Lessons in Love (13 page)

“Um, Love?” Charlie licks his lower lip, eyeing me adorably before going on. “You realize it’s impossible for you to hide that, right? I mean, it’s not like we met off-campus and I don’t know the real you. I came here.” He points to the floor. “Here. To high school. And not just any one but the one where my famous brother is hailed as one of the best people to grace these halls.” He sticks his neck out, pigeon-like, for emphasis. “I think you can safely say I’m okay with our age difference. And with the fact that to see you, I’ll have to retrace the Parker-trodden path.” He sighs. “Which, as we know, isn’t top on my list.”

Something occurs to me as he says this. “Then why Harvard?” I scratch my neck. “If you don’t want to repeat Parker or follow in his footsteps — why not enroll someplace else? Carve your mark at Princeton, or Brown, or Stanford?”

“First of all, we’re not talking about me right now — we’re focusing on you. Second of all, good point.” Charlie hoists himself up on one of the soapstone tables, his left hand resting on the swan’s neck faucet. “The tricky part about sibling rivalry is wanting to be free of Parker, like I was in high school. He was here, I was at Exeter. But it didn’t stop the inevitable comparisons — by my parents, by mutual friends — like those guys on the Vineyard, Henry Randall and his pack.”

I haven’t heard that name in a while, and it dawns on me that even though my world should get bigger with college approaching, the prep school world makes it smaller, all those names and faces reappearing when you least expect it, all the
do you knows
to come over the years. Charlie turns the faucet on and for a second I wonder if he’ll wash his hands, but he just fiddles with the hot and cold, then stops. “The only reason I went to Harvard was because it won me over. Not because Parker was already there, but because on my tour, it felt right.”

My mouth forms a very small ‘o’, and I nod, imagining what it will feel like to tour campuses in a few weekends, the questions I need to think about before my interviews. “I keep hearing about that — the feeling that something just fits…but I just don’t know if I’m that kind of person.”

“Are you talking colleges or something else?” Charlie pats the table next to him. I go and sit near him, with the sink in between us. It’s small, and not particularly deep, but it might as well be a moat for all the touching it allows.

“Everyone says you ‘just know’ when you’ve found the right place. But what if I’m just such a thinky person, such a list-maker of this versus that, pros, cons, middles, that I can’t do that?”

“Can’t what?”

“Can’t relax and just give in to the feeling.” As I say this, I suddenly know I’m talking about more than just colleges. What if I can’t do that with relationships, too? Didn’t I stop all of them in the past? Fine, so Robinson Hall cheated on me and turned out to be a sophomore mistake. But then with Jacob I could have pursued it, but I chose an internship instead. Next up was Asher Piece, who I left in London and who then dropped me. So maybe that would have kept going if I’d stayed. But maybe not. And now Charlie. As though he can read this doubt in me, Charlie hops down, his shoes scuffing the poured concrete floor, and inserts himself between my knees.

He puts his hands on the back of my neck, his hands leafing about in my hair, his fingers sending ripples of pleasure from my scalp to my legs as he plays with my hair then kisses me. “Can you relax in this?”

I lean in so my face is on his shirt, wanting to take in that mixture that makes him smell like him. Sometimes, when I’d finish work at the café and crawl up to bed by myself this summer, I’d sleep with something of his — a sweatshirt, a t-shirt — just so I could breathe him in. My list of what he smells like: cornflowers (not in a perfumy way, but those flowers are clustered near his beach cabin), Never-dul (brass polish he uses on the boat), lemon Joy (he washed his hair with it on boating overnights), chocolate, cinnamon, and the salty ocean. I press my nose into the yellow broadcloth of his shirt, sniffing. My heart and my nose come up empty, though, when I get only the whiff of Tide. And not the ocean kind.

“Look, it’s bound to feel weird while we get used to this back and forth thing,” Charlie says. “I’m in…my world’s kind of different — classes, my housing situation, no rules…”

“I’m sorry,” I say and then shake my head into his chest. “I keep wanting to apologize. For all that — the picking me up at my dorm, that I can’t just decide to go to the Square and hang out with you.” I pause. “That I can’t sleep over…” I’m speaking into his chest, muffling the words, especially the last few, just in case calling the bedding situation (or lack thereof) to light only makes things worse.

