What the hell was wrong with me?
I was sitting in the single chair at the end of the table, so Porter pulled out and sat in the chair immediately to my right. He pushed his bag away and pulled the crumbled paper and his calculus book closer. “All right,” he said as his hands pressed and smoothed what was essentially a piece of garbage flat. “I think we should start by figuring out who will tackle what.”
Why was he using this scrap when he had a whole binder overflowing with paper? “What’s that?” I pointed.
Porter glanced to his right and laid his hand on top of the binder. “What? This?”
“Yes, the thing that appears to be filled with perfect paper while you’re suggesting we get started working on less-than-perfect paper.”
Porter smirked; maybe he kind of liked that I was such a smart ass. He pulled the binder over and flipped open the cover. “Because this perfect paper is already being used.” He turned the binder toward me so I could read the cover page: United Flight Operations Manual.
I gave him a confused look and flipped through some of the pages that were separated by tiny plastic tabs. “What . . . like, for pilots?”
Porter nodded.
The manual looked totally legit. “Where’d you get this?”
He hesitated for only a moment while I pulled the manual closer and opened to a section titled: Boeing 747 Preflight Safety Checks. “It was my grandfather’s.”
“And he just let you have it?”
Porter shrugged. “Not exactly. I can guarantee it was supposed to be given back to the airline when he died, but I took it instead. That, and his favorite jacket.”
I looked up into Porter’s eyes, “I’m sorry he died . . . were you close?”
Porter shook his head, “I never even met him. The first time I ever saw him he was lying in his casket.”
I looked back at the manual in front of me and tried to figure out what to say next. I guess I could understand the jacket, but I wanted to ask him why he would take something as strange as a pilot’s flight manual from a man that he never even knew—not to mention carrying it around everywhere he went.
But before I could gather the nerve, Porter reached for the binder, closed it, and slid it to the side.
“We should get to work,” he said, and returned his attentions to straightening out the wrinkled paper that would be our project plan.
I stared at his hands. They were big. Big wide hands with long fingers that ended in nails that were clean and recently clipped. They looked like hands that could do things. Build things. Porter’s hands looked like they did work. They were attractive. Porter had attractive—
“Hello?”
My eyes yanked away from his attractive hands and fell directly into his eyes. His eyes that were staring right through me. “I’m listening.”
He furrowed his brow like he didn’t believe me, then returned to what he was saying. “I’ll handle the . . .”
It was like my body was operating completely independent from the rational, thinking side of my brain. I rubbed my hands down my thighs, drying the sweat on my jeans. Sitting this close to him was almost painful. My God—I should get up and go home right now.
I felt nervous, flushed, excited, scared—all at the same time. I wanted to touch his hand, but didn’t dare do something so stupid. It was a ridiculous thought, but what would it feel like to hold that big hand, the one with the tiny pencil, the hand capable of scribbling out that amazingly complex equation?
Wait.
“That’s wrong,” I blurted, and pointed to his calculation mistake with my own finger.
Startled, Porter sat back and frowned at where I was pointing. “No it’s not.”
I nodded emphatically, “Um, yes. Yes, it is.” I could feel that my eyes had opened super wide and my face had that are you seriously questioning my ability? look.
Porter shook his head, flipped the paper over, and began writing something else. “Look,” he said.
Annoyed that my mathematical authority was being challenged, I sat back in my chair and waited for him to be wrong again.
Except.
I leaned forward, narrowed my eyes at his work. For several minutes, numbers piled on top of numbers. Porter, seemingly lost in his mathematical creation, worked quickly. Completely focused, he turned the page sideways when he ran out of space and began carrying equations down the side of the paper.
When he had finished, he sat back and stared at the rush of thinking he had produced. “See?”
I stared. I did see. “Yes,” I said, suddenly realizing that, without noticing it, Porter and I had moved very close together while he had worked so hard to prove me wrong. Under the table, my knee was pressed against his leg.
We were touching.
I continued to stare at his complicated equation, pretending to still be considering it even though I knew within a minute what he had done. The place on my knee that pressed against his leg felt like it was the epicenter of a brilliant flame. I wanted to move my leg away.
I also didn’t want to move my leg away.
Porter was staring at the paper too, and I realized he was now also aware that our legs were touching under the table.
Why, why, why didn’t I stay at the cafeteria table with Eli?
“Impressive,” I finally managed to say, taking the opportunity to sit back and shift my body away from his. Breaking the contact between us was a relief—but also a little disappointing.
I took a breath, “So, you’re clearly a genius.” It was almost painful for me to admit. “How do you want to break the project up?”
For the next hour, we planned and sketched and divided assignments, always careful to not touch again, it seemed. Just when I thought we were really getting started, Porter looked at his watch, then jumped up so fast his chair tipped over behind him with loud crash. “Crap,” he said and started grabbing everything on the table and shoving it back into his bag. He didn’t even zip it up before he threw the strap over his shoulder. “I gotta go,” was all he said, and then walked away.
