by Dahlia Adler
“Doesn’t she?” Frankie fawns, throwing an arm around my neck, her bangles jangling. “I’d kill for those tits.”
I roll my eyes, but in my mind, I’m making out with Frankie right now. That girl is the best confidence booster ever.
“They are great tits,” Jason agrees, his eyes glued to them as he takes a long swallow of beer.
For no good reason, I try to imagine Connor saying something that crude, and snort. Whoops. Jason raises an eyebrow and Cait and Frankie turn to look at me. “Nice line,” I say wryly, banishing Connor from my brain, and take a drink of my own.
Doug joins us then, wrapping an arm around Frankie’s waist and whispering something in her ear that makes her laugh. Cait and I exchange a “Doug’s getting more than boob tonight” eye roll, and then Frank flutterwaves goodbye before letting Doug lead her away.
“I’m gonna go say hi to Tessa,” says Cait with a sigh, and then she’s gone, which just makes Jason leer harder.
“So, Lizzie.” He slides an arm around my waist, slips his hand in my back pocket, gives my ass a squeeze. The gesture makes me want to knee him in the balls, but I don’t. Because this is what partying was like before That Night, and before Connor, and I used to enjoy this, and all I want is to get that back. “You wanna—”
“My sloppy seconds, Pollard? Really?”
Trevor’s voice cuts through the room. If people didn’t notice me there before, they sure do now. Fuck. Coming here was such a stupid idea.
I pull away from Jason, but I have no intention of backing down from Trevor. I haven’t seen his face since That Night, but looking at it now I see everything that is sad and hateful in my life. He is apathy and loss and death and I am…I don’t know what.
But I do know that I’m all out of people to answer to, and maybe that’s what makes me fearless now.
“So I’m your sloppy seconds now, am I?” I step away from Jason, closer to Trevor, and make no effort to keep my voice down. “That’s funny, because I could swear I heard we’d never hooked up, never even met before that night.”
“Yeah, well, apparently you had a bigger mouth than I realized. You’d think it’d help you give better head.”
There are snickers and “burn!”s and “ohhhh”s all throughout the room, but I just roll my eyes. If ever there were an arena where I don’t doubt my skills…. “Please. Like I’d take oral advice from a guy who wouldn’t go down if it were a graduation requirement. Not that I believe for a fucking second you had any complaints. Jesus, Trev, doesn’t lying get exhausting? Or are you just so naturally hardwired to be a complete and total piece of shit that it’s effortless at this point?”
Trevor’s eyes blaze with fury; it’s obvious he didn’t expect me to stick up for myself, and he’s fresh out of eighth-grade insults. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he growls. “What the fuck are you even doing in my house? No one invited you here. No one wants you here.”
Behind me, Jason is conspicuously silent. Guess my tits aren’t that great.
Another voice, however, calls out, “I invited her, actually.” We all turn to look. Doug shrugs, and I know in a second he’s gonna get laid for this bit of chivalry. I silently pray for Frankie to get multiple orgasms in thanks. “Sorry. Didn’t realize it was a thing.”
Frankie yanks his head down to hers and shoves her tongue down his throat. Everyone laughs and catcalls, and Doug gives a thumbs-up as she mauls him. Even I have to smile at that.
“Just get out,” Trevor orders me wearily. “Get out, and don’t come back here. We used to fuck, and now we’re done, and unless you’re looking for one last hurrah….”
“Never in a million years.”
“Good,” he says coldly, as if he isn’t fucking dying for it. “Then you’re fresh out of business here.”
He’s got me there; there’s really no point in my being at the house now. I’m not going to dance. I’m not going to hook up. I’m done drinking. I don’t even want to be here with these people.
I want to be with Connor.
But Connor doesn’t want to be with me. I’m no more to him than I am to Trevor. He might not treat me like a piece of gum stuck to his shoe, but the fact remains the same—I’m alone. And that’s not changing anytime soon.
I shrug. “When you’re right, you’re right.”
And then I turn to leave.
