Where I End and You Begin (19 page)

“What’s the difference?” I ask.

“With you? Hard to say.”

I grin at him. “Want to watch the television tell us how fucked we are?”

“Yes,” Daniel says. “I want to see it myself. But first I’m turning the heat up. Might as well, now that we’re both here and I’m not just depriving myself.”

I watch as he crosses to the thermostat. “You don’t keep it cold in here out of some religious stricture, do you?”

He smiles. “Only because I’m practicing for my vow of poverty.”

The heater kicks on and I look up at the ceiling, smiling when I find the nearest register. I go and stand in the stream of hot air pouring out while Daniel switches his attention to the television. “Yup,” he says after about five minutes, “we’re stuck here.”

“At least we have enough fluffernutters to see us through the week,” I say.

“Good Lord,” he says. “A week?” I’m sure we can get you home tomorrow.”

Tomorrow?
I think. I don’t want to go home tomorrow. I want to stay here, shooting the shit and eating fluffernutters. I don’t want to be finding out what my shitty grades are. I want to pretend, for just a little while longer, that I am safe and sound.

“We’ll just have to see,” I tell him. “Eat your fluffernutter or no dessert.”

“This practically is dessert,” he counters.

“Eat your fluffernutter, or no meal.”

“Well, I suppose when you put it that way, it’s hard to say no.” And he grins at me as he stuffs half the sandwich down his throat.

For a while we watch the television tell us what is happening right outside the window, but after the fifth shot of a reporter getting buried alive in snow, Daniel turns off the television. “Modern journalism is a wasteland,” he says.

“All journalism has always been a wasteland,” I say.

“You may be right. I’m not the history major.”

I smirk into my glass of milk. “At last, my degree comes in handy: being a pedantic shithead. I am going to be so much fun at parties after I graduate. If I graduate.”

“You’ll graduate,” Daniel says, and he says it with such ease that I wonder if he doesn’t have some special insight into the future that eludes me.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t,” he says. “I just choose to believe it’s true until such a time as it is definitively proven to not be true at all. If you get poor midterm grades, you can ask your professors about extra credit assignments. If they won’t give you extra credit, beg them. You could also cry.” He snorts. “I actually knew one guy back at MassArt who never even completed his senior project, but he’d been asking for extensions on his work the entire time he was at school, so when he asked for an extension on his senior project the deadline just sort of extended past matriculation. He got his degree and all was well. I guess.”

“That’s just wrong,” I say. “But might be effective. I could at least beg. I’m good at begging.” I wonder if I could put my slut super powers to use, but then brush the thought aside. That would probably get me suspended or kicked out. The opposite of good.

“I don’t think you’ll need to beg your way through your classes,” Daniel says.

“Yeah, but how do you know?”

He gives me a smirk, and suddenly I am suspicious. “Daniel... what do you know that you aren’t telling me?”

“Not much,” he says. “Only I got called in to fill in for Father O’Reilly’s class, and it never occurred to you that he might ask me to help him grade his midterms?”

The blood drains from my face. “Did I pass?” I demand. “Did I get an A?”

“Ethical conduct prevents me from revealing that information directly to you,” he says.

“Daniel!” I’m going to hit him. I look around for an object that would be suitable for smacking that smirk off his face. I grab a pillow from the loveseat and hold it high over my head. “Tell me!”

“I can’t!” He laughs, holding his hand up as though to shield himself, and I am boiling mad. I hit him with the pillow.

“Tell me!”

“I can’t!” He’s laughing so hard he’s doubled over, and my only consolation is that he probably wouldn’t be laughing so hard if I flunked my Holocaust midterm. Which is one down, three to go.

I hit him with the pillow a couple more times, just to get my tension out, until he finally grabs it and wrests it out of my hands with a yank so vicious that I squeak and fall into him.

For the briefest of moments, I am in his lap, my face pressed against his rock-hard stomach, his muscular thighs beneath my hands, and the scent of him fills my head. His flesh beneath the flannel of his pajama pants is burning hot.

I recover quickly, shoving against him and rearing back. I grab another pillow off the loveseat in the hopes that he won’t see my flaming face.

