Jaywalking

by Rachel Ember

  It was like any other kind of camaraderie he’d experienced times enough before. On the field with his team or watching dumb movies with his friends. But it was nice to feel it about something he’d always enjoyed in solitude.

  Mac took a long pause while the laughter faded, and worked into what Jay already knew was the emotional one-eighty that made the poem one of his favorites. By the time he reached the last lines, Mac had tilted his head down, away from the mic, and the room was silent as everyone strained to hear his ever-softer words.

  And I think that must be what you meant with your ‘sorry’—that you’re sorry for what you didn’t mean—

  * * *

  But tell me, my once-upon-a-long-time, is there anything you meant to do to my wide-open heart?

  * * *

  I would rather you meant it, the heart-wringing harm of it all.

  * * *

  Please don’t say, my pretty enemy, that you meant no harm.

  Every word struck Jay with new power. Jay had been a fan of Mac’s for years, but he’d never felt this breathless and raw.

  He wondered how much of the intensity came from Mac’s energy, and how much was being caught up in the emotional tide of the crowd, while at the same time feeling the secrets of Emile’s closeness: the pressure of his leg against Jay’s, and the delicate note of cedar in his cologne.

  Mac went through his entire one-hour set without ever breaking for more than a drink of water. Jay could feel the night slipping away from him even while he was still in the middle of it, and the knowledge that it was fleeting made each minute that much more intense and perfect. He hoped his memory would do justice to the experience, at least.

  When Mac was done and had received his final applause with a charming flash of his gap-toothed smile, Jay turned toward Emile, who was already watching him. Their eyes met.

  The moment of synergy was all it took—the last push Jay needed to lean in all the way. His nose was full of that bright, woodsy cologne and his lips brushed Emile’s ear as he murmured, “I wanna get my hands on you.” He fought the urge to bite the smooth skin just under Emile’s ear, which was a shade paler than his neck.

  When Emile shuddered at his words, Jay lost the battle with himself. He raked his teeth over that warm, edible-smelling skin under Emile’s ear, less than a nip, and leaned away to look Emile in the eye.

  “Yes.” Emile closed his eyes like it pained him to add, “We could—the bathroom.”

  Jay was in uncharted territory, but fuck if that was going to stop him. “Yes,” he said; the word sounded like a growl. Emile bit his lip and actually whimpered. Jay felt like a god.

  “They’re upstairs, close to the back,” Emile said, already pushing off from the table. At the suggestion he could be as eager as Jay, Jay’s heart leapt.

  “You first,” Jay said, “and I’ll follow in five minutes.”

  Emile nodded once and stood, stunningly obedient, and then, with that quirk of a smile back on the left side of his mouth, he turned and strode off, outwardly calm and controlled as he edged between the tables and crowds to the stairs.

  Jay stared at his phone and watched the lock screen, getting up the second five minutes had crawled by. He navigated the room as calmly as possible, but couldn’t help breaking into a jog up the empty staircase.

  The bathrooms were two unisex singles. Jay chose one at random, knocked, and after waiting a second or two for an answer and hearing none, he cracked the door.

  Empty.

  Door number two, then. He rolled his shoulders like he was about to make a game-changing penalty kick, his heart racing, and knocked on the second door.

  Silence.

  Jay tried the knob and found the door unlocked. He held his breath and opened the door—

  Empty.

  He stood there with a furrow in his brow for several long seconds, wondering weakly if there were other bathrooms, with his mind refusing to consider the alternative.

  Two young women, arms looped around each other’s waists and laughing, pressed past him and he moved out of their way, forcing his thoughts to unfreeze.

  Emile was gone.

  Jay was no longer in easy, object-focused mode. He was in untethered, anxious mode, spiraling fast as he replayed the last hour in his head.

  Jay had grabbed Emile at the door. Jay had taken his hand after that. Jay had put his knee between Emile’s, and then his teeth on Emile’s neck. Emile hadn’t instigated a thing, and as soon as he’d gotten out of Jay’s sight, he’d vanished.

