Bloom

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  That’s all it takes for my sense of the world’s rightness to be wrenched away. I turn toward him sharply, the sun and breeze forgotten.

  We are both off tonight, and we’d never discussed it but I assumed we’d spend it together. Maybe I’ve done such a good job of feigning independence that he didn’t realize it would matter to me. But either way, now I get to spend the day pretending it doesn’t hurt.

  “‘Someone’, huh? Must be a girl,” says Max. And my stomach sinks even lower. He wouldn’t. We haven’t laid out any ground rules, but surely he wouldn’t take someone else out. Except James doesn’t deny it. His glance toward me is quick and anxious, and then he tells Max to mind his own business.

  I jump to my feet. “I’ll see you guys later.” I grab my purse from my room and have just reached the door when James grabs my arm.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “I’m fine,” I say tersely.

  He looks behind him and then pulls me out to the front stoop. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  “Do you have a date?” I hiss.

  He looks surprised, and then he grins. “Yeah. That’s the plan anyway.” I step away from him and he pulls me back with his hands around my waist. “With you, Elle. I meant I had a date with you.”

  I feel all of my anger transform into a deep desire to cry. “Oh,” I say in a choked voice.

  He pulls me toward him. “I thought you knew.”

  “How would I know that?” I ask. “You never even mentioned it.”

  “I spend every freaking minute with you. I thought it went without saying.”

  “Nothing goes without saying, James. I have no idea where things stand.”

  “Things stand wherever you want them to,” he replies. I’d like to tell him that I want them to stand with me in a white dress, followed by me bearing his children. There’s no end to where I want us to stand, but right now I’d settle for not lying about our relationship to everyone we know. I say nothing, of course. And his lips brush my forehead and my cheeks before finding my mouth and I forget what I was thinking entirely.

  **

  For our first real date I wear the same backless dress I wore to Ginny’s birthday. It seems fitting, after all.

  “You look … ” James begins, when I come down the stairs.

  “Grown up?” I laugh. “Because that’s the best you could do the last time I wore this.”

  He pulls me against him. “Every time I saw you in some new way it was like being punched. I couldn’t stand the things I thought about when I saw you like that. And I couldn’t stand the fact that other guys were thinking them too.”

  “That’s sweet,” I smile.

  “What’s less sweet,” he says with a sigh, “is that I’m thinking them now too. So if we don’t get in the car this minute I don’t think we’re leaving at all.”

  We go to a restaurant in Lewes, which is far enough away that no one we know will see us. For once reality eclipses even my loopiest daydreams. It’s all the best parts of a first date – the hopefulness and the giddy excitement – without the awkwardness of being out with a relative stranger. We talk easily about almost anything, but honestly it would have been enough just to see his smile, to hear the low rumble of his laughter. To drink in the way he looks at me, like I’m a prize he can’t believe he’s won. The way his eyes grow hazy and heavy-lidded when either of us references last night.

  We get back to a — thank God — empty house. I run to the bathroom and find James waiting on the couch when I return downstairs.

  “So we probably need to talk,” he says. I stand before him, reaching to the side of my dress for the zipper. “In spite of what happened last night, I don’t want you to feel rushed and … ”

  “James,” I say, pushing my dress off. It billows into a small pile at my feet and I step out of it. I’m not wearing a bra, so that pretty much takes care of it.

  “Jesus Christ,” he breathes.

  I climb into his lap. “We don’t have to sleep together,” I whisper. “Not until you’re ready.”

  His laugh is slightly strangled as he runs a hand down my back and glances at his crotch. “I don’t think my readiness was ever the issue.”

  “You know what I mean,” I smile. “But I’m not going backward either.”

  He pulls my mouth to his. “I’d argue if I was capable. But I’m not capable.”

  “Good,” I sigh.

  Chapter 39

  I spend so much time in a lust-fueled daze that I feel like I’m barely noticing the rest of my life as it passes by. The calls from Edward continue and drift onto voicemail as if they never came through at all. My father still doesn’t call and I forget to mind. My mother chirps away about wedding plans and I make appropriate noises while I begin to slide my fingers into James’s waistband.

  The small intimacies build as each day passes, become so natural that it’s hard to remember what’s considered acceptable between two people who aren’t supposed to be together. When he’s holding my hand under the kitchen table at breakfast. When he kisses me in the deep freezer, or at the beach, or when he leaves me at spin class. It’s shocking that we haven’t been caught.

  But after the second week, Max corners me. “Okay, one of you needs to admit it.”

  “Admit what?” I ask. But I know.

  “That,” he says, pointing at my mouth as it twitches in an effort not to smile. “The two of you look like that all day long. When you’re not touching each other and pretending it’s an accident, that is.”

  “I can’t imagine what you’re referring to.”

  “Seriously?” he scoffs. “I know he’s embarrassed by the age difference, but what’s your excuse?”

  His words make my stomach drop. Is James actually embarrassed? Enough that Max doesn’t even question it? “When there’s something to tell I’ll let you know,” I say quietly. While I begin to wonder if there ever will be something to tell. Being the fling James is ashamed to acknowledge doesn’t really feel like the start of a fairy tale.

