Eager to Love

by Sadie Romero

  I went up and down a few strokes, reaching up to run my hands over his abs. I let him go, and his cock—now very erect—quivered.

  “Actually,” I said, thoughtfully, “you might owe me a shoe.”

  “If you keep doing what you’re doing, I’ll get ten shoes,” Jeff said.

  I ran my tongue from the base all the way to the tip playfully. “Make it a hundred,” I said.

  “Done.”

  “A thousand,” I said.

  “A million. All the shoes you want forever. Just don’t stop.”

  I laughed at him. “You’re a woman’s dream come true,” I said.

  And then I gave him a blowjob that left him shuddering and breathless and stupid.

  We lay together afterwards under the gaze of Mr. Heinlein. I felt no less guilty. Jeffery slept.

  Chapter 3

  Dr. Giacomo was lecturing about covalent bonds, but I was just watching his mouth move. I loved the way his clothes clung at his chest when he turned to motion toward the screen behind him, the way his eyebrows arched with inflection, the rolling rhythm of his mahogany voice. I was taking notes only nominally, scribbling down whatever bullets flashed up on the Power Point but not actually thinking about anything.

  Okay, so maybe I was thinking about something, but it had nothing to do with covalent bonds. Way more fundamental. Electromagnetism, which is necessary for things to touch each other. Necessary for friction. So what I was thinking about was actually Giacomo’s hand sliding up my shirt and cupping my breast, the warm pressure of his squeeze. I was thinking about his arms wrapping around me, about him standing behind me and pulling me into his embrace. About me tilting my head back and our lips connecting. Electricity. Electromagnetism. Atoms brushing against each other.

  Contact was made of electricity. I wondered what guilt was made of. Something heavy, I thought. Maybe iron, accrued in the stomach and chest.

  I wondered if being with Giacomo would be as exciting as it was if it didn’t feel so wrong. If I wasn’t having to swallow a mouthful of guilt for every lingering kiss.

  Iron, I realized, was an excellent conductor of electricity.

  When class ended, I packed up my things as everyone began filing out of the room. Giacomo passed by, his leather laptop satchel slung across his chest. “Very productive meeting the other day, Seager,” he said, with a look so subtly meaningful that no one but me would catch it. “I look forward to our next one.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, relishing the eye contact.

  And then, too soon, he left.

  I ran a hand through my hair and watched him go, metal in my stomach and electricity between my legs.

  Later that night, I lay small spoon to Jeffery’s big with my own arms wrapped around a body pillow. We were in his room again, and I wished I didn’t have a science fiction writer presiding over my inner turmoil. I couldn’t sleep. I knew that I had to do something to change this current situation, but I didn’t know what route to take. Especially since staying the course seemed so much more desirable.

  Sometimes when I was with Jeffery, my hunger for Giacomo faded to a dull ache. Most times, my love for Jeffery felt so strong that my chest hurt. He really was a perfect boyfriend, and from some perspective I tried not to think from, I knew it was possible to see Giacomo as a pervy old man.

  Why did it have to be wrong? Why did I have to choose?

  Here, I think, was the heart of it. Jeffery treasured me. And while it’s flattering and encouraging to be treated like a princess, it can also be exhausting. There was a kind of responsibility to being around Jeffery: a responsibility to continue being his ideal.

  With Giacomo, I didn’t have that responsibility. In fact, I had zero responsibility with Giacomo. I was a toy to him. I didn’t have to try to be anything I wasn’t, didn’t even have to think if I didn’t want to.

  Now pause right there, dear reader. I can feel you judging me from here. What kind of self-respecting young woman would willingly let herself be dehumanized to the point of becoming a man’s toy? That’s what you’re thinking, right? Well, get off your high horse. Any child would tell you—if they had the words for it—that there’s freedom in not having to make decisions for yourself. Besides, you didn’t let me get to my next point.

  In his sleep, Jeffery shifted and squeezed me closer to him. He shifted his legs against mine, and he sighed.