Charlie arches back, so he can see my face. “Did you just make reference to the lack of physical proximity?” I nod. He raises his eyebrows and frowns. “Well, then, I guess it’s over. If we can’t sleep together tonight — in fact, right here and now — I guess we’re done.”

“Okay,” I laugh. “I get it.”

“It just is what it is, Love. How great would it be if we could just be summer-bound forever? You, a coffee wench and me a poor but honest fisherman.” He touches my hair.

“It sounds like the start of a fable,” I smirk and pull him back, my legs wrapped around his waist. Like this, I can believe we are a couple, no matter the distance, the age inequalities, our past relationships mistakes, our mutual “old friends” Jacob and Miranda.

“Yeah?” Charlie looks at me, but with that guy expression of half being aware of the words coming out of his mouth, the other half being sucked into
the look
. That pre-physical trance. “So what’s our moral?”

I tap my forehead. “In film world, this means I’m thinking.”

“Just like Lucy Honeychurch in that movie we were supposedly watching?”

“You knew her name?” I thought he’d never seen that movie.

Charlie nods. “I took a film course called Agrarian Visions. I used
A Room with a View
in my thesis.” I blush. Every time I think I’m informing Charlie of something new, or expressing myself for the first time with him, it’s like he’s heard it before. Now I feel redundant even with my slim knowledge of movies. “Not that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy your espousal of the film’s subtext. A.”

“A?”

“My grade. For you.”

“What do I have to do for extra credit?” I joke. He puts his fingers on my lips and I’m torn between wanting to nibble on them and the subtext of our own story. Is he the teacher to my student? Then before I can let my inner critic come on full force, he leans me onto the soapstone so I feel the stone’s coolness at the same time he’s on top of me. There’s something amazing about kissing while lying down, such a connectedness. All prior worries and feelings of being somehow less than present disappear. He’s all mouth and hands, whispering words to me that give me chills equal to the physical moves.

I kiss him back, not minding the hard surface I’m on, almost unaware of our surroundings save for the quiet drip of water into the sink. I guess Charlie didn’t tighten the tap.

“Can I?” Charlie whispers while in the process of taking off my shirt. I nod, feeling Charlie’s hands on the back clasp of my bra (a position, it should be noted, that takes no small amount of abdominal musculature on both our parts, what with my having to arch my back, and him being on me but not so on me that I can’t breathe).

“Charlie…” I give into the moment, to the feeling of being wrapped up in him, so wrapped up that I pepper the physicality with a question he can’t answer. “Am I going loose my virginity to you?” The sentence makes its way from my brain where I thought it was tucked away to consider at other times (lying in bed at night, bored in class) to the air between us. Why does that question come to me for consideration when I’m not with him? Maybe spitting it out now is my way of espousing the need to connect it — that string of words — to the actual person and act. So now I’ve asked it, and the words hang there, suspended as if in a cartoon bubble, while we continue to kiss. Charlie props himself up on his forearms, looking down at me.

“Did you just ask me what I thought you asked me?”

“Yep.” I look at him. “I did, in fact, say that out loud.”

My shirt is off my body but around my neck, bra undone, my heart racing for a ton of reasons, Charlie’s pressed against me, and to make a point he asks in a very clear voice. “You’re asking
me
if I’m the one —
the
one — you’ll have sex with for the first time?”

This time, the words more than hang in the air: they echo, overly loud, with his enunciation. Right after Charlie’s posed the question back to me, an unpleasant surprise: a small cough tells me we’re not alone. And while I’m on full-view on top of the lab table, I can’t see the door in its entirety.

“Oh, shit, sorry,” says a voice.

I hear this from the doorway without knowing who said it. From where I’m lying (half-naked, of course), I can just see the floor and two pairs of shoes near the door. Charlie bolts upright, jumping cleverly behind the counter so only his upper body is viewable, and I grab my t-shirt and roll it down as the intruders walk into the room. My bra dangles like a useless limb from one side of my shirt.

“Oh, hey, Love, sorry to bust in on you.”

I stick my arms into their proper position in my shirt just as Chloe Swain presents in front of me.

“Hey.” I smooth my hair behind my ear. I say
hey
like we’ve brushed by each other in the hallway. Not like she’s just seen me kind of naked, in a very compromising position. Not like she just heard Charlie ask me about losing my virginity, and not like Jacob’s right next to her.

