“I hope you’ll have some more spare time in the future? Maybe sooner rather than later?”
I was about to respond to affirm his question, but my body suddenly tightened up again like it had at the restaurant. There was that twinge again, somewhere deep within me. This time, I let the signal get through to my brain, and I voiced the concern that had risen up within me.
I said, “How old are you?”
In the dim light, I saw him just slightly tilt his head.
“Is that okay to ask?”
“Yeah,” he said. Now he was smiling. “It’s okay. I’m twenty-seven. I should be graduating law school at twenty-six, but I took a year off after getting my bachelor’s degree.”
“Twenty-seven,” I echoed. That meant he was six years older than me. It sounded like a big difference at first, I suppose because I felt so young at twenty-one. But then I thought of married people I knew, relatives I had, who were probably more than six years apart.
“Is that an acceptable age?” His voice snapped me back to the moment. I had been standing there, quiet and internally processing things for too long. My gaze had drifted to the side, but when I looked back at David, I found that he was still smiling at me.
“Sorry.” I shook my head. “Yes. I hope that wasn’t a strange thing to ask. It’s just—you’re kind of a teacher, aren’t you?”
“A teacher?” He grimaced a little. “I hope that’s not how you view me.”
“No, it’s not. It’s not how I view you. I just mean the workshop. Technically, you’re the instructor, right?”
“Oh.” His hand rose to his chin. “I suppose, technically, that’s right.”
“Is there something wrong with that? I mean, since I’m technically your student, right?”
David took a step closer to me.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “This might not be . . . perfectly kosher. But, since we’re being technical, I think it’s okay. You don’t receive a grade for the workshop. You just have to show up, and I confirm your attendance.”
“Right . . .”
“Honestly, Drew.” He took another step so that he was standing inches from me. “I don’t think anyone will care. And even if they do, I don’t. I want to take you on more dates. I want to keep seeing you. I want to keep getting to know you. Is that okay?”
He placed his hand against my face, and I felt my knees stiffen. For a split second, I could see myself three years ago: standing on the porch of my parents’ house with River. His hand resting on my face. The night before he left for New York. I brushed the image aside.
“Yes,” I answered David. “That’s okay.”
“I don’t want to come on too strong,” he lowered his voice, “but the truth is, I want to get to know you more, Drew. And I don’t know if this is too soon, but I really want to kiss you. Is that okay?”
I felt my head nod up and down, and then he moved both of his hands to the small of my back. He lowered his mouth to mine.
I was enraptured by the moment, by the fact that this beautiful man was kissing me. When he pulled away, I was frozen—a statue. Before I could form any real thoughts or command my body to move even a millimeter, he said, “I’ll talk to you soon, Drew.”
The only way I could think to respond was a simple, “Okay.”
As he walked back to his car, I stood there outside my apartment, wondering why I ever questioned if this were a good idea
Chapter 9
David Valentine became my remedy for Fall Term.
School had been exhausting me. I was distracted and disengaged during my class lectures. I was uptight and endlessly on edge during my clinicals. I found myself becoming groggy and slow-going during my study time. I woke up in the mornings, apprehension all around me, struggling to get out of bed, even with the knowledge that Honeycombs were just one room away.
But as I spent more and more time with David that term, things changed. It wasn’t a drastic, black-to-white kind of change. My classes, clinicals, and coursework didn’t become like trips to Disneyland for me. It wasn’t as though I suddenly started eagerly looking forward to any part of it.
What did change, though, was that I found something that motivated me to get through it all. I would make plans to see David in the evening, and then I was on a mission that day, staying as alert as possible through lectures, fighting through my dreaded clinicals, and then hammering and grinding away on homework as fast as I could.
Then, at long last, when my work for the day was done, my reward would arrive: I would get to be with him. At first, there were more dates. More expensive dinners and scoops of ice cream and walking around town while holding hands. He told me more about law school and his dreams of getting into politics to help others, and I would listen, awestruck, like he was telling me he was going to the moon.
As the term progressed, we became more lowkey, hanging out at my apartment or his rental house. We’d order in Thai food, lie on a couch together, and watch movies. He didn’t talk as much at that point, about his future ambitions or anything really, but I didn’t mind. To me, it didn’t really matter what we did together or what we talked about. As long as I was with him, I was happy.
“I wish I could find a lawyer to date.”
The week leading up to Thanksgiving, I invited Kat to my apartment one night so we could work on a school assignment together. We sat at a small dining room table I had found on Craigslist and managed to squeeze into a corner of our living room. Cambria had at first protested the piece of furniture, since it wasn’t the handsomest table. But when I asked her if she’d be willing to spend her money on a pretty, new one, she had silently grown tolerant of the thing.
“He’s not a lawyer yet,” I corrected Kat. “He’s still a law student right now.”
“But he will be a lawyer. I’m so jealous. The last guy who asked me out was going to school for engineering.” She crinkled up her nose as she said it.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“He just had this certain look to him. He was shorter than me, for instance. I want to be able to wear heels and not be towering over my boyfriend, you know? And, he was wearing glasses and sneakers.”
“You wear glasses, Kat.”
“Yeah, but I don’t like it when guys wear glasses.”
“Well, engineers make good money.”
“Oh, yeah. I didn’t think of that.”
“Okay, let’s finish up this assignment. Focus, Kat.”
Normally, I liked to complete schoolwork on my own, that way I could do it quickly and without social distractions. But, this assignment was based on our clinical rounds. We’d been given a patient profile and had to develop a care plan that would be reviewed by a nurse at the hospital. Even as self-centered as Kat was, she was actually very skilled at thinking from a patient’s point of view and applying things we’d learned from clinical observations. That was where I needed her help.
“Why—so you can go run off to your lawyer boyfriend? I’m tired, Drew. And hungry. Do you have any protein bars? I’ve been trying out a high-protein diet. I think it’s really working. I haven’t lost any weight, but I feel like my waist is smaller.”