  Jay had sexually assaulted someone. So severely, apparently, that Emile had thought he had to play along in order to plot an escape.

  Uncharacteristically clumsy, Jay quickly made his way through the bar, which was even more crowded now than when he’d arrived. Sheets of rain were pounding the single wide window. Jay reached the door and burst through it, striding past the startled bouncer and straight out into the downpour.

  This time, Jay didn’t race it. He let it drench him, walking slowly and reliving the horror of it all again.

  By the time he’d driven home, he felt almost like himself. This was a night he could lock away like a bad dream. Only Emile knew what Jay had done, and Jay would never see him again. The knowledge filled him with a confusing mixture of relief and regret.

  He’d set it behind him. In a few weeks—maybe a little longer—it wouldn’t haunt him. Eventually, it would be like none of it had happened, except that he’d learned a lesson: He should only trust his instincts on the soccer field.

  Two

  Emile

  August

  Emile couldn’t stop yawning. Godot hadn’t slept well, which meant neither had Emile. Eventually, he’d seen signs of the sunrise and had given up and gotten out of bed. Now, he and his dog were preparing for a very early morning walk.

  In his opinion, Emile’s otherwise-perfect house had a single flaw: its spot on the hillside seemed to be vulnerable to every decibel of noise pollution coming from the block of student residences a quarter-mile to the south.

  He’d adjust by September, but every summer, Godot spent weeks being bothered by the students’ late-night shenanigans. Emile understood; he always came to relish the quiet summer evenings, too.

  Outside the front door, Godot paused to thoroughly stretch each of his legs, then yawned for emphasis. He was a rescue dog of indeterminate origin, about forty pounds, with a thick white coat dusted with black speckles and triangular ears. Emile had never loved anything or anyone quite like he loved this dog.

  “Sorry, old man. Summer’s officially over,” Emile said with sympathy. “No more sleeping in for us.” Godot tilted his head back and gazed at Emile with his soulful brown eyes. Then, he yawned again.

  Emile tugged one of Godot’s soft ears. “Come on, lazybones.”

  They set off across the boarded walkway that led from the front door over a rocky waterway and on to the driveway. The property’s two-bedroom, two-bathroom ranch had been built in the 1950s by an architecture professor at the university, and the lovely and unusual ways the sloping lot and the waterway were incorporated into the design were what had first drawn Emile to the house.

  Dodging the potholes that riddled the driveway, he hurried to keep up with Godot, who had trotted to the end of his leash. He’d shaken off the drowsiness of a rough night with canine ease, tail swaying, delighted to be alive and out for a walk. Emile wished his own emotions and energy were so straightforward. He yawned into his elbow and turned north on the sidewalk, which sloped at a steep upward grade. Godot happily fell into step at his side.

  Even though Emile enjoyed the quiet summers, he usually felt an air of possibility at the start of every fall semester and, with it, an entire academic year. Usually, but not today.

  Today, Emile’s predominant emotion was dread.

  Not only because his summer-long reprieve from seeing his ex was coming to an end. To add insult to injury, this afternoon and twice each week all semester, he’d be teaching Li
terature 100.

  Emile had been an associate professor for six years. But no amount of experience would ever accustom him to the pain of Literature 100. He frowned down at the cracks in the sidewalk and the worn toes of his tennis shoes, wallowing.

  The class combined two lethal traits: it had no prerequisites, and it filled a humanities credit requirement for a variety of non-arts majors. That meant the class was—almost always—horrible to teach. The majority of the students didn’t want to be there and had a deep apathy for written communication that wasn’t in internet shorthand. Most miserably, without fail, at least one of them would plagiarize something. It didn’t matter how many times Emile warned the entire class that they wouldn’t get away with it because, like nearly everyone in the world with internet access, he did know how to use Google.