  You see, I didn’t want to be either of those things. I wasn’t either of those things. Caitlyn Seager was neither ivory ideal nor plastic plaything. I was, however, a bit of both. And I wanted both. I wanted the delight of being treasured and the liberty of being small. And I couldn’t get both of those things with just Jeffery or just Giacomo.

  So I’d found myself in a kind of heavy perfection. I was getting everything I wanted—everything I needed—but I was wrong for it. I was a treacherous woman of the most conniving type. I’d become a cheater, and I hated myself for it.

  But I didn’t hate myself enough to actually do anything about it. I couldn’t just break things off with Giacomo and be done with it. For one, I’d be giving up all of that mouth-watering sex. But for another, I would still feel guilty for what I had done—even if I’d stopped doing it. The only way to make things right from that angle would be to come clean to Jeffery, which would shatter his ideal of him. And it would hurt him deeply. I would lose both, so that option was no good. Breaking up with Jeffery in favor of Giacomo was even more obviously out of the question. I had no illusions about what I was to Giacomo, and I knew he’d eventually get bored of me like anyone does a favorite toy. I would lose both that way too.

  To complicate matters, I hadn’t had a blackout in almost a full week. This meant one of two things. Either I was overdue and should expect one any minute, or…

  I hugged the body pillow closer.

  …or, just maybe, I was doing something that made them fade. Maybe it was something I was eating, or maybe I’d stumbled into the exact right balance of sleep and exercise… but I really wasn’t doing anything differently. Not anything that I hadn’t done at any other point in my life. Except for that one thing. Except for that tiny fact that I was sleeping with two men at the same time.

  It didn’t make any sense, of course, but from a certain standpoint: it was the only variable I had changed. And it seemed to be helping.

  So on top of these emotional wants and needs was heaped a much more practical desire. If I stopped having blackouts, my life would be so much different. And I would be able to get a driver’s license and everything. As strange as it seemed, what if cheating healed me?

  Selfish. No matter how I chopped it up or framed it or recolored it, I was being selfish. And I knew it. I knew it. But I was stuck. Any direction I moved led to somewhere worse than my current condition, and aside from the guilt, my current condition was amazing.

  But oh, the guilt!

  Carefully, I peeled Jeffery’s arm off my body. I pushed aside the body pillow and slipped out from under the blankets. I stood in Jeffery’s room in the dark wearing only my panties.

  By then my eyes had adjusted, and I walked to Jeffery’s desk with its blacked out computer monitor and messy assortment of trinkets. A little rocket ship, a poster of Mount Everest, some Boy Scout patches. A stack of mismatched journals with myriad bindings and covers. I hadn’t read those, and I never would—that would be a greater violation of trust than sleeping with Giacomo—but I did brush the spines with my fingertips, knowing that the mind of a boy I loved lay inside them. Beside the journals were a stack of brochures from the club fair thing Jeffery had attended. Advertisements for the BCM, Law Club, Engineering Alliance, and a slew of Greek letter triads. Art Club, Beer Club, Bowling Club, and even Disco Club. A black, nondescript looking one for something called the Lower Saturday Union.

  I shuffled through these and wondered if maybe I should get more involved. Maybe I needed both of these sexual relationships because I didn’t have many friendships. Maybe if I felt more comfortable around g
roups of people, all my problems would just vanish like so much mist.

  Chapter 4

  “Sublimation,” the teaching assistant said, “is when a solid turns directly into a gas. Who can give me an example of sublimation?”

  “Duh,” said a guy from the back of the lab. “Dry ice.”

  “That’s right,” the grad student said.

  He’d introduced himself as Marty Laveau at the beginning of the lab.

  “Dry ice sublimates at room temperature. Who can give me an example of the opposite, of gas turning into a solid. Anyone?”

  Marty was tall and lean with oversized glasses that made his eyes look enormous. When I looked at him, I couldn’t help but imagine a scrawny owl topped with a Shaggy-from Scooby-Doo haircut. Zoinks.

