“Partners in what?” Ryan asked.
“Crime,” I answered sarcastically. Ryan really was the nosy one this evening.
Suppressing a laugh, Ben answered “A joint History/Art History Class project. We got paired up together.” He turned back to me. “Did you look at the details? Looks like we only have a couple of weeks to work on it. It’s a lot of research to do in a short period of time along with our other course work. I think we should probably start as soon as possible so we’re not in a hurry to get it finished on time.”
I agreed and we made a date to meet in the library the next morning to see how far we could get. Since Daniel was out of town I figured I might as well fill my time up. Besides, I knew he wasn’t going to be happy that I would be spending time with Ben so it was best to do it while he was out of town.
Eating dinner, I tried to hide my disappointment that Daniel wasn’t back yet. It seemed like we spent the biggest bulk of our time together on Saturdays and I was beginning to think it wasn’t likely that I’d see him at all tomorrow. All of a sudden, I felt tears begin to well up in my eyes and turned my head to the side as I tried to dash them away as inconspicuously as possible.
Why couldn’t Daniel love me like I loved him?
But the answer seemed obvious even to me.
As I finished my dinner and pushed my tray away, Ben caught my eye. He smiled as if he was trying to cheer me up. I guess I must have looked sad. I know that’s how I felt on the inside. I did my best to return his cheerful smile and sighed. I did feel better when I looked into his eyes. Strange, I wonder why.
Right on time Ben showed up in the front of the library. I’d been early as I hadn’t slept very well last night. Truth was I hadn’t slept much over the past few nights. When we walked inside I instinctually headed to my usual spot upstairs in the genealogy section. As it turned out, it was convenient for our project as the majority of the books we wanted were all on the same floor.
We’d been assigned Gustav Klimt as our artist. I was vaguely familiar with his work but not a whole lot. We pulled all the books that we thought we might want and piled them in the middle of the table. After dividing up some of the work, we dived right in.
A while later, I went online and started scrolling through images of his work. Klimt liked women, that much was for certain. His pictures always seemed to have a sensuousness about them, even his landscapes if that was possible.
I peered up at Ben over the top of my screen. He was leaning back in his chair with his nose in a book, his brown eyes and thick eyelashes fixed on the pages of whatever it was he was reading.
Ben was very good looking, that was for sure. He had that tall, athletic build and strong broad shoulders I found so attractive. I watched him for a few minutes as he turned the pages of the book, pausing occasionally to make a note on a scrap of paper. He had a thick head of wavy brown hair that looked soft and made me wonder how it would feel if I ran my fingers through it. Even under the harsh florescent lights of the library his skin had an unnaturally healthy glow to it.
Why didn’t he have a girlfriend, I wondered. Suddenly he put his book down and reached for his bottle of water. Not wanting to be caught staring, I quickly averted my gaze.
He got up and walked around the table to take a minute and look out the window at the view of Mount Mohonk. After stretching out his arms, he turned around to peer over my shoulder at the images on the screen.
“I like that one,” he said as he pointed to a painting on the screen. “She has nice lips. They’re like yours.”
“Mine?” I scoffed.
“Yes, they’re not too thin or too full, they’re just right.”
I blushed, relieved that he was still standing behind me and couldn’t see my now crimson cheeks. Then without a word, he circled around back to his chair, took out his notebook and started scribbling down some more notes.
After another hour had passed we’d outlined most of the paper and had made good progress. Time passed but working in comfortable silence together, neither of us seemed in much of a hurry to get