Stunned, I sat there and watched him go. Realizing only after it was too late to stop him that he’d forgotten his jacket.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Porter’s jacket looked weird in my house. A foreign object. An obligation. A direct connection to him that made me feel much more uncomfortable than it should.
I tried flinging it over the back of one of our kitchen chairs—like it was nothing. “It’s just a jacket, Ruth,” I said, out loud, to myself while I washed my hands in the kitchen sink. As if calling the heavy fabric out, labeling it so objectively, had the power to diminish the weight of having it in my possession.
While I dried my hands, I stared at the worn leather and pushed away the idea of slipping the jacket back on. Why would I do such a thing? What could possibly be the purpose of putting on a guy’s jacket—in secret, no less! But my mind kept returning to the memory of walking down a cold, windy street, and Porter pulling it off and handing it to me. Alone in the house, I shook my head at my own stupidity. Not only is it ridiculous, but kind of creepy, Ruth. If you really think about it. On the street it was cold—it is not cold inside your own house. Putting on someone else’s stuff, really? Someone you hardly know?
I folded the kitchen towel into thirds, hung it from the oven handle, and turned to leave the kitchen—and the jacket—and go up to my room. I had a ton of homework, I reminded myself. I had to plan out my trip up to Harmony House later in the week, I reminded myself. I had to prepare myself, mentally and emotionally, to eat dinner with my self-absorbed father on Thursday, I reminded myself. I would simply leave the jacket there in the kitchen, and grab it tomorrow on my way out the door so I could return it.
Who the hell cares about a stupid jacket?
In my room, with the door carefully shut and locked, I stood and stared at myself in the full-length mirror nailed to the wall next to my closet. I was wearing Porter’s jacket. It was giant on me: the seams for the
shoulders hung way past mine, the sleeves swallowed my hands, and the bottom binding hung to the middle of my thighs. But I liked the way the weight of the leather pulled my shoulders down—physically forced them away from my ears, pressing me to relax even though I had no idea before I’d put it on that I needed to.
I turned my nose toward the collar and allowed myself the smallest of whiffs—it was the rich scent of old leather, yes, but also a warm, soft something that I knew was simply Porter. Safe, locked behind my door, alone in my own house, I closed my eyes and allowed myself to breathe in a little deeper.
It felt very much like something stupid Bella would do.
I opened my eyes and glared at myself in the mirror, more than a little disgusted at the sight of myself swaddled in some guy’s jacket and completely relishing the experience. “You are insane,” I whispered directly into my own eyes. And with that thought, I flexed my shoulders even lower and let the heavy jacket slip from my back and onto the floor.
Honestly, I didn’t have time for this nonsense.
Ignoring it like a neglected dog, I left the jacket piled in heap in the middle of my floor. That’s how much I cared about Porter Creed’s jacket.
On my bed, with the contents of my backpack spread around me like a protective wall, I opened my laptop, the document folder with my senior honors thesis, and leaned back against my headboard. After a few minutes of academic focus, I planned to have forgotten all about Porter and his jacket. Porter and his big hand holding that tiny little pencil. Porter, hunched over the library table working out that beautiful calculus equation—Porter proving me wrong.
Yes, I had been wrong. And when the awareness of that had hit me, sitting there in that library with our knees pressed together under the table, I had been mortified.
But that wasn’t all. It wasn’t even the most prominent emotion, I now realized. Watching Porter work that equation, scrawling down the margins of his crappy piece of paper—my God, did I want him? Was that what this swirling, sick pull lodged in my stomach was all about?
I closed my eyes and let my head fall back against the headboard behind me. “Crap,” I whispered, thinking of Porter’s eyes as he looked up from that page.
See? he asked me again in my mind.
Yes, I did see. But even more, I felt.
With my head still leaning back in defeat, I opened my eyes and found Porter’s jacket still curled up on the floor in front of the mirror.
I knew what was happening here, I wasn’t completely oblivious. But I didn’t want to like Porter. I didn’t want to like any boy right now. What I wanted was to hurry up and move on with my life. Finish high school, finish waiting for my real life to begin. Princeton, neuroscience—my future.
There was something about his jacket, the feel of having it in my room—it worried me. I wasn’t absolutely, completely, 100 percent in control of my emotions.
And I wasn’t exactly sure what to do about that.
The handle on my door rattled and made me jump.
“Ruth?” my mother asked through the door.
“Yes,” I answered, swinging my legs over the side of my bed and rushing to snatch up Porter’s jacket.
The handle rattled again, “Why is this door locked?”
My mother hated locked doors; she was always worried about what might be happening behind them. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a good reason, at least not one I wanted to tell her, for why the door was locked, so I hesitated.
“Ruth?” her voice nearing the high pitch of hysteria.
“I’m coming!” I shouted back trying my best to sound more annoyed than caught doing something I shouldn’t. Although what on earth she could suspect me of doing in here, I had no idea. I threw Porter’s jacket into my closet, slid the door closed, and rushed to let her in.