  No one answered. He’d made us all put our phones in a tub against the back wall to keep us from Googling anything.

  “That one’s harder, right?” Marty said. “I’ll tell you this: it’s called ‘deposition.’ Anyone? Try to guess. It’s more common than you think.”

  “Frost?” I tried.

  “Bingo,” Marty said, pointing at me.

  I felt my cheeks burn with the attention.

  “Very cool,” he said. “With frost, the moisture in the air turns directly to solid ice without first becoming a liquid.”

  He continued, segueing neatly into the experiment we were about to work on through a series of transitions that I missed because I was busy feeling self-conscious about singling myself out with that correct answer. I heard Jeff’s playful mockery in my head calling me by my superhero name.

  With the ability to instantly wither at the slightest hint of social confrontation! Abandons parties faster than a speeding bullet! More ponderous than a locomotive! Who’s that alone in her apartment? A bird? A plane? No! It’s… Introvert Lynn!

  By the time I peeked back out of my shell, we’d already been separated into groups and were weighting pieces of metal before and after they’d been submerged in various metals. It was precisely as boring as that sounds.

  A guy near the back—the one who’d answered the sublimation question—said as much.

  “Dude, this is putting me to sleep,” he said loudly. He had a large Raising Cane’s cup with a straw, and he would sip on it constantly between comments.

  “Well,” Marty said. “It’s not all explosions, of course.”

  “It don’t have to be explosions, but I’m bored as hell,” said the guy.

  Marty the Grad Student pushed up his glasses by the bridge with a single finger. “Well, it might be boring, but meticulousness is the heart of good chemistry. That, and careful notes. With these two things, you can work magic.”

  Raising Canes guy laughed and shook his head.

  “You’re laughing at me,” Marty said, more a statement than a question.

  “Magic?” Raising Canes said. “Now I know you’re messin’ with me.”

  “I’m serious,” Marty said. “Take this current experiment. Pieces of solid iron are actually becoming a part of the liquids you’re soaking them in. The iron is becoming a completely different material, and so is the liquid. Chemistry is a science of transformation. And, what’s more, the control and guidance of that transformation. When you can control the way something behaves, the way something becomes… Why, that’s the closest thing to magic we have.”

  “Dude, you need to get laid,” said Canes.

  The class burst into laughter.

  Marty pushed up his glasses again, his face bright red. He clearly didn’t know how to defend himself against such an attack, and I felt sorry for him.

  Cane’s guy just sipped from his drink smugly.

  “All right, all right,” said Marty, motioning for everyone to calm down.

  Eventually, they did. And the experiment, which—magic or not—was still very tedious, continued. Lab lasted four hours. After the first two, Marty called a break to let everyone go to the bathroom or grab a snack.

  When we got back, everyone just wanted to grind through the rest of the experiment and be done. Now we were increasing the temperature of the various liquids with Bunsen burners, in part to learn how to use different kinds of lab equipment and practice good safety procedures. The documentation part of the activity was just as mind-numbing as the rest. I’d been working in a zombie-like daze for the last twenty minutes or so when a blood-curdling scream erupted from the back of the classroom, shocking me into wakefulness.

  It was Cane’s guy. He was gripping his wrist and screaming as he stared at his hand, which was splotchy and bright red and already starting to bubble over with blisters. Those closest to him rushed in to help, but the rest of us stood frozen and staring.

  Marty closed his book and stepped quickly to Cane’s guy, his eyes wide and exaggerated through his glasses. He rushed Cane’s to the emergency station and turned on the faucet, which poured cold water all over the guy’s burned hand.

  Cane’s guy screamed with new agony.

  “What happened?” Marty demanded of his lab partner.

  “I don’t know,” the girl said. “I looked over and he was just holding his hand in the flame!”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know!” she said. “He must have zoned out or something.”

  I pushed against my classmates to get a good look at the burn. It seemed pretty bad. Bad enough to make my stomach wrench. Although, in earnest, I felt a quiet inkling of satisfaction to see that jerk get his come-uppance.

