by Sharon Page
Even in just fantasy, Ryan does things to me that no one else has done. He consumes me.
I step out of the shower. I towel off, blow dry my hair. When I’m done, I discover Ryan has sent another message. It reads: Can’t sleep. How am I going to survive without you, Mia?
I don’t know how to answer him. It touches my heart, but makes me realize I don’t know how I’m going to survive without him.
Since the first night Ryan and I got together, he’s completely changed my life.
***
Within an hour and a half, I’m frustrated again.
Lara and I do a junk food run which involves sprinting downstairs to one of the common rooms of our residence—a room filled with chairs, racks of magazines, two tables with computers and another flat screen television. One entire wall is covered by vending machines. Healthy-ish choices are noted by large green circles. After spending a quarter hour marveling at the junk food deemed healthy (baked yet still high-fat corn things), Lara opens up her purse and starts to feed in the impressive amount of change we gathered. We begin at the lowest item number that we figure is healthy and work our way up. With armloads of baked chips, fruit bars, and diet soft drinks, we race back upstairs.
“This is how we will avoid the freshman fifteen,” Lara says as we dump our loads on her bed. “By eating healthier.”
I lift a brow. “Yeah, but a truckload of stuff isn’t going to help, healthy or not.”
She sticks out her tongue, looking gorgeous even while doing that.
She fires up her laptop. “Pride and Prejudice. The BBC version. The version,” she says.
I feel a pang. Lara is taking English Literature. She pointed out, over dinner in Res, that a math or sciences degree didn’t guarantee a job anymore either. And she knew more people getting work with an arts degree than with a science or engineering degree.
Munching chips, we stretch out on Lara’s bed and watch.
We reach the part where Elizabeth takes a wrong turn in Netherfield and encounters Darcy in a billiards room, preparing to do some serious work with his cue.
Lara sighs. “I think Jonathon looks like Darcy.”
I have to admit he does, but Jonathon is even more gorgeous. I’m mesmerized by the look shared by Darcy and Elizabeth. It’s filled with awareness. There are a few heartbeats of awkward intensity, then a moment where they surrender and stare at each other, completely wrapped up in each other. At that point, Lizzie bolts.
It leaves me wanting to the scream: “There’s a pool table. Throw him down on it already.”
But nobody does that in Regency England.
In my head, I’m doing it. I am not focusing on Pride and Prejudice anymore. In my head, I am in bar with Ryan; a country-style bar in Milltown with a row of pool tables illuminated by low hanging lights. The warm, honey-yellow light caresses Ryan’s profile, washing over his straight nose, high cheekbones, and his full lips. I love to watch him when he’d engrossed in thinking—there’s an incredibly sexy vibe about him when’s totally focused on something.
When I used to tutor him, I’d be completely turned on watching him work on math problems or his English homework. My panties were always wet when I helped him study for his final exams, and sometimes I had to bite down on my fist to keep myself from jumping his bones.
But back to my fantasy…
The lights play all over his body, highlighting the bulge of his biceps and the definition of his triceps. He’s wearing a worn white t-shirt and jeans that cling to his hips, but have room around his tight butt, so you just get hints of how gorgeous his ass must be.
I love the way he moves when he plays pool. He takes slow, easy steps because his mind is calculating his shot. He doesn’t say much, just nods when his opponent is trying to distract him or trash-talk him. He leans over, back muscles rippling under his shirt, jeans tugging tight against his butt. Most female conversations in a bar come to a complete halt when Ryan plays pool.
He doesn’t notice. He’s not pretending—he really doesn’t notice. His focus is only on the game. Except when I’m there. Then he’ll look up at me before he does his final line up for the shot and he’ll grin. I’ll almost melt at the way he looks at me.
Ryan is only nineteen but he always got into this bar. He was never carded. His father had apparently served two years in prison in place of the guy who owned the bar, and in return for his father’s magnanimous gift (taking two years of his life away from his son rather than ratting out a drug dealer), Ryan was allowed in whenever he wanted. His drinks were on the house, but Ryan never touched anything except water. Ryan’s father had driven an irreparable rift in their family so his son could score free bottles of water.
I managed to get in because I was Ryan’s girlfriend and I never drank anything but diet Coke.
But right now, I imagine coming up close behind him while he’s lining up his shot, and I press my crotch tight to his hard ass. I imagine taking Ryan’s pool cue out of his hands and setting it aside. I reach around and stroke his erection through his jeans. Grasping his zipper, I draw it down—
Oh god.
Okay, I’ve got to do something. I want to play with myself, but I can’t do it with Lara in the room. I can’t pretend I need another shower, not two in one night.
I jump up off the bed. “I’ve got to go for a run.”
She hits a key and pauses the movie. “It’s eleven.”
“But it’s a warm night and I like late-night running. It’s so quiet and mysterious. And it’s better than when it’s hot in the day.” I can’t tell her I just need to burn off sexual steam.
I started running in the evenings because Ryan ran to train for college. I had to stop going with him because he had to push himself beyond his limits and there was no way I could keep up. So I’m a bit out of shape as I jog down the drive that leads from the residences to the one of the main campus roads.