  Godot paused to rub his face into the fragrant fronds of his favorite evergreen tree alongside the sidewalk. Emile watched him and couldn’t help but smile. He really should try to emulate Godot and focus on the positive. Lit 100 could always surprise him—it had happened before. He’d had at least two classes where he’d learned that the non-majors, if they bothered to be interested, could bring fresh perspectives.

  Also, Emile was teaching two upper-level survey classes, so it wasn’t as though his ability to teach nuance would completely wither.

  Keeping those thoughts in mind, he’d almost talked himself into a good mood by the time he finished walking Godot, fed Godot, gotten dressed while Godot sulked, and left Godot staring plaintively out the window as he began the cycle to campus.

  After all, he thought with growing lightheartedness, it was a lovely morning. One of those ideal August days when the sun shone with late-summer brightness but the air was autumn-cool enough for tweed vests. When he got to the portion of campus known as the old quad, he found an open spot in the good bike rack right outside his building.

  Buoyed, Emile jogged up the limestone steps into Cross Hall. One of the older buildings on campus, Cross boasted finicky climate control, creaky wood floors, and twenty-foot ceilings. Emile adored it.

  He checked his cubby in the wooden beehive where all their mail was sorted as it came in, dropped a few advertisements for text books in the large trash can stationed by the cubbies for that purpose, then paused when he reached an envelope at the bottom of the stack with a familiar emblem above the return address.

  Skimming the enclosed letter as he walked toward his office, glancing up occasionally to be sure he didn’t collide with anyone, Emile smiled. He had been invited to speak at a conference in Chicago—a fairly prestigious one, at that—questioning the premise that poetry could or should be distinguished from prose. The subject was only tangentially adjacent to his PhD work and he’d published only two articles about it, so the invitation felt especially vindicating.

  With his letter in hand, he stepped inside his office feeling downright lighthearted, a welcome one-eighty from how he’d felt when he’d gotten out of bed that morning.

  Emile’s office was a perfectly square room, slightly taller than it was wide, with a single enormous window. He raised the sash a few inches to let in the breeze. After placing the letter carefully beneath a paperweight in one corner of his cluttered his desk, Emile sat down, opened his inbox, and saw an email from Ben.

  So much for his good mood.

  As soon as he could unfreeze his body, Emile compulsively hit ‘DELETE.’

  Then, he remembered Ben was his boss.

  “Shit.” He went into the trash folder and restored the email. It wasn’t even addressed to Emile individually. It was a group email to the tenure-track associate professors, with the usual bulleted list of ‘start of semester’ tasks, like replacing default passwords and downloading class materials. He deleted the email again after reading it twice to be sure it wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know.

  Emile’s usual routine before and between classes was to work on his poems or reread the books he’d assigned his students. But the idea of writing and delving into the minutiae of his own thoughts and feelings, with Ben on his mind, turned his stomach. Since they’d broken up—that sounded like such a civilized phrase; ‘since they’d imploded’ felt more accurate—Emile had gotten into several cognitive ruts where the harder he tried not to think about Ben, the more Ben-related thoughts and memories lodged themselves in his brain.

  In moments like this, he could close his eyes and relive a few good moments in visceral detail. Apparently, he was an emotional masochist, because that’s what he did now. Ben spreading Emile across the mahogany desk in Ben’s study and pressing his knees to his chest.

  Except, instead of Ben’s patrician face, his impeccably-groomed beard, and his salt-and-pepper hair in its meticulous side part, Emile saw Jay, the young man he’d abandoned in a bar in Andersonville. Skin fair under a subtle golden tan, lean muscle everywhere, huge blue eyes and bright hair plastered to his head like a gold crown. Jay had basically been a Ken doll come to life.

  Emile opened his eyes, unsettled by the combination of memory and fantasy. As he’d—eventually—managed to remind himself that night, Jay had been a kid. As in, not yet twenty-one. Debasing himself in a bathroom stall for Jay would have been inappropriate.

  Satisfying as fuck, but inappropriate.