There’s some jeering behind me as I go, but as I think about spending another night alone in my bed while Trevor parties here like some kind of hero before bringing some bimbo back to his room, the injustice of it all hits me like a double shot of tequila, and I whirl back around.
“No, you know what? I do have one last piece of business here,” I spit at Trevor. “Even if I were a stranger who’d just shown up in your room that night, I’d deserve better. But I wasn’t. We’d been fooling around for months, and you were right next to me when the cops came to tell me my parents had been killed. How the fuck do you not call, not care, not anything?”
He pales but doesn’t respond, and I know that at least I’m not completely insane. He should’ve cared. He should’ve called. Not because I was his fuck-buddy but because I’m a fucking person.
But other than Cait and Frankie, only one other person on campus has been treating me like one. Or at least he had until recently. Now I was just some sort of disposable problem to him too. How and when had that even happened? And why?
For the millionth time that week, I wonder what the hell happens when Connor goes home at night, to turn him from the guy who couldn’t keep his hands off me at my apartment to the guy who hid from me in his office. From the guy who came back to my home, who went down on me by the parking lot, to the guy who said Never Again.
There are no answers to be had to my question for Trevor, but it doesn’t really matter; we’re out of each other’s lives now, for good.
But I’m going to get at least one answer tonight. And I’m going to get it now.
• • •
“Open the door, Connor,” I call, wincing at the sound of my voice echoing loudly in the hallway. “I know you’re in there.” I bang on the door again.
Finally, I hear a fumbling on the other side, and then there he is, in a Montreal Canadiens T-shirt and flannel pajama pants, his expression warring between panic and rage. “What are you doing here, Elizabeth?” he whispers fiercely, yanking me inside and shoving the door closed behind me.
“What happens at night?” I demand. “What happens that makes you forget that you actually enjoy hanging out with me? How is it that I left that first kiss thinking, ‘Man, I can’t wait to take this further with Connor tomorrow,’ and you left it thinking, ‘This is a terrible thing that can never happen again’? What happens at night that erases everything that happened that day?”
“Elizabeth—”
“Tell me, Connor. I can’t deal with any other men on this campus screwing with me. If this is all in my head, you need to be man enough to tell me that. If you’re coming back here to somebody else, you need to be man enough to tell me that. Now answer the fucking question.”
“What happens at night?” he repeats, and I nod. He exhales sharply, raking a hand through dark-brown hair that’s grown just this side of unruly before scrubbing it over his scruffy jaw. “What happens is that I come back here, and I’m lonely, and then, inevitably, I think of you. What you probably think of the outfit I wore that day. How genuinely Max makes you laugh. The glimmer of excitement you get in your eyes when an idea clicks. The way you nibble on the earpiece of your glasses when you’re writing. It makes me feel like I see what the old you must’ve looked like.”
My stomach clenches at his words, but before I can say anything, he marches onward, an edge of steel creeping into his tone.
“Then I think of that very first kiss, and how you tasted like grape lollipop. How soft the skin is on your lower back. I think of the way you sigh when I suck your neck in just the right place. The infuriatingly sexy whimper-moan thing you make
when I bite your lip. That was bad enough. Now, thanks to my incredible stupidity last week, I jerk off while thinking about how sweet you taste. Every. Fucking. Night.”
I all but collapse against his doorpost as I try to take it all in, this awful night suddenly doing a complete one-eighty. “Holy crap, Connor. You…really like me.” There are a million hummingbirds in my insides right now, doing some sort of awkward mating dance.
He raises an eyebrow, his face a neon “Are you an idiot?” sign. “You say that like you had no idea. I’ve been telling you that every day.”
“No, you haven’t.” I’m sure of this fact. I burn with certainty. Because it’s what I’ve been dying to know, and if he’d given me even an inch, I would’ve leapt on it like a jungle cat. “All you ever say is ‘we can’t do this.’”
He laughs. It’s mirthless. “Why do you think it matters so much to me that we stop? You think I’m just scared of getting caught? At the risk of sounding like a dick, trust me when I say that if all I wanted was for us to fuck each other’s brains out for a night, I would’ve brought you back here the second you kissed me in my office, and we would’ve gotten away with it. I don’t push you away because I’m afraid of getting caught one night.”