“I don’t like locked—” I opened the door before she could finish. “Doors.” Her eyes narrowed as she inspected my face and peered over my shoulder into my room. “Why is the door locked?”
I shrugged, “No reason . . . I didn’t even realize I had done it,” I lied.
I could tell from the way her eyes narrowed she didn’t believe me. “Is someone in there with you?”
“No, mother, I am not having unprotected sex in my bedroom in the middle of the afternoon behind a locked door.” I held the door open wide and moved to the side so she could see for herself. “Homework,” I held out my hand to my bed.
Her mouth twisted to the side as her eyes quickly scanned my bedroom. “I don’t like locked doors.”
I sighed and rolled my eyes. “You said that, and I know. I’m sorry, I won’t ever lock my door again.”
“It’s only because I worry.”
“You have nothing to worry about.”
“You would use a condom, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh my God, Mother.”
“Do you still have some?”
I stared at her in disbelief. Last year she had purchased five dozen condoms, the variety pack, from Costco and made me keep them under the sink in my bathroom. “You have to be joking. How could I have possibly used sixty condoms? Do you think I’m running a brothel in here? I haven’t even used one!”
She sighed and closed her eyes. Like this, I could see the bags under them and the wrinkles that radiated out like tiny fans from the corner of each eye. “I just . . .” She shook her head. “I just worry about you.”
“Well, don’t worry. I might as well be wearing a medieval chastity belt. No guy at our school would even dare come near me.”
She opened her eyes and looked into mine. “That’s not what I want either, you know. I want you to be happy. I do.”
Now it was my turn to sigh. Exasperated, I raised my hands over my head, “I’m happy! Early admit to Princeton, clearly going to be valedictorian, and dinner with my obtusely self-centered father next Thursday! Who’s not happy?”
Her shoulders sagged. Giving up she turned away from me. “What do you want for dinner?”
“Tacos?”
“Great. Tacos it is,” she said, and headed down the stairs.
I closed my door and rested my forehead against the wood. Six months. Six months and I would be living in a dorm with some other brainiac at Princeton, locking as many doors as I pleased and not using entire truckloads of condoms in private.
All this because I couldn’t stop myself from putting on a boy’s jacket.
The next morning, while my mother was busy loading up her computer bag with overflowing manila folders, I snuck Porter’s jacket out of my closet, down the stairs, and into Vader’s trunk.
My mother usually drove separately because she had meetings after school, but on rare occasions she would catch a ride with me. I didn’t want to take a chance on today being one of those days and her finding a man-size leather jacket on my front seat. Not that the truth was a big deal. So I met my calc partner after school at the public library and he left his coat. Except I didn’t exactly meet him after school, and apparently having some article of clothing that belonged to Porter Creed in my possession was making my emotional internal wiring go haywire.
My mother was extremely attuned to picking up on emotional weirdness. I didn’t want to take the chance of her picking up on some crushing-on-a-boy vibe I might inadvertently be putting out there. I just couldn’t handle another condom conversation right now.
“Bye, mom!” I called from the garage door.
Behind Vader’s black leather steering wheel, I allowed myself to breathe a sigh of relief before I set my brain to figuring out how exactly I was going to get an excused-absence slip from the attendance clerk before fourth period.
I knew of exactly one way, but it required me to sneak into my mother’s office and forge her signature on a pass.
With a loud sigh, I pushed the clutch, shoved the tight gearshift into reverse, and backed out of our cluttered garage.
Standing at my locker, Porter’s jacket in my hands, I jumped out of my skin when something loud slammed into th
e locker next to mine.
“Not forgiven!” Eli said.
“Are you trying to kill me?” I held my heart and gave him a dirty look.
“You should be so lucky! Do you have any idea . . . any idea”—he shook his hands at the ceiling like his dad did when giving a particularly emotional sermon—“how freaked out I was yesterday?”
“I said I was sorry,” I mumbled, while trying to decide if I should leave Porter’s jacket in my locker or take it with me to class or should I try to find him at his locker?
“Um, not good enough,” Eli shook his head.
“What do you need? A pound of flesh?”
He nodded. “That’s a start. Also a swear to God and all that is holy including your piece of crap car that you will never, ever, ever freak the hell out of me like that again.”
I sighed and raised my right hand, “Fine, I swear to Vader that I will never, ever freak you out like that again . . . ever.”
Eli paused like he was considering the legal viability of my sworn oath, then nodded once, “Okay. Pardon granted. Now tell me EVERYTHING.”
The first bell rang and I shut my locker with Porter’s jacket hanging from the hook inside. “Later,” I said, and lightly slapped his check.
“You’re killing me.”
“You’ll live,” I said as I pulled my bag over my shoulder and walked toward my first-period class.
“I have news too, you know! Juicy stuff!”
I raised my hand over my head, “Can hardly wait,” I said without turning around. The alleged news without question had to do with Jordan blatantly flirting with Eli when his father was not around. Eli probably needed to tell me that Jordan “gave me the look” or “put his hands on my shoulders.”
Affective Needs Page 6