“You aren’t lecherous.”
“Not yet,” he says, “but if I make another move toward you, I will be.”
He needs more, so I give more. I tell him I write my stupid poems just so he’ll read them (“Your poems are not stupid,” he says. “Please don’t call them that.”), that I spent all Thanksgiving break reading Lolita and feel changed because of it, that I dressed up today for him, that I shut the classroom door because I wanted us to be alone.
“And I thought we might . . .” I trail off.
“We might what?”
I roll my eyes, titter out a laugh. “You know.”
“I don’t.”
Swiveling slightly in the chair, I say, “That we might, I don’t know, kiss or something.”
“You want me to kiss you?”
I lift my shoulders and duck my head so my hair falls over my face, too embarrassed to say it.
“Is that a yes?”
Behind my hair, I give a little grunt.
“Have you been kissed before?” He pushes back my hair so he can see me, and I shake my head no, too nervous to lie.
He gets up and locks the classroom door, turns off the lights so no one can look in through the windows. When he takes my face in his hands, I close my eyes and keep them closed. His lips are dry, like laundry stiff from the sun. His beard is softer than I expected, but his glasses hurt. They dig into my cheeks.
There’s one close-lipped kiss, then another. He makes a wordless hmm sound and then there’s an open kiss that goes on for a while. I can’t focus on what is happening, my mind so far away it might as well belong to someone else. The whole time all I can think about is how weird it is that he has a tongue.
Afterward, my teeth won’t stop chattering. I want to be fearless, to smirk and say something flirty and coy, but all I can do is wipe my nose on my sleeve and whisper, “I feel really weird.”
He kisses my forehead, my temples, the corner of my jaw. “A good weird, I hope.”
I know I should say yes, reassure him, give him no reason to doubt how much I want it, but I only stare off into middle distance until he leans forward and kisses me again.
I sit at my usual place at the seminar table, my palms flat on the tabletop to keep myself from touching the raw skin at the corners of my mouth. Other students filter in, unzipping their coats and pulling copies of Ethan Frome out of their backpacks. They don’t know what happened, can never know, but still I want to scream it. Or, if I can’t scream it, I want to press the heels of my hands against the table, break through the wood until the whole thing cracks apart and the splintered pieces fall in such a way that the secret spells out across the floor.
On the other side of the table, Tom leans back, stretching his arms behind his head so his shirt rides up, showing a couple inches of his stomach. Jenny’s chair is empty. Before Tom came in, Hannah Levesque said something about them breaking up, gossip that would have sent me reeling two months ago. Now it barely registers. Two months feels like a lifetime.
During class, as Mr. Strane lectures on Ethan Frome, there’s a slight tremble in his hands, a reluctance to look my way—or no, it’s ridiculous now to think of him as “mister.” But the thought of calling him by his first name seems wrong, too. At one point he touches his hand to his forehead, loses his train of thought, something I’ve never seen him do before.
“Right,” he mumbles. “Where was I?”
The clock above the doorframe ticks two, three, four seconds. Hannah Levesque makes some painfully obvious point about the novel, and instead of brushing her off, Strane says, “Yes, exactly.” Turning to the chalkboard, he writes in big letters, Who is to blame? and an ocean roars in my ears.
He talks about the whole plot of the novel even though we only had to read the first fifty pages for class. The allure of young Mattie and the moral conundrum the older, married Ethan finds himself in. Is Ethan’s love for her really wrong? He lives in desolation. All he has is sickly Zeena upstairs. “People will risk everything for a little bit of something beautiful,” Strane says, with so much sincerity in his voice there are ripples of laughter around the seminar table.
I should be used to this by now but it’s still surreal—how he can talk about the books and also about me, and they have no idea. It’s like when he touched me behind his desk while everyone else sat at the table, working on their thesis statements. Things happen right in front of them. It’s like they’re all too ordinary to notice.
Who is to blame? He underlines the question and looks to us for answers. He’s struggling. I see that now. It isn’t that he’s nervous to be around me; he’s wondering whether he did something wrong. If I were braver, I would raise my hand and say about Ethan Frome and about him, He didn’t do anything wrong. Or I’d say, Shouldn’t Mattie share some of the blame, too? But I sit silently, a scared little mouse.
At the end of class, Who is to blame? still stretches across the chalkboard. The other students file through the door, down the hallway, and out into the courtyard, but I take my time. I pull my backpack zipper, bend down and pretend to tie my shoes, slow as a sloth. He doesn’t acknowledge me until the hallway outside the classroom is empty. No witnesses.
“How are you doing?” he asks.
I smile brightly, tug at my backpack straps. “I’m fine.” I know I can’t show even a hint of distress. If I do, he might decide I can’t handle any more kisses.
“I was worried you might be feeling overwhelmed,” he says.
“I’m not.”
“Ok.” He exhales. “Sounds like you’re doing better than I am.”
We decide I’ll come by later, after faculty service hour when the humanities building is quiet. When I’m nearly out the door, he says, “You look lovely.”
I can’t stop the grin from taking over my face. I do look lovely—dark green sweater, my best-fitting corduroys, my hair falling in waves over my shoulders. That was on purpose.
When I return to the classroom, the sun has set, and there aren’t any window blinds so we turn off the lights, sit behind his desk, and kiss in the dark.
* * *
Ms. Thompson organizes a Secret Santa in the dorm and I draw Jenny’s name, which seems like it should hurt. Instead all I feel is a vague annoyance. I take the ten dollars I’m meant to use on a gift and go to the grocery store, buy her a pound of generic-brand ground coffee, and spend the rest on snacks for myself. I don’t even wrap the coffee; at the gift exchange I give it to her in the plastic grocery bag.
“What is this?” she asks, the first words she’s spoken to me since last spring on the last day of the year—the I guess I’ll see you around she tossed over her shoulder as she left our dorm room.
“It’s your gift.”
“You didn’t wrap it?” She opens the bag with the tips of her fingers, like she’s worried what might be inside.
“It’s coffee,” I say. “Because you were always drinking coffee or whatever.”
She looks down at it, blinking so hard that for a moment I’m horrified, thinking she’s about to cry. “Here.” She thrusts an envelope at me. “I got your name, too.”
Inside the envelope is a card and, inside that, a twenty-dollar gift certificate to the bookstore downtown. I hold the gift certificate in one hand and the card in the other, my eyes darting back and forth between them. Inside the card, she wrote, Merry Christmas, Vanessa. I know we haven’t kept in touch but I hope we can work on repairing our friendship.