  Most of what Emile craved in his sex life was inappropriate. But he had to draw some lines, didn’t he?

  He leaned back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling. “Shit. Fuck. Goddamn it.”

  “You know, for a poet, your vocabulary is surprisingly narrow and shockingly profane,” drawled Sydney, having apparently let herself into his office. Sydney Laman, also an associate professor, had started at Walland a year after Emile. He’d always thought of her as the workplace equivalent of a classmate, and she’d quickly become his best friend, too.

  “I’m much more eloquent in writing,” he assured her.

  Sydney was carrying two mugs of tea. She set one on the desk in front of him, then sat in the chair across his desk with the other.

  “So,” she said, holding her mug near her face. “The email.” She took a sip.

  “I read it,” Emile confirmed. “Twice, even. It barely had anything to do with me. I’m fine.”

  Sydney raised a brow. She had a very expressive face: striking, if too narrow to be classically pretty, with large grey eyes and a small, bow-shaped mouth. Her hair was cut short, and spiked with gel which further set off her angular features. Emile knew the meaning of the look she was giving him all too well. Sydney was thoroughly unimpressed.

  He considered whether he owed her more candor. He adored Sydney. She shared Emile’s fondness for tweed. He’d been the man of honor at her wedding four years before.

  Emile adored her, but he really didn’t want to talk about Ben with anyone. The more he talked about him, the more difficult it would be to keep his emotions in order.

  “You just need to get back on the horse,” she said. And then, because she knew him and none of her barbs were ever intended to really wound, she added with a gleam in her eye, “Literally.”

  One of Sydney’s favorite games was baiting Emile with a deliberate linguistic faux pas. Another game they’d begun playing years ago when they’d started their tradition of grading essays together was a competition over whose students produced the most grammatical atrocities.

  “You’re literally not funny.”

  She clutched the lapel of her tweed jacket. “I’m literally wounded.”

  Emile broke and laughed, pained. He threw up his hands. “You should probably keep going. I need to be inoculated against what I’m going to face in Literature 100.”

  “Oh, Lit 100. I forgot.” She grinned sadistically. “You know, I think it’ll be good for you. Marking up a Lit 100 paper is therapeutic. Like one of those adult coloring books, except you don’t have to color inside the lines and you only use red pen.”

  Emile laughed again. He didn’t miss the self-satisfied way that Sydney smiled at him o
ver the rim of her mug, reminding him that this was all a thinly veiled distraction. Oh well. He needed it.

  He shouldn’t need it, though. What was wrong with Emile, that getting one impersonal email, three solid months after a break-up, was enough to get under his skin?

  Maybe it was the same central flaw that had almost led him into blowing a teenager in a bathroom.

  That hour at the bar had felt like the best kind of lurid dream, or maybe like being dropped into a poem. The memory had barely faded over the passing weeks, making Emile wonder what would have happened if he’d gone into the bathroom to wait instead of panicking at the last minute.

  His imagination helpfully supplied an image of him kneeling on hard, dirty tile, Jay’s big hands tight in his hair.

  “Oh, what’s this?” Sydney had somehow, despite the other detritus on Emile’s desk, located the letter inviting him to speak at the conference. She snatched it out from under the paperweight and her eyes widened as she read. “Oh, honey!” she exclaimed happily, grinning at him. “Congratulations!”

  Relaxing a little, Emile smiled back at her. “Thank you. I must be a substitute; it’s only six weeks away. Not much time to prepare.”

  “Fortunately, you thrive under pressure.”

  Emile’s smile faded. “I suppose I’ll have to make sure Ben will approve the trip before I can confirm.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “You should ask Irina,” she said, meaning the assistant head of their department. “If you think Ben might not be objective. You’re entitled, if—”

  “If I think that there’s a conflict of interest,” Emile finished for her, his smile returning. He was always strangely pleased when Sydney became prickly and defensive on his behalf. “Yes, I’ve read the handbook, too, and even if I haven’t, you’ve reminded me often enough.”