It’s one of those peculiar nights where the heat of the day and the damp cold of evening mix together and produce a wispy, low-lying fog. It rolls down the street like tumbling barrels made of steam. It darts around tree trunks and slithers around the residence buildings. The night is still warm, the perfect night for sex. This would be a night to drag Ryan outside and have him do me from behind while I lean over a bench or hold onto a tree trunk.
Mmmm. I’d love to do that. A quickie where I just drop my shorts and lean over, and he pulls his cock out…
Damn. Really. Why do I keep doing this?
I run harder. It’s not long before I’m working to suck in breaths. Probably people in the dorm rooms can hear my heavy breathing. At first I hear people laughing and shouting, though the sound is partially absorbed by the fog.
Then I’m running along the road and I don’t hear anything but my panting and the slap of my soles on the pavement. The swirling mist evaporates as I run through it, but ahead it looks thick, white, and impenetrable. Street lamps make yellow disks of light that reflect off the fog.
This would be the perfect night for a reincarnated Jack the Ripper to step out from behind a bush, grab me, and drag me away.
Just what I needed to think about.
My heartbeat speeds up, and not just because I’m in terrible shape. I get a stiff, tense feeling, as if something bad is going to happen. I know this feeling. I used to get it all the time when I was in the house alone with my stepfather—
It’s just my imagination.
But bad things do happen on college campuses.
Footsteps. I hear them behind me. For one moment, I feel relief: I’m not alone out here.
Then panic hits. I’m not alone out here.
I try speeding up. Of course, the footsteps do as well. Is it possible I’m just hearing a strange echo of my own sounds through some weird phenomena caused by the fog?
I could slow down. That would let me know pretty fast whether someone was following me, because the person would catch up. Hmmm. Not exactly a brilliant strategy.
But I c
an’t run this fast for much longer. Whether I like it or not, I’m slowing down.
In this fog, how could anyone have seen me to decide to chase me? But my labored breathing must have given me away. To a predator, my heavy panting would scream: slow-moving prey, close to exhaustion, easy to take down.
Now I can hear the other person’s steps more distinctly. That person is running, but not accelerating. Do attackers run at a leisurely pace? Maybe they do if they’re biding their time, and waiting for the prey to reach the place they’ve already calculated is the ultimate spot for an assault.
Light cuts through the fog up ahead. There’s a building there, a refuge, a place I can race to and take shelter inside.
It’s one thing to say I’m on my own and independent and I need to fend for myself. It’s another thing to be a complete dumb-ass and get myself attacked or mugged or killed because I’m trying to prove I have the right to run around the campus late at night.
Sucking in a deep breath, I sprint. The sucking was a bad idea because my stomach cramps in response, but I keep going, panting as the fog thins and I see what I picked as my shining beacon in the foggy night.
The lights are on in a coffee shop at the base of one of the buildings. Outside, there are dozens of students. I slow down only when I’m at risk of plowing into the groups of chatting people. I stop and fight both dizzying relief and a vicious cramp that locks up my right calf. The footsteps come at me through the fog. Then, before I can see who it is, the sound stops. I spin around but there’s no one there, of course, as if the person who was behind me melted into the night.
Creeped out, I go inside, haul my Starbucks card out of the pocket of my hoodie, and get a decaf latte.
Chapter Four
Thinking I was being followed cools my lust, which actually lets me sleep a little. But I do wake up every hour and blearily look at the numbers on Lara’s alarm clock from across the room. At five, I give up, have a shower, and at six-thirty, I venture back outside wearing my hoodie and sweats.
In the early morning sun, the campus looks beautiful. There is no creepy fog, no weird sounds bouncing back against a wall of mist. Sunlight streams over the White Mountains, sparkles on dew-covered grass, and turns the yellow leaves into something ethereal. I walk around, my hood pulled up over my hair as I didn’t bother to blow-dry it.
I do a coffee run, then explore the campus. I call up my class listings on my phone, check the names of the buildings, then do the walk I will do every day for the fall term.
“You do like torturing yourself,” I mutter to myself. “Don’t think about this being five years. Don’t think about being twenty-four when you get out.”
Sunlight glints along the many windows of the architecture building. Shading my eyes, I press my nose against the glass and peer into one of the rooms. Drafting boards are set up, which surprises me as I thought most of the work would be computerized. Then I see piles of wood, strange shapes made out of white plaster, models built with some kind of white board, artwork on the walls, tools lying on many of the tables. This is the studio, where hands-on-work is done.
I’m going to be in there—potentially right in that studio—at the beginning of next week. I’m almost leaping up and down with excitement.
And nerves—I am definitely feeling nerves. But I am going to succeed.
I’d heard the old story in which the professor tells you to look to your right, then your left, and two out of the three of you will be gone by the end of the year. A really smart friend of mine in high school freaked out over that concept, until I pointed out that she would be the one left, as long as she was determined to succeed.
I am determined to be one of the last ones standing. I have to do this, otherwise, what am I going to do with my life?
I have a list of some books I need, though the required textbooks for the School of Architectural are few in number. Following my on-phone map, I locate the University Store, where textbooks, novels, souvenirs, sweatshirts, snacks are sold. It’s closed this early in the morning of course.