  And maybe that’s why he still hasn’t tried to sleep with me. We do everything else, and we get torturously close, but he always pulls back. If this wasn’t something inconsequential — if I were actually his girlfriend — surely it would have happened by now?

  “Max is asking questions,” I tell James. “I feel kind of bad not telling him the truth.”

  He runs a hand over his face. “Yeah, I know. He asked me too.”

  “He already suspects anyway.”

  “We can’t,” James says. “He’s one of my best friends but you know what a big mouth he has. He’d think he was being subtle by spray painting it on the front of the house.”

  So I have my answer. James absolutely intends for no one to ever know that this is happening. I was willing to accept that condition when this began. Why can’t I be okay with it now?

  **

  James cuts our next beach trip short. “For my own sanity,” he groans, “you’ve got to stop wearing bikinis.” So naturally we wind up in his room, and hours later we are still there, being startled awake by the light tapping on his door.

  “James?” It’s Ginny, and her knocking gets louder. We are both completely naked, his leg thrown over mine, the duvet on the floor and the sheet up to our waists. “Can I come in?”

  “Just a minute!” he shouts, his voice slightly strangled by panic. I’m already jumping out of bed, throwing on my shorts and t-shirt. He hands me my bikini and I run, opening the sliding glass door to his small deck. I’m a full story off the ground here, but if I can climb from his deck to Max’s, I can reach the stairs and get out that way. I’m in the process of climbing when the door opens across from me and I see Martin, our creepy neighbor, standing in the side yard with a big, shit-eating grin on his face. Given that I’m suspended mid-air between two balconies, I really don’t have time to worry about the ramifications.

  “Need a hand?” he calls.

  I ignore him, landing on Max’s
deck with a thud and running to the stairs. Martin’s waiting at the bottom when I get there, still smirking.

  “What?” I snap.

  “Quite the little soap opera going on over here,” he laughs. “I had no idea.”

  “Shut up Martin,” I try to move around him but he blocks me.

  “So let me see if I’ve got this right. You’re sleeping with James, and the two of you don’t want anyone to know?”

  “This is none of your business.”

  “This is juicy gossip,” he argues. “So it’s important that I get my facts straight.”

  “Please don’t say anything,” I say, just the tiniest bit of pleading in my voice. “It would really mess things up between me and Ginny.”

  “What’s it worth to you?” There’s a lecherous look on his face, a gleam in his eye, that tells me he’s not talking about money or free drinks.

  “Nothing,” I say. I start to walk off, and he grabs my arm.

  “I want a little taste of what James has been getting,” he says.

  “Fuck you,” I snap.

  “Fine. Just give me that.” He nods to the small scrap of red-and-white striped fabric in my hand.

  “You want my bikini?” I ask, sure that I’m misunderstanding him. He nods. It would be a small price to make this conversation end, but I shudder at the thought.

  “It’s not your size.” I turn to walk away but he grabs my arm again, this time managing to pull the bottoms from my hand. “Give it back,” I demand.

  He tucks it into his pants. “Come get it.”

  I am absolutely not doing that.

  “Keep it,” I snarl. “It’s probably as close as you’ll ever get to a real girl anyway.”

  Chapter 40

  “Do you think there’s any way we can keep Martin out of our parties?” I ask, watching Max pull a pony keg to the back deck. I’ve actively avoided thinking about what Martin might want to do with my bikini bottoms, but I sure as shit won’t be able to avoid it if he’s standing on my deck at tonight’s party.

  I never told James what happened. It goes without saying that James would overreact, and Martin’s father is apparently some big-shot attorney. It’s not a stretch to imagine the ways things might turn out poorly for James if he knew.

  “Is he bothering you?” he asks. There’s a small surge of tension in him that suggests I was right not to say anything.

  “No,” I say. “He’s just creepy.”

  I should feel worse about lying, but I don’t. It’s for James’s own good, first of all. And it’s entirely James’s fault that I had to climb off the balcony in the first place, since he’s the one insisting we keep it a secret.

  Personally, I’d welcome being discovered. I’m sick of sneaking around. I’m sick of forcing myself out of James’s bed in the middle of the night. And I’m particularly sick of listening to Ginny assure me that James and Allison will get back together once school starts.

  Her comments only hold weight when I’m not with him. As I sit across from him later that night, the idea of him with anyone but me seems laughable.

  It’s one of those nights where my whole body feels stretched thin, waiting for him after an entire day built of stolen moments – kissing him in the car before work, his hand grazing mine at the bar, the weight of his eyes on me and the way my stomach flips over when he gets that dirty little smile on his face.

  Martin has been successfully avoided (he took it “poorly”, I’m told) which has allowed me to focus on James to the exclusion of all else. It’s only when James and Ginny begin ridiculing me that I really pay attention to the conversation at all.

  “She was a total germaphobe. She wouldn’t even touch door handles when she was little,” James is telling Max.

  “Maybe she just had a good idea where your hands had been,” smirks Max, which leads James to kick over his chair. Boys.

  “Remember that time you couldn’t get out of the women’s locker room at the pool?” Ginny laughs.

  “Shut up, Ginny.”