  Marty called the campus infirmary to come assist, and he let the lab out early. Once everyone else had left and Marty was filling out paperwork related to the accident, I approached his desk.

  “Mr. Laveau?” I said.

  He looked up from his paperwork and gave me a haggard smile, his glasses grotesquely magnifying what would have otherwise been very pretty baby blues. “Some first lab, huh,” he said. “Please, just call me Marty.”

  “Uh, okay,” I said. “Mr. Marty, I’m sorry to give you more paperwork, but I have a condition that may affect my performance in this class. I have to ask you to sign this acknowledging that accommodations can be made for my disability, if necessary.” I handed him a form. “I don’t need you to sign it immediately, but I need it back as soon as you can. I already spoke with Dr. Giacomo, but I thought—”

  “Ah,” he said, cutting me off and looking at me with new interest. “Seager, right? Giacomo told me about you.”

  I stiffened and swallowed hard. A paranoid flicker darted through my brain about what exactly Giacomo had said about me. Maybe he’d told Marty about how he’d asked me to strip right there in his office the first time I went to meet with him. About how I had—in total shock of my own actions—obliged. About how that was already only the first of several… encounters I’d had with my chemistry professor.

  “Yeah,” Marty said. “He said you have a memory thing. That it may be triggered by certain chemicals.”

  I relaxed. Of course that’s what Giacomo had told him. I felt foolish for my own concern.

  “That’s right,” I said. “It’s a form of epilepsy. I’m on medication to reduce the effects, but sometimes I… well, I guess I misplace an hour or two every once in a while. Blackouts. It’s not full amnesia because I always remember what happened later, but the disorientation has affected my schoolwork before.”

  “We’ll be careful, then,” Marty said, amicably. “It’s really no problem.”

  “Good,” I said. “Thank you.” I adjusted my backpack strap and started toward the door.

  “You’re Caleb Seager’s little sister, aren’t you?”

  I jerked to a stop as if pulled by a cord connected directly to my heart. I turned and looked at him and saw sympathy on his face.

  “You knew him?” I asked.

  “I knew of him,” Marty said. “He was a couple of years ahead of me, but when I got into this program, I walked right into his shadow.”

  I nodded. “I know what that’s like.”

&nbs
p; “The grad school can’t stop singing his praises,” said Marty. “With good reason, of course. I mean, he was brilliant. It wasn’t just because…” He trailed off, realizing suicide probably didn’t make for polite conversation when you were discussing the deceased with his baby sister. He coughed and dropped eye contact, and in that moment, I realized that my feelings weren’t hurt at all, and Marty seemed somehow very human.

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to rescue him. “I know. He really was smart.”

  “His team made excellent progress on chemicals related to that Alzheimer’s drug. They say he was just tenacious. That he’d spend all day and night in the labs, testing and retesting.”

  “My grandfather had Alzheimer’s,” I told him. “He was a very important person in both of our lives. Like a second father. When Caleb was in high school, Grandpa started to get pretty bad. By the end, he didn’t even know who any of us were anymore when we’d visit him. It was awful. Definitely made an impact on both of us.”

  “That explains Caleb’s dedication,” Marty said, nodding solemnly. He glanced down at the form I’d given him to sign and made a forced chuckle. “I guess forgetfulness runs in the family, then,” he said.

  I felt my face contort at the awfulness of that jab.

  Marty recognized his mistake immediately. “Oh God. Caitlyn, I am so sorry. I didn’t…”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “No, really. That was awful of me. I was… I was just trying to lighten the mood and…”

  I gave him a pass. “No really,” I said. “I understand. Really, I do.”

  Marty signed the form and passed it back to me. We walked out of the room together, and Marty turned to activate the electric lock on the door. “That wasn’t cool of me,” he said.

  “Oh wait,” I said. “My phone.”

  Marty held the door open, and I rushed back into the room to grab my phone. The clear plastic tub sat on a table at the back of the room across from the emergency station. Mine lay alone at the bottom. I grabbed it and started toward the door, but I stopped.