted my Julie-glow into a smile at him. “Autographs, now? Aren’t we glamorous.”

  “Yeah. Bizarre.” He lifted his eyebrows.

  “That was one of the people from my bio study group.” I put the phone back into my pocket. “I’m to meet them this afternoon. Doubt we’ll really get anything done, they only sit around and gossip.”

  He nodded and drank some juice. “I’ve got a paper to write. I’ll just be a hermit till it’s time for the play.”

  That was that. By 2:15, Julie and I were driving in her blue Toyota up the south hills of Eugene, past expensive houses and wooded parks. She stopped the car in a cul-de-sac, and we got out. She took a folded-up woolen blanket from the back seat and smiled at me. My pulse started pounding.

  She led me up a path into one of the parks. The rainclouds had blown away, and the sun now shone between evergreen branches. The air was still cold, but you could smell spring in the breeze, especially up here in the forest. Hand in hand, we walked uphill until reaching a spot where the trees ended and a meadow opened up. She led me into the meadow. The straw-colored grass rose to our waists and got our shoes wet. In the center, she flung open the blanket, spread it out, and fell onto her hands and knees to crunch down the high grass beneath it. I knelt too, to help. The blanket settled into a lumpy beige square. I stared at how green her eyes were when the sun was in them.

  On our knees, with the grass waving above our heads, we leaned forward and met in a kiss. When we slid down onto the blanket, me on my back and Julie on top of me, the world fell out of view and became nothing but a fence of high grass and a patch of blue sky. And kisses, kisses, kisses. Oh, we made up for lost time that afternoon with all those kisses.

  Of course, in that position, even when you’re both dressed, you get up to more than kissing even if you don’t mean to. Gravity brings you into contact with places you haven’t touched yet intentionally. Shifting around to get comfortable makes you notice them even more. And then you start shifting on purpose, and touching with your hands – just a little at first, to see what the other person does. When they don’t mind, you keep doing it. And maybe you’re still fully dressed, but it becomes the hottest thing you’ve done in ages, and you can tell she thinks so too because she’s breathing as shallow as you are, and making little sounds in her throat, and driving you mad by pulling your tongue inside her mouth.

  That was all we got up to, that day. I swear it’s the truth. Even though we’re talking about me, the guy who had encountered the knickers of twelve separate girls by the time he was nineteen, I let Julie stop me while all our clothes were still in place, and she led us back to the car.

  To my surprise we had lost two hours, lying there in a chilly meadow kissing and fondling through our clothes. I knew the feel of her chest through her blue jumper very well by now, as well as the inner lining of her raincoat against the backs of my knuckles. I had also got well acquainted with the corduroy texture of the trousers she was wearing: the back pockets and the waistline, not the front button or the zip. She, in turn, must have come away with a solid knowledge of my gray cotton shirt and a limited region of my jeans, over my thighs, where she had petted and tickled me.

  “Have to get ready for the play.” She sighed as she stuck the key into the ignition. “And maybe do some homework.” She checked her face in the rearview mirror, rearranged her hair, and ran a thumb across her well-rubbed lips.

  “Yeah.” I reached out and smoothed a piece of hair she had missed. “Don’t know how I’ll concentrate.”

  “We’ll have to do this again. Tomorrow, maybe.”

  “Tonight, if I can catch you behind a set piece.”

  She let me out a street away from the dorms, so we wouldn’t arrive together. Back in our room, Sinter was settled in with his gloomy loud music, a group that either had “black” or “midnight” or “death” in their name; I couldn’t remember. He was slouched at his desk, typing.

  He glanced my direction. “Hey. How was biology?”

  Parts of me were still sore or insistent, having been pressed too much or not enough. I felt drunk. I turned away, touching my lips (to name just one such part), and answered, “Rather frustrating.”

  HAD I forgotten she was my cousin? No, of course not. But my enamored brain, all day, insisted on labeling her as first a girl – the most amazing, beautiful, delightful, sexy girl ever – and then also, just incidentally in a footnote kind of way, my cousin.

  Did I wince, that night, when Sinter and Julie had to kiss on stage? When they had to pretend to be madly in love? When he had to show desolation at learning who she “really” loved? Yes, but only on their behalf. I had a fairly easy time of things myself. In fact, I had to be careful not to be in too good a mood, lest Sinter notice.

  And that was difficult, when Julie was privately doing me such fantastic favors. During a scene where Sinter was onstage with Blaine, she appeared beside me. We weren’t alone; there’s no truly being alone backstage during a theater production – you’re always within a few yards of someone – but we were isolated enough to whisper without being overheard.

  “Got zero history read,” she told me, looking up at the backdrops over our heads. “Could only think about a certain field and a certain blanket.”

  “Same here.” I watched Bev whip stitches into a ripped costume sleeve, at the door to the makeup room. “Hope it won’t rain tomorrow.”

  “If it does, there’s always the car. And abandoned forest roads.”

  “Mm. I love it when you talk like a serial killer.”