“Stop!” he says. “Mercy.”

He’s lying on the floor, the shove I gave him to right myself having tipped him over. He stares up at me, and I suddenly realize what I must look like to him, a woman on her knees beside him, her arms over her head, her breasts jutting out and her face flushed. If it weren’t for the couch cushion in my hands, I could be giving him a floor show.

I sit back on my heels and glare at him, just to know I’m not happy with the teasing, and he grins at me. “Let me just say this: if you write as well for your other classes and have the same grasp of the material, I don’t think you’re going to have a problem.”

I blink. “But what if I don’t?” I say. “What if all I know about is the problem of evil and how shitty everything is? That class is practically a blow-off class.”

He sighs. “God, Bianca. For about five seconds there you were in danger of acting like a normal girl. Good to see you just won’t let happiness keep you down.”

Now I really am angry with him. “Fuck you,” I say. “For a moment there I thought you didn’t have a huge stick up your ass.”

He sits up. “I don’t.”

“You do. You just want to make me normal and happy so you can pat yourself on the back and feel like you’ve done a good thing in this world.”

“I want to make you happy because then you would be happy,” he counters. “You know what I thought when I saw you puking all over the floor of my class?”

“That I looked like a drowned rat?”

“That you looked like someone who was drowning in misery.” He scowls. “Is it so bad that I want you to be happy instead of sad?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, it is. Because you don’t know anything about why I’m sad.”

“Because you won’t tell me.”

“And because when you first saw me and thought, ‘oh no, she’s so sad,’ you didn’t care about me. You cared about putting a notch in your God-belt.”

His face grows thunderous, so dark that a tiny sliver if fear slips under my skin. “Now who doesn’t know anything?” he says.

I don’t know what to say to him, but my eyes flit to the crucifix on the wall, and he follows my gaze.

“Ah,” he says. “I see. You think people only want to help you so they feel good about themselves. So they can get into heaven or something.”

“Everyone is out for themselves,” I tell him. “If you don’t know that by now, I don’t know what to tell you.”

He watches me for another long moment, and I stare back at him, defiantly. There’s a burgeoning rage inside me and I don’t know if I’m mad at Daniel or mad at everyone else in the world.

Poor girl, so tragic, so bad, poor girl, so dreadful, so sad...

But people are always judging, even when they express sympathy.

“I don’t need you to tell me I’m fucked up,” I say. “I know that well enough on my own.”

He sighs, exasperated. “I wasn’t trying to tell you that you’re fucked up. I’m just wondering why you can’t let yourself hope for anything.”

I shake my head, staring at him. “It’s really none of your business,” I say, “and I wouldn’t tell you anyway, even if I wanted to. You’re too nice and you wouldn’t understand.”

“Why wouldn’t I understand?”

I stand up. “There are places you can only understand if you go there. But you can’t come back from them. So just be happy you aren’t me.”

I glance at the clock on the DVR. It’s only nine, but I’m exhausted. The tension of the day has seeped through me, and it seems like this morning happened a long, long time ago. “I need to lie down,” I say, not looking at him.

For a long moment, Daniel doesn’t say anything. Then he stands up, too, and says, “Just a second. I need to grab some blankets and a pillow.”

I nod. A night on the loveseat it is, then. I’ve been worse, slept in worse places, felt worse about it. No big deal.

But when Daniel comes out of his room, blankets and pillow in hand, he says, “Okay, you can go in, now.”

I blink at him. “What?”

The ghost of a smile touches his face. “You didn’t think I was going to make you sleep on the couch, did you?”

“Uh.”

“You take the bed. You’re the guest here.”

“You’re like a foot taller than I am,” I say. “You should be in the bed.”

He just shakes his head at me. “Shut up and go lie down, Bianca.”

I blink, stung, and watch as he arranges the blankets and pillow on the loveseat. I shouldn’t let him do this.

But I’m still mad at him.
Normal girl.
What a shithead.

I root around in my bag, pull out my phone, then turn and head into his bedroom. I don’t close the door because that seems rude, seeing how the only bathroom in the apartment is through this door, but I do shut it part way, as though that gives me any privacy.