He sounds so utterly unlike himself, caustic and coarse, and for the first time, my own tipsy brain processes that I’m not the only one who’s had more than one drink tonight.
“The problem is, I don’t want just one night. And I don’t think you do either. Do you?”
I want anything you’re willing to give, I think but don’t say. I want you inside me. Tonight. Every night. The thought makes me shudder, and I don’t know if it’s just because I’m full of emotion or, as I suspect, because I like that Connor wants more than a night with me. And he’s right that I want more than one with him. “If I say yes, can we go to bed?”
To my utter shock, he cracks an actual smile. Not showing teeth, of course, but it’s not a stern “Lizzie” or even “Elizabeth.” It’s almost like he has a sense of humor. Almost.
“Is that a yes?” My eyebrows shoot skyward. I’d been bluffing, but if Connor’s suddenly down to get down….
He rolls his eyes, but snorts a laugh. “No, it’s not a yes. I just…maudit, you’re good at making me smile.” He shakes his head, and his expression goes serious, his dark-blue eyes fixing on mine. “I like you very much, Lizzie Brandt,” he says soberly. “I’m sorry if I haven’t said it that way, or made it feel that way. And I’m sorry it doesn’t matter that I feel that way.”
I’ve experienced a lot of pain in the past few months—hell, just tonight alone. Excruciating, unbearable pain. And while nothing will ever compare to losing my parents, his words make me ache in places I didn’t even know could feel.
“What happens at night?” I ask again, softly this time. “When you’ve done your fantasizing, and gotten off, and all of that’s behind you and you can think. What happens?”
He sighs, raking a hand through his already rumpled hair. “I feel like a fucking pervert, if you want to know the truth.”
“Connor—”
“You are eighteen—”
“For another six weeks!”
“And I’m twenty-five. And your teacher. I’m supposed to be someone you can trust.”
“Okay, in case you haven’t noticed, there isn’t anyone I trust more than you in the entire world. Don’t you get that? Don’t you realize how supremely screwed up I would be without you? You listen to me. You’ve helped my grades. You found me an apartment—”
“And I shouldn’t have done that. I overstepped my boundaries as your teaching assistant. I was only supposed to tutor you. That’s all.”
I can’t believe I’m hearing this now; I thought we were past all that shit, at least. “Christ, Connor, do you have to be such a fucking martyr? You did those things before you even liked me!”
Another brief, mirthless laugh. Another disbelieving, self-loathing-riddled shake of his head. “No, I didn’t.”
“Yes—”
“Lizzie, I’m telling you. No, I didn’t.”
I’m stunned into silence, but only for a few moments. My desperation to know the truth wins out. “When? Why?”
“The first day. You wore a miniskirt, and you have fantastic legs. And your glasses. You look so fucking sexy in those glasses. You were kind of hard to miss.”
“Thinking I’m hot isn’t—”
“You sat down and made some joke that made everyone around you crack up. Then Hudson Roberts made a sleazy comment about you being exotic and you told him to go fuck himself gently with a chainsaw.” He takes a deep breath, and then a faint, fond smile quirks his lips. “You kept pretending not to give a shit, but you were sneaking glances from your phone to the blackboard, not the other way around. I know what it looks like when someone loves to learn, and no matter how much you try to hide it, you do, Elizabeth. So yeah, you were on my radar from day one.”
“Connor….” I don’t even know what to say. The hummingbirds are frantic now, beating against my heart, my lungs, my spleen.
“Do you know how much it kills me that after years and years of dating ‘appropriate’ girls—family friends, and fellow grad students, and girls I’ve met at the library—I’ve fallen for an eighteen-year-old student who chain smokes?”
“I’ve stopped that,” I point out meekly.
“I noticed. For me?”
“For a few reasons. You might be one of them.”
He scratches at his chest, and I wonder if he feels the same ache there that I do. His gaze wanders off to some point in the distance, and I know in my gut that we’re not done with the pain-inflicting portion of the evening yet. “Then there are the nights I convince myself the age difference isn’t so bad, and I won’t be your TA anymore in a month anyway, and I know in my gut I’ve never given you a grade you didn’t deserve.”
