“Is that why you’re upset?” she asked.
“I told you, I’m not upset,” I said. Amanda knew about my past. I was sure it was a lot of the reason she acted flighty when she talked to me about guys. She was trying to show me they didn’t matter. That I did.
“Oh,” she said, snapping he fingers. “I know, maybe Luke has a friend for you.”
“No,” I said, probably too quickly. “I’ve got enough going on.”
“It sounds like you’ve got nothing going on,” she retorted.
How could I tell her? I’ve got James to fend off, I’ve got Professor Dylan to deal with, and I’ve got Keith in my head making me question everything about James and possibly being the reason I even wanted Professor Dylan in the first place. I couldn’t.
“Okay, fine,” I said, “but no one desperate.”
Even if she really believed everything I’d told her about last night, I was in no position to request anyone who was anything but.
“Fun! Mandy and Candy’s double date!” She clapped. “We’re going to get your coconut split.”
I looked at her quizzically.
“Well, because you’re a Miami virgin, it’s a coconut not a cherry.” She made a coconut-sized ball with her hands. “Get it?”
“Gross,” I said. “I can never un-know that.”
“Aw, Candy, if only your readers knew what a prude you really were.”
Chapter Ten
Heading over to campus, the only thing I could think about was waking up in James’s bed and James’s kisses. Everything else was a blur. It’s sad how fast it happens. Mandy called it boots brain, as in once you’ve knocked yours with someone hot you don’t have one anymore.
That was definitely how it felt.
I considered calling in sick to discussion section, not that there was really a way to. If I missed it on the first day, I would have Professor Dylan up my ass even more than he already was, especially considering it was for his Modern Lit 301 class. All I needed was for him to hear I bailed, then ask if anyone knew why and have James answer, oh it must be because she had sex with me: in a cab, in my bed, and in any possibility of additional places.
Instead I decided to take control back. I arrived exceedingly early and spent the extra twenty minutes pulling all the chairs as far away from the desk at the front of the room as I could without them being out the door. It looked weird. The chairs all clumped in the back of the classroom like a flock of birds, like they were afraid of something.
I wasn’t afraid. I just needed to keep James away from me. I might not be able to keep him out of my head, but in this classroom I was in charge.
I sat at the desk at the front of the room, and waiting for the students to arrive, I opened my laptop and clicked into my Candy Facebook Fan Page. I considered posting the question, What do you do when you wake up next to someone you wish you hadn’t? But that wasn’t what my Candy Fans wanted to hear. It also wasn’t something I wanted to write because a part of me—a part of the Candice part—had relished waking up next to James.
I reminded that part to shut the hell up.
I had an unread message. It was fan mail from a reader.
It was always incredible to me when someone had read my work and liked it enough to take the time to let me know. More than incredible—there really wasn’t a word for it.
I wanted to let you know how much I loved Couch Surfer. My boyfriend and I haven’t been having as much fun lately as I’d like and reading your book really sparked something in me. I think if he knew Couch Surfer was the reason he had a smile on his face all day yesterday, he’d be sending you a note, too.
I e-mailed her back to thank her, but it never felt like enough. How did you thank someone for helping make your dream come true? How did you thank hundreds of someones?
I stashed my laptop away. There were five minutes till class was about to start. I bounced my right knee up and down, up and down, the force shaking the desk like a cell phone with the ringer off, vibrating on the table as each student walked in.
All nine of them. With each new face, I took a deep breath and composed myself in anticipation of James, but he strolled in last.
Perhaps having some time to sober up, he felt as awkward as I did and didn’t want to spend any more time with me than he had to. Or he’d received my message loud and clear.
I couldn’t help but feel a sharp chill in my chest at the thought of it. The thought he would never look at me the way he had across the table when we both said J.D. Salinger, that morning in his room, or when I gave him the dollar that started it all.
Discussion section began and I read the questions I’d written for our first book.
Lolita.
The irony of it hadn’t hit me until now. At least James wasn’t prepubescent. At least I wasn’t a lecherous old man. But I suppose I was a lecherous young woman.
I let each student drone on with their answers, their words about Humbert and Lolita and Nabokov’s controversial brilliance bleeding into one another, interrupting and interjecting. A buzz filled the room as they debated with each other. As a student myself, I’d felt it during discussion sections. It was what every student wanted. A place where they could feel like their opinions mattered.
A college classroom might be the one place in the world where you could say whatever you wanted and think whatever you wanted and other people had to listen because you were paying for it.
Everyone was taking part in the discussion, answering my questions and adding their own, except for James. He was just watching me, his brown eyes like honey, sticky honey stuck all over me. They scanned my face, my chest, my arms, my hands, and back again. It made me tremble knowing he was probably seeing what we’d done the night before. It was all I could see, all I could feel.
I needed him to know I wasn’t having it. Not here.
“James,” I said. “Anything you want to add?”
He paused, clearly shocked I would call him out like this. I was a little shocked myself, but there was something about sitting at the front of a classroom that commanded respect, and right now I was demanding it.