  “She used to open doors with a shirt or a paper towel because she didn’t want to touch the doorknob,” Ginny tells Max. “But they only had those air dryers and she was wearing a swimsuit. So she stood in there until someone came in and she could slide out.”

  “I was seven!”

  “You’re still a germaphobe,” Ginny says. “Remember that hotel over spring break?”

  “That hotel was filthy.”

  “She had a heart attack because I put her clothes on the bed.”

  “On the filthy bedspread!” I cry. “Do you know what you’d find if you took a blue light to that room? There’d be you-know-what everywhere.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you and Ryan were doing in hotel rooms, but most people aren’t getting it everywhere.”

  I don’t need to look at James to know he didn’t appreciate the mention of Ryan in that context.

  “I wasn’t basing it on personal experience,” I say hurriedly. “Haven’t you ever watched ‘Dateline’? They’re always going into hotel rooms with a blue light.”

  “From what your suitemates said about you and Ryan, I wouldn’t want to take a blue light to your dorm either,” Ginny cracks.

  James’s eyes look black in the moonlight. I watch that muscle tick in his jaw and can’t think of a single thing I can say to fix this. He stands. “I’m going for a run,” he says.

  “A run?” asks Ginny. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  He says nothing, and won’t even glance at me as he goes, but I feel a small knot of dread in my stomach and I resent its presence. I haven’t done anything wrong, and he wouldn’t have to hear about my ex-boyfriend if he’d just admit we’re together.

  He runs for over an hour. I feel the upper windows shake when he closes the front door, and I slip from the room, grateful that our guests are gone and that Ginny falls asleep so quickly.

  He’s in the shower already. I sit on the bed and wait. He doesn’t look surprised to find me there when he emerges. But he doesn’t necessarily look happy to find me there either.

  “You can’t blame me for that,” I say quietly.

  His jaw grinds. “I know. But I just don’t need to hear that shit.”

  “You know, you wouldn’t have to hear that shit if we just told them what’s going on.”

  He walks to the foot of the bed in nothing but a towel. “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

  “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No,” he says, dropping the towel. “I just don’t want to talk.”

  He pushes me on my back, his movements rougher than normal. He moves over my skin, claiming me again and again with fingers and tongue and teeth, something urgent and desperate driving him.

  “I’m close,” I gasp, and then watch, stunned and heavy with anticipation, as he reaches into his nightstand drawer and pulls out a condom.

  He opens it and meets my eye for the first time all night.

  And he stops.

  Freezes. “We can’t,” he says through clenched teeth.

  “What the hell, James?” I snap, my disappointment too bitter to conceal. “Why not?”

  “It’s just not a good idea,” he says, throwing the condom toward the trash.

  “You didn’t need the condom anyway. I’m on the Pill. But why is it a bad idea?”

  He closes his eyes and runs a hand over his face. “We only have a few weeks left here,” he sighs. “I think we just shouldn’t … get carried away.”

  There are a hundred questions I’d like to ask in response, but I say nothing. I lay there with my stomach roiling, knowing that the answer he just gave provides all the information I really need.

  Chapter 41

  We don’t discuss it. Things continue on just as they have, superficially. But instead of a quiet joy I have to struggle to conceal, it’s now a sharp pain in my center, a constant sadness and the exhaustion that accompanies pretending it’s not there.

  We hav
e the house to ourselves on Thursday morning. We lay together with our bare legs entwined, my head on his chest, him on his side, absentmindedly playing with my hair while we talk. I no longer enjoy this time with him. Instead I spend it acutely aware that it is fleeting, trying to memorize all the things I won’t be able to take with me.

  “I’m going to miss this when I get back to school,” I tell him. I’m not sure why I say it. I suppose because I want to hear him agree, to say it back to me. But instead he hesitates, and then changes the subject.

  “Brian says you requested tomorrow off,” he says.

  I feel ill and I deserve to feel ill. I know where things stand. I shouldn’t be trying to extract words and emotions from him that he doesn’t feel.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I did it a while ago. Ryan’s band is playing and someone messed up my schedule last time so I couldn’t go.”

  He freezes beneath me. “You’re still going to that?”

  “Ryan is a good friend,” I reply. “And his band is great. You should come. It’ll be fun.”

  “Right. So I can stand around watching you lust after your ex-boyfriend? No thanks.”

  I laugh and lean on my forearms to look at him. “You sound jealous, James.”

  “I am jealous,” he says. “You told me flat-out you couldn’t resist him on stage.”

  “That was before I was with you,” I reply, wondering even as I say it if I’m actually ‘with’ James.

  “Why don’t we just go out of town for the weekend?” he asks. “We could go to DC.”

  “You can’t possibly be that worried about Ryan,” I say. “I had ample opportunity to hook up with him the last time he was here and I didn’t, so why would I now?”

  “It’s not all about keeping you from Ryan,” he says. “I just want an entire weekend where I get you to myself. I’m tired of sneaking around all the time.”

  “So why are we sneaking around then?”

  “You know why,” he says quietly. “We live with Allison’s brother. And we both know Ginny would blame you if this got out.”

  If this got out. His assumption that there will never be anything to tell. His assumption that this will end.