  Hands behind her back, she eased a step closer and let her elbow lean against mine. I gave her waist a pinch, then folded my hands properly back. I set my gaze on the stage manager, in her black turtleneck, muttering into her headset to the lighting booth crew. A curl from Julie’s wig touched my shoulder. “There’s something I’ve heard about British guys,” she whispered. “Tomorrow I want to see if it’s true.”

  Is that a French military-issue dagger in your pocket, Captain, or are you just happy to see Miss Roxane?

  “You’ve heard we’re the best kissers in the world? It is true, but you already knew that.” Despite the joke, I was trembling with lust. I could guess well enough what she had heard: the infamous circumcision question. Many American males, poor lads, get the mutilation as babies, while we in the more civilized nations do not. American girls were fascinated by this fact, as I knew all too well.

  She chuckled, soft and deep-pitched. “We’ll see.”

  “Yes, perhaps we shall.”

  She slipped away in a rustle of gown. I gasped a breath, trying to be silent about it. Quick check downward: costume bulky enough to hide evidence of this conversation? Yes. Thank God.

  Late the next morning, rain tapped the roof of Julie’s car and ran down the windows, soaked the dark trees of the forest southwest of the city, and puddled on the bumpy road. We found a parking spot: a narrow stretch of gravel that led into the woods a short distance and then stopped. We got comfortable in the back seat, under the same blanket
we had brought to the meadow. Clever girl, she had worn a shirt you could unbutton, and a loose skirt. My hands gained access to sacred places through those avenues, while she acquired an answer to her question. First with her hand, then with her eyes, she found the rumor to be true, and told me with a blush that she found it quite enticingly interesting.

  “I’m a virgin, technically,” she had said once upon a time, and by the end of that day she still was. But any adolescent – and hopefully any adult – with sufficient imagination can dream up several activities just as satisfying. So there beneath a scratchy woolen blanket, in the too-small vinyl-upholstered back seat of a Toyota, Julie French and I explored our options.

  Why didn’t I say it afterwards? With her body draped around me while she caught her breath, her hair tickling my neck, her hand retrieving a folded wad of clean tissues from her coat pocket and tucking them into my palm – why didn’t I say, “I love you”? Because I knew she wasn’t mine, and couldn’t be. But it was so hard to keep quiet; I had to press my mouth to her forehead for nearly a minute straight. And I was not generally a cuddler after sex, no matter which definition of “sex” you used.

  We couldn’t stay long. It was Sunday, and we had a Cyrano matinee. We got back late, and arrived wet from sprinting across the car park. I let Julie go in before me so we wouldn’t turn up at the same time. “Lost track of the hour,” I said to Sinter, who was in full costume and shooting me a perplexed look in the dressing room mirror.

  The whole week went like that, but because of classes we couldn’t go so far afield as the surrounding forests. We exchanged texts every morning as a strategy session, comparing our schedules and those of our roommates.

  Monday and Wednesday we managed to get my room for an hour in the afternoon. Tuesday and Thursday we couldn’t work out a time for either room, so we ventured to campus and went on a desperate search for a secluded corner. The Law Library had a unisex restroom on its fourth floor so we made use of that on Tuesday. On Thursday, in the rain, we found a sheltered bench tucked into the far end of a track field, which gave just enough cover to make us brave enough to maneuver our hands under the intervening clothing. “God, we’re going to get arrested,” I said, though I wasn’t about to stop.

  “Hope my parents aren’t reading the Eugene police beat,” she said.

  We weren’t arrested. But we were caught.

  Friday, in my room, we got daring with our hour of luxury, and opted to strip off everything. I was stretched out on my mattress, watching the top of her head and her bare shoulders as she moved down my torso, kissing the exposed skin, when the doorknob rattled. A key snapped back the deadbolt. Julie gasped and dove under the sheets. “Sinter, wait!” I shouted. “Please – wait a second –” I grabbed clothes from the floor. Where the hell had Julie’s bra gone to?

  The sounds of the latch went silent. “Okay,” he called, sounding confused, which he had every right to be.

  “Just a second,” I repeated, wriggling into my jeans. I fell off the bed.

  “Five minutes – please,” Julie added, voice distorted both by panic and by the shirt she was tugging down over her head. Evidently she wasn’t bothering about the bra.

  Another pause, then, “Okay.” The deadbolt relocked. He went quiet.

  We didn’t know if he was still there. We didn’t talk except to mutter curse words. Julie put on her shoes, patted down her hair, and grimaced at me. We were dressed, so I nodded, and we opened the door. Nobody there. She let out a shaky sigh.

  “I won’t say it’s you unless you want me to,” I told her.

  “See what you can get away with.” She kissed me quickly. “I don’t want to hurt him.”

  “I know.”

  She darted off to her room. I went to my bed and sat down, leaving the door open.

  Sinter came in ten minutes later; ample time, very nice of him. “Class was cancelled,” he said. He occupied himself with taking books and notes out of his knapsack.

  “Yes. Er, sorry,” I said. “Seems we never devised a system.”

  “System?”

  “Sock tied around the doorknob or something. You know, for when I…have a girl in here.”

  He put the knapsack on the floor, and stacked the books on top of each other so their white library stickers lined up perfectly down the spines. “A girl whose voice I know pretty well by now,” he said.