“Hey.” He says
hey
like it’s been years since we last tuned in on each other’s lives. Maybe that’s what it feels like — when you go back to school after summer break — and you see that person out of context, that it’s been eons. I flash back to seeing him make out with Chloe at the fair on Martha’s Vineyard, all those reflections of them in the hall of mirrors, slamming me.

“We were just…” Chloe giggles and slinks her arm around Jacob’s jean-clad waist. She shrugs so we all know we’re in this together, this unintentional double-date, all of us sneaking illegally for a campus hook-up before the dorms beckon.

“It’s fine.” My blood races around my body as I adjust my foot into the flip-flop that had flopped off and wave my hands. “We were almost done.” Cue regret of word choice. Done with what, exactly? “We’re heading out anyway.”

The few minutes of overlap we’ve had with Jacob, Charlie’s been quiet. He emerges from behind the soapstone slab with his hands in his pockets, in a nearly identical stance to Jacob. Charlie is a vision of crumpled academia and Jacob, earthy in a grey t-shirt so thin I can see his tanned stomach underneath, looks incomplete without his guitar. Oh my god — I have my own Cecil and George! Just like in the movie downstairs. Only, Cecil is so prim he’s ridiculous in film and George is like a puppy he’s so enthusiastic. But still.

“We’ll let you go then,” Jacob says and just like that I’m reminded that I don’t have him and Charlie. Unlike Lucy Honeychurch and her conflicted suitors, I have just the one — and he’s tugging at me.

“Okay, well.” I suck in air so hard everyone hears. Then I counteract his use of the pronoun we with my own. “We’ll see you back at the dorms, then.”

“So, you never did tell me the name,” Charlie says.

Our hands are clasped, swinging just slightly, as he walks me back to Fruckner. I couldn’t get a ride with him without signing out officially and I couldn’t find Mrs. Ray, so we hoofed it up and back. It’s not bad, really, to end the evening strolling with your boyfriend, even if the air is sticky and the heat oppressive.

“The name of what?” Now that we’re out of the science building, away from Friday Night Flicks and hook-up surprises, the night feels bigger, better.

Charlie stops. He touches my face. “This whole time, the whole distraction thing?” He kicks his feet against the sandy grit on the pavement. “All I wanted to know was the title — of your story.” He smiles as me. “For Chaucer.”

I stretch my arms up into the sky, wishing it were cooler, wishing we were back on the beach, or that it was summer, or that I knew — just somehow could find out — what would happen with us. “You’re so nice to ask, Charlie. Really.” I stand on my tiptoes and kiss him.

“So?”

“What You Might Know,” I say, and nibble a bit of skin on my top lip. “I keep changing it slightly.” The temperature hasn’t dropped, and I’m hot. The kind of hot that invades you weather you’re fully clothed or, say, semi-naked on a science lab table. But I digress. “It’s not set in stone…” In bed or walking to campus I’ve played with the title, debating the merits of words.

“It’s a good title.” He doesn’t say more, which I take as a sign of respect.

The noise of our shoes on the pavement sounds louder than it should, making me feel a certain emptiness. All that looking forward to seeing Charlie all week only to have it go by so quickly. We walk past the cemetery, where giggles and a few decidedly undead noises filter into the night air. By the time we reach the circular driveway for Deals, Bishop, and Fruckner, I’m bursting with the warmth, and back to wishing we were at Charlie’s cabin where the sea air comes at a fast clip, instantly making you long for an oversized sweater.

“So you’re not going to tell me what it’s about?” Charlie puts his thumb on my chin, right near my lower lip.

I look down. Okay, so maybe I took the respect too soon. It’s not that I don’t want to share the story with him, but that I don’t want to share it with anyone. The doubt I have about my writing is too raw. Those words on the page are too new. Even if I just sketch the plot for him, I’ll feel like I’ve let something go. And I can’t do that yet. It’s almost like if I do, I won’t get into Chaucer’s class. A silly mind game, admittedly, but I need all the help I can get. “I was just thinking how much I wish we were in the driveway near your cabin.” I kiss his thumb and he retreats it.

“She said cleverly deflecting his attempts at finding out about her secretive writing.” He wipes his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt, making me wonder why he doesn’t shed the Oxford and just wear the white t-shirt. “Could it be hotter?”