“So…in a month, then?” That seems to be what he’s saying, and if so, I can handle that. I know I can, if I know we’ll be together at the end of it. But his face isn’t saying “in a month.” Not his sad eyes, or his firmly pressed lips.
He can’t even meet my gaze when he responds, sounding utterly gutted. “In a month, you’ll still be a guardian to two kids, and no matter what else we can get past, I’m not sure I’m ready…for that.”
“Oh.” All the hummingbirds bite it at the same time. Just like that, I’m a leaky balloon, all my air sapping into the ether. I have nothing more to say; that part isn’t changing anytime soon.
“I know I’m an asshole,” he mumbles, and in that instant, I can’t help feeling how stupid it is that age gap has ever been an issue. Because in this, Connor can be a child. I have no choice but to be an adult. “But…osti de tabarnac de calice. I’m not even mature enough to stop myself from fooling around with one of my students. And it’s not like I’ve had a great role model when it comes to fatherhood. How can I—”
“Yeah,” I interrupt, suddenly finding it hard to breathe in his tiny apartment. “I get it. I gotta go.”
“Lizzie—”
“There’s nothing left to say. Just stop.” There’s nothing to grab, nothing to do but whirl around and run from Connor’s apartment, back to my own, back to the two boys who depend on me to be their everything.
I barely sleep at all that night, and in the morning, Tyler and Max refuse to do me the small courtesy of getting themselves ready. Instead, it’s a bitchfest of “Why is there no bacon or waffles?” when I hand them boxes of cereal, and “Where’s my blue shirt?” to remind me I haven’t done the laundry in over a week.
It’s almost as if they’re trying to prove Connor’s point. “Of course he doesn’t wanna deal with us” is the obvious subtext of Tyler’s complaining his cereal bowl is sticky. “What twenty-five-year-old guy would sign up for this?” is implicit in Max’s refusal to wear a raincoat even though it’s already pouring outside.
By the time I get the boys to school, I’m too exhausted to go back
to sleep. Instead, I nurse a mug of coffee through a crappy morning talk show I can barely hear over the pounding rain. Then I start on a second cup to do my reading for English lit. It’s amazing how many more hours there are in the day for the boring stuff, now that I’m not sleeping off hangovers or wasting another morning in Trevor’s bed while he pokes me—no hands!—for another round.
The mere thought of Trevor’s familiar morning wood makes me squirm on the couch. Not because Trev was so great in bed—he was okay at best; he staunchly refused to go down, then had a hissyfit because I countered by refusing the same—but because frankly, I need to get laid.
Connor’s Magic Orgasm wore out right around when he did.
I pull out my phone and text Cait. We’re going out tonight. Off campus.
It takes her an hour to text me back—at least one of us got to sleep in—but when she does, it’s with emphatic agreement.
I’m a woman on a mission, and tonight, failure is not an option.
• • •
“Yowza!” Cait and Frankie whistle at me when I meet them in the parking lot, painstakingly made up and dressed to kill. “You are going to destroy tonight,” says Frankie.
“That’s the plan.” I smile smugly, settling into the backseat of her Prius. My outfit is a never-fail. It’s just a plain black sheath, really—one that hugs my curves and stops at mid-thigh. But it’s the glasses that make it work. And the stiletto Mary Janes.
Some guys love toned, athletic, Amazonian blondes; Cait eats them for breakfast. Some guys like the freaky artist type, figuring she’ll be great in bed; from what I hear, Frankie never disappoints.
But if you’re one of those guys with a sexy librarian fetish? I am your walking wet dream. And the fact that I know Connor’s one of those guys gives me a flash of vengeful satisfaction I can barely tamp down.
Delta is a stupid bar with a stupid name, but they’re tough on fake IDs and after that last disaster of a party, I know I don’t want to see anyone else from Radleigh tonight. Cait, Frank, and I all have real IDs—they’re just not ours. They were pricey, but worth every penny for a night like this when you just wanna disappear.