  Though he wasn’t looking at me, I cringed. I curled my bare feet under the bed. “Yeah.” My toes touched a smooth lightweight strap of some sort – ah, so that’s where the bra had gone. I tapped it further toward the wall. “Listen, this is a new thing, and I was going to tell you. After the play. We didn’t want it to be weird for you.”

  He sank into his desk chair and opened his schedule book. He nodded.

  “I wasn’t lying, last week,” I babbled on. “She really is still with Patrick. They have a…an open relationship, as it turns out.”

  He took the cap off a pen, and crossed something out. “Interesting.”

  “But don’t tell him. Don’t tell anyone, please. He doesn’t want to know.”

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell?”

  “Precisely. You understand.”

  “Then, uh…” He pressed the tip of the pen into his knuckle, and dragged a line of black around the bone. “Does she know…?”

  “No. I haven’t told her that.”

  He lifted his eyebrows. “All right.”

  “I feel – that is, I’m sorry I – look, really, I was going to tell you. I hated hiding it. I’m hiding things from everyone. Now at least you know everything.”

  His lower lip slipped between his teeth. He nodded, spiraling a black line on the back of his hand.

  “And you hate me for it,” I concluded. “Can’t blame you there.” I turned sideways, drew my feet up onto the bed, and seized my nearest textbook.

  “I don’t hate you, you drama queen,” he said.

  “But you liked her, and I knew you did –”

  “Well, you liked her first.”

  “I know, but you liked her well enough to…to lose Clare over it.”

  “That,” he said, capping the pen, “wasn’t really about having feelings for Julie. It was about not having those feelings for Clare. See?”

  “Yes, I do, I just…”

  Our phone rang. He swiveled and picked it up. “Hello? Yes, I’ll get him.” He held the receiver out to me. “Your mom.”

  I set down the text, heaved myself to my feet, and took the phone. “Hello?”

  “Hi, darling, it’s Mum.”

  “How’s it going, Mum?”

  “It’s going fine. We wanted to come and see your play this weekend. You said there’s a Saturday evening performance?”

  I had mentioned the play in email a couple times, mostly as an excuse as to why I wasn’t writing more often. They’d responded enthusiastically, saying they simply must come see it, but I hadn’t answered to set up any plans. I wanted to avoid the moment when they discovered the name “Julie French” in the program, and put two and two together.

  My fingers curled around the top of my desk chair, and I fell into it. “Oh, well…yes. There is. But you know, I don’t really have that many lines. You needn’t bother.”

  “We want to see it anyway. It’s what parents do, Daniel. Is Saturday a good night? How much are tickets?”

  “Well, I can get you comp tickets – complimentary – but…I don’t know where the seats are. They might not be any good.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be fine. And you said your roommate was in it?”

  “He’s one of the leads. But…listen, um…” I pushed my free hand into my hair, which was still unkempt from my tangle with Julie a quarter-hour ago. “There’s something I meant to tell you, about the play.”

  “Oh?”

  “Julie – Julie French, our…relative…” In the edge of my vision I saw Sinter throw me a glance.

  “What about her?” Mum sounded a little scared.


  “She’s in the play. She’s Roxane. So, um, I’ve actually spent some time with her.”

  “Oh, my goodness! What’s she like?”

  “Fine. Very nice. Er, as a matter of fact…” No getting around this next confession if they were going to come and see her in person. “She’s the same Julie who’s driven me to Sunriver and back a few times. I didn’t know her last name, didn’t make the connection at first, but that’s her.”

  “Then we’ve met her! Oh, and I didn’t even notice!”

  “Well, yes – but I haven’t told her we’re related. You said you didn’t want me to.”

  “Did she look like Evelyn? God, I can’t recall.”

  “I don’t know. But you don’t want me to tell her, right?”

  “No! I haven’t spoken to her father yet. I will one day, I imagine. Oh, but now I do so want to see her. We must come to the play.”

  “Fine, but – you’re not going to tell her, are you?” I tried not to make it sound like begging.

  “Lord, of course not.”

  “It’s only, it would be weird, since we’ve hung out now…”

  “I’m not ready. I’ve no idea what I’d say. But to see her – my niece! Oh, dear, now I’m all flustered. I won’t be able to eat a bite.”

  “Calm down, Mum.”

  “Calm down indeed. It’s very exciting! Get those tickets for us, won’t you, dear? Saturday night.”

  “Saturday night.”

  “Thank you, darling. Goodbye!” She hung up.

  I hung up too, and let my hands fall to my lap. I didn’t realize I was staring so motionlessly out the window until I moved my eyes and saw the inverted impression of a white flagpole as a glowing violet stripe down my view of the world.

  “So they’re coming Saturday,” Sinter said.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s awkward.” He dropped the pen into a mug on his desk. “Want to go out for ice cream? You look like you could use ice cream.”

  My head sagged, and I buried both hands in my hair. “Why are you being nice to me? You should hate me. Come on, I’m despicable. Yell at me, would you? Tell me I’m a terrible person and I don’t deserve her. Somebody should.”