I pause at the edge of the bed and listen to Daniel out in the living room. The television switches on again.

The bathroom is still bright and cheery, so I close the door, leaving only a slice of light to fall across the foot of the bed, then I climb up and crawl under the covers.

It’s hard to think about something other than the fact that Daniel sleeps here. The sheets smell like him. The pillows smell like him. The indentation of his body in the middle of the bed pulls me toward it. I grab a pillow and punch it a few times, as though trying to punch the Daniel out of my head, but it’s as useless as pretending everything is fine.

I must be a mess,
I realize. If a total stranger like Daniel could see it, it must be obvious to everyone. But everyone else is dealing with their own messes, too. I need to pull it together, to solve my problems on my own, if only a certain priest-to-be would let me get on with it.

For the first time in almost two weeks, I have a sudden urge to drink. An escape from my head. I thought I was doing better, but Daniel has been my new addiction. An escape from my life, my world, stepping back in time with him—that is my new method of running and hiding. Running and hiding. That’s all I ever do. But how do you stand and face the future?

There’s a certain language, a dying language, and I can’t remember who speaks it or where in the world they are, but in that language the future is referred to as being
behind
us. It must be behind us, since we can see the past. We walk backwards, blind, into the future, only knowing where we’ve already been.

That’s what I feel like. I walk backwards. I only know what I’ve already done. If I’m walking toward a cliff, I wouldn’t know it. And sometimes, I think I wouldn’t care.

Caring too much leads to heartbreak. Wanting something too much leads to despair. The Buddhists probably have it right, that the root of all suffering is desire, but I don’t know how to stop feeling these things. They are
feelings.
You
have
to
feel
them. I can’t let them flow through me like water, the way the enlightened ones do, feeling them and letting them go. There are too many. It’s too much. And they are too painful. An undammed ocean coursing through a kitchen faucet.

I throw the pillow down and push my face into it, hoping that I will suffocate in my sleep.

It only takes a moment to change your life. One mistake, and it all comes crashing down.

When I wake up, it is dark and I hear the pattering of snow outside the window. But it is also cold, bone-deep, and I shiver, burrowing further into the covers. A sense of déjà vu washes over me, and for a moment I am upended and lost, not knowing where I am or how I got here. It seems as though I have looped the day, returning to where I started. Or perhaps I only dreamed about Daniel, about the empty house, about Tristan and the snow and the darkness chasing me down the highway, and I am now waking up again, after the whole day has passed me by.

But this is not my bed at the house. It’s too wide, too comfortable. The sheets smell like spice and man, a delicious, illicit scent.

Stop,
I tell myself, because I have a habit of sabotage, of ruining everything I touch, because at least that way I’m in control of the inevitable ending. The heartbreak will come, but it will be mine, and I will have seen it coming.

And then there is a light knocking on the door. I force my eyes open and turn.

I’m in Daniel’s bedroom, sleeping in his bed.

“Is everything okay?” I ask. My lips and mouth don’t work right, my voice a mumble. I can’t see him. The light in the bathroom is off, and there’s no light coming in the window either.

“The electricity’s gone out,” he says, and his teeth are chattering.

It takes a moment for me to realize why he is in the doorway, as though asking permission to enter his own room, because he
is
asking permission to enter.

“You’d better get in bed,” I say, and scoot over, pushing myself into the cold space of the sheets, leaving the warmth for him.

He does.

The mattress dips beneath his weight, the gravity of him pulling me toward him, and I have to clutch the sheets beneath me to keep from slipping.

Then he is sliding under the blankets and I feel his body fill up the space next to me, all broad shoulders and long legs, all burning heat and unexplored country.

I swallow and turn over, closing my eyes.

“Bianca.”

I turn back. “Yes?”

“Do you want to know why I’m taking a break from seminary?”

I do. I do very much. But I don’t know how to ask him, and it’s not my place to pry. “Only if you want to tell me,” I say.

He scoots closer, and the air in the room grows thick. I can’t see him in the dark at all. The lights have gone out all over the city. The world is shrouded in snow and night.