Okay, I’ve accomplished something scholarly.
Then I hike around the campus, figuring out where my classes are. It’s only at dinner in the res cafeteria that I realize that I forget to text Ryan all day. And I didn’t receive any messages from him.
***
Through the week, I buy books, explore the campus and the small college town of Westingham and take part in Frosh Week activities—lots of parties, silly scavenger hunts. There’s a big football game on Saturday with a rival college, and I go with Lara. Drunk guys try to pick us up and we have to constantly rebuff their invitations and tacky pick-up lines. I’ve called and texted Ryan a bunch of times over the week, but not too often, since he’s been busy with physical training.
The phone calls don’t get any easier. I just have to hear his voice and I’m so sexually and emotionally frustrated, I want to scream.
On Saturday night, Jonathon’s limo arrives at eight promptly. Under my bare thighs—my dress is short—the leather of the bench seat in the huge car is supple and satin-soft. Lara sighs and stretches her legs along the seat across from me. She wears rolled-up jean shorts, sandals, an off-the-shoulder, grey sweatshirt over a tank-top, and she looks stunning.
She plucks a bottle of champagne that’s on ice on a silver bucket, but struggles with the cork. “I don’t usually drink, but Jonathon’s champagne is amazing,” she says. “Da-y-am, I don’t think I’m going to get this open in this lifetime.”
I take the bottle from her. Before I moved to Milltown, I used to sneak out to parties where the older boys knocked back beer and Jack Daniels, and the girls drank champagne. The stuff was cheap, sparkling, and sugary. I didn’t drink more than a swallow but I learned how to remove a cork. Of course those corks were white plastic, but this one works exactly the same way. I pour two crystal flutes of champagne as we roll through the Yardley campus.
“Jonathon’s party is a tradition,” Lara tells me as she takes a glass. “Every year he throws a huge bash on the Saturday night before classes start. Some people get so drunk they aren’t even sober by the time classes begin.”
Tradition? “How long has he been doing it?”
Lara taps her lips. “Six years, I think.”
“He’s been going to Yardley for that long? Is he getting a master’s degree?”
She shakes her head. “He started in Economics. His dad wanted him to go into law, but he doesn’t want to, so he keeps changing his major. After Economics, he did Art History, then English Literature. Now he’s in Mathematics.”
Professional student, I think, using a term I’ve heard my stepfather use. Which is strange, because I usually avoid remembering things he has said to me. If Jonathon started here at eighteen, that makes him twenty-four now. I want to be graduating at that age. By then, I would want things to be happening in my life.
“Why doesn’t he just do what he wants?”
Lara pours more champagne for both of us, then lifts the bottle and squints into it. “Fortunately, while these bottles are heavy, there’s not much in them,” she observes. “He can’t do what he wants. His father would cut off his allowance.”
“He’s a grown adult. Surely, he wants to do something else. Why doesn’t he build his own career?”
“He gets about thirty thousand dollars a month.”
I cough on my champagne. I can’t say anything. It would be very hard to walk away from that much money. But I’d rather have nothing than feel I couldn’t do what I wanted. That’s why I’m at Yardley—so I’m not ever going to be dependent on anyone and I can do what I want.
I pull out my phone and text Ryan, telling him about the limousine and the champagne. He sends a text too, apologizing because it’s been a couple of days since he answered me. But he’s been busy with his training.
I picture his physical training like in movies, where Ryan clambers up rope ladders, runs through tires, slogs through mud on his stomach. Maybe it’s more
intense: parachuting from helicopters, running simulated searches in enemy zones. Things I’ve seen on T.V. news. I have no idea if this is what he’s actually doing, but I know he’ll be exhausted. He’s also on a curfew and expected to go to bed early, so I stick my phone back in my purse.
I pick up the champagne and take another drink because I’m feeling sorry for myself and lonely. But I’m already feeling a giggly and giddy so I set it down.
The limo glides onward. The campus sits on the outside of Westingham, a small town near the White Mountains. During the school year, the college takes the town over, but it’s still quaint. We drive down the main street—a long, winding street filled with antique shops, eclectic restaurants, ice cream places, candy stores, and inns with huge front porches and flags that whip and snap in the cool fall wind.
Further out are chalets rented by students who want to live off campus. Some students stick around in the summer, getting jobs in the town’s tourist haunts.
“Is this where Jonathon lives?” I ask Lara.
“His dad bought him a house when he first went to Yardley. It’s another twenty minutes from town.”
The limo sweeps up a mountain road lined by cute Swiss-style chalets and monster homes of stone and slate and shimmering glass. Then the road dips down the other side, where a small valley is laid out before us, thick with gloriously colored maples and dark firs. At the bottom, a lake sparkles, reflecting the last of the golden sunset.
Then we drop low so the vista disappears and the road twines through the valley and begins to climb again. The car leaves the main road and follows a narrow, tree-lined drive. Branches arch over it, almost touching in the middle. Then the trees stop suddenly, followed by rows of well-manicured shrubs with blood-red leaves, and the woods have been tamed and turned into a stretch of mowed lawns.