He responded by saying that if Lolita had been written today, it probably would have been considered more erotic than literary.
As he went on to explain his point, I was as nervous he would tell everyone what we had done the night before as I was for him to push across the room with the force of a cyclone and kiss me into oblivion.
More nervous still, that even with all these other students around us, my mind would not have been strong enough to say no to his lips.
It was like there was two of me. The one who knew what she should do and the one who just wanted to be able to do what she wanted. Forget Candy, I apparently had a multiple-personality disorder of my own to deal with, even without her help.
Class ended without a kiss or an announcement from James about our forbidden sexual escapades. I waited as the students started piling out of the room. I couldn’t leave until they’d all left—another rule. I had to be available in case they had questions, so I sat at my desk hoping James would leave without saying anything other than he was dropping my discussion section. And hell, dropping out of University of Miami completely, better yet moving to Zimbabwe, so I didn’t have to deal with having feelings for him at all.
“Hey,” he said, walking to the front of the room, his backpack as tight to his back as I had been riding on his motorcycle the night before.
“Hey,” I repeated.
He stood above the desk, wearing one of those white T-shirts I had pictured being. The thing was, I didn’t have to just picture it anymore. I had been. He’d worn me all over his body. Standing in front of me, it felt like he still was.
“I don’t want things to be weird between us,” he said.
“Why would they be?” I said. Of course they are, I thought.
“I just felt like how we left things was weird.”
“We’re adults, like you said,” I replied. �
�We can act like adults.” It was what I said, but all I could think was, Bullshit. I don’t want to act like an adult. I want to feel your arms around me. I want to know what a kiss from you feels like. I want to remember.
“With that in mind,” he said, making the sign of someone solemnly swearing, “I just want to reiterate I will not try anything with you again.”
“Thanks,” I said. That was it. I told him to stop and he was going to. (Uncontrollable Emoticon sad face.)
“It’s not like you’re that irresistible,” he said.
(Uncontrollable Emoticon, wide eyes.) What?
“I mean, as long as you can keep your hands above my belt, I think we’ll be fine.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” I said, standing. “As long as you can stop funneling me drinks.”
“I don’t think there was a funnel at the table,” he said. “Maybe you had one in your purse.”
His phone beeped and he picked it up.
“Late for ‘How to Take Advantage of Women 101’?” I asked. It was mean and untrue, but he was being mean and untrue, too. At least I hoped he was.
“No,” he said. “I’m meeting Professor Dylan for a drink. It’s what adults do.”
“I’ve never heard of a professor having a drink with an undergrad,” I said. Professor Dylan had never even asked me to have a drink. All my lusting after him and our almost-kiss and nothing. Maybe he was just trying to avoid what had happened between James and me.
“I’m not just any undergrad,” he replied.
I’d understood that, but not why yet. Clearly Professor Dylan had recruited James, but what made him so special?
I mean, I knew why I thought he was special, but I doubted he was recruited because of his flawless chest and meditative eyes and mischievous disposition…
Focus, Candice.
“You going to get him wasted, too?” I asked, still being an ass, matching each dick comment from him with my own dick comment; a dick sword-fight.
“He’s not my type,” he said.
I stood there.
He stood there.
The air between us charged like it was before a thunderstorm.
Finally, he sighed. “What? Do you want to come or something?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” I said, even though I really didn’t. Truthfully, I wasn’t looking forward to sitting in on their literary bromance, but I didn’t think I really had a choice. If I didn’t go, would they talk about me? Sure, James had kept his mouth shut sober, but would what happened last night slip out after the third mojito?
It would start with Professor Dylan saying, James, you really are an amazing writer. And it would end with James saying, You know what else are amazing? Candice’s boobs.
…
James and I walked in an uneasy silence to a bar around the corner from campus. It was one I hadn’t been to yet. Amanda thought the bars near campus were sleazy (filled with undergrads trying to hook up) and while she liked hooking up, she did not like hooking up with undergrads. She thought it was beneath her, which made me wonder why she was so hot on James and me getting together. Maybe it wasn’t because he was an undergrad, but that he was my undergrad.
She probably just wanted me to be with anyone so I would move on.
The place was called O’Connors, the kind of bar that in New York State we referred to as a pub. We walked in to find a long wooden bar adorned with brass and beer taps lined up like bowling pins. It was very un-Miami, but that didn’t stop it from being packed with raging undergrad hormones on a weeknight.
“Did Professor Dylan pick this place?” I asked. It seemed an odd choice.
“He’s the one who asked me,” James said, shrugging. I guess it sort of made sense. The place wasn’t totally conducive to discussion, but it was very conducive to observation, which Professor Dylan liked almost as much as hearing himself talk.
Until I saw Professor Dylan waiting on one side of the booth with a beer, I hadn’t really considered I was not only having a drink with a guy I’d just had sex with who I could never have sex with again, but I was also having a drink with a guy who almost kissed me and who I could never kiss.
Who maybe I’d never even really wanted to kiss.
Who these two were to me academically seemed ancillary to the fact that, sexually, they both created a triangle of confusion. The three of us were a diamond of correct relationships and naughty ones.
Or, as Mandy would have put it, Their penises are at half-staff, unsure whether to rise or fall. I suppose even my vagina, though not rising or falling, was curious if it should be at attention or at ease. It would have been simpler if I could have just left it at home.
James sat down first, across from Professor Dylan, which forced me to make my first awkward decision.
Who to sit next to?
James was probably doing this on purpose to see if I would sit next to him. He had no idea Professor Dylan (though he would have denied it like crazy) might have been wondering the same thing.
In the end I chose neither, thinking, Screw both their egos, and pulling a chair from another table and placing it on the end of the booth. As a writer I couldn’t help but notice I was a little heavy on the chair symbolism that day. As a reader it would have been something I highlighted and talked about in class.
It would have been something I complained about in my review.
“I hope it’s cool I invited Candice to come,” James said as I sat down.
I was not going to get semantically caught up on the word James chose. I was not going to think he added in his head, Just like I did last night.
“Definitely,” Professor Dylan said, seeming noticeably jollier, maybe because of the beer. “I want you two to feel comfortable with each other.”
Little did he know.
James scanned the room for anyone to come over and give him something to make his throat burn and mind erase. I was far too hungover for that remedy.
A waitress finally came by, dark brown hair worn in two braids, a body like a tied bow. James ordered a double scotch no ice.
I ordered water.
“Candice, how nice of you to join us and drink water,” Professor Dylan said.
“I have some work to do later,” I said. How could I respond, I can’t drink anything because if I do I will throw up all over the table and the pretty waitress who I know you’ve both added to the story file you keep in your heads?
Here was the file I’d started: Brown-haired student waitress. Father died when she was twelve. Mother is working two jobs to keep her in school here. She studies and works and combs her pretty brown hair.
“I don’t envy being a student, always work to do,” Professor Dylan said. “I won’t tell if you have one beer.”
“I’m taking a break from drinking,” I said, focusing on James without even meaning to. This was bad. I was treating him like we had an inside joke. He and I could not have an inside anything.
Even though he’s been inside me, I heard Candy say to Mandy.
“Drinking and writing, Candice, like peanut butter and jelly,” Professor Dylan said, picking up his beer. “It’s okay to unwind sometimes.”
Professor Dylan had no idea how far I’d unwound the night before. I had practically become a shoelace undone from its shoe, the kind someone trips on.
James raised his drink, toasted with Professor Dylan, and drank all of it in one gulp. He was either as uncomfortable as I was or trying to prove something to Professor Dylan. Probably both.
Listen, if there were a way to intravenously shoot liquor into my veins without feeling the negative effects of it, I would have, just to numb myself. I would have had a drip hanging next to me on one of those silver rolling hangers they have in hospitals. Or, I would have done what I’d heard some students here started doing and sucked it up my butt, but there was no way it was going in my mouth, or in my stomach. My body would revolt.
“I guess I have an ulterior motive,” Professor Dylan said apologetically
. “I like the way your cheeks flush when you’re drinking.”
My cheeks flushed alcohol-free.
“I guess a compliment works just as well,” Professor Dylan added.
James cocked his head and stared at me. He probably would have said something out loud if his professor wasn’t sitting right there. Instead, I saw his question on his face. Did you sleep with him, too?
I hadn’t, but would I have if no one had interrupted us on the beach to ask us about the ever-disputed hot dog or hamburger? Had something that simple been the only thing keeping us just teacher and student? It made me wonder if I was a lot more like one of Candy’s characters than I was willing to admit.
It made me wonder if alcohol was just an easy excuse for what had happened with James.
“So, how are your classes treating you so far, James?” Professor Dylan asked.
Oh great, I got to listen to James kiss up and Professor Dylan love him for it. I totally shouldn’t have come, but what would they be talking about if I wasn’t here?
“Good,” James said. “Discussion section today was particularly enlightening.”
“Really,” Professor Dylan said, turning his gaze to me. Even though it was clear he wanted James to continue. “Please share.”
No, I thought, please don’t.
The only thing he could have possibly enlightened Professor Dylan with was the realization that his just being in the room had made me act like I had spiders crawling all over me. I’d done my best to hide it, but it was clear he could tell. It was transparently apparent that James’s hand just inches away from mine on the table now made me need to drink more water. Do anything to not think about his hand.
His hands. His hands all over me. Me all over his hands.
“Candice was really comprehensive at illustrating how Humbert’s forbidden love for Lolita is really just a metaphor for the switch from old European to Modern Literature.”
“That’s why she’s my TA.” Professor Dylan took a sip of his beer and turned to James. “Your work has glimpses of Nabokov.”
(Uncontrollable Emoticon with an exploding head.) WHAT?
“No,” James said, “he was a master. I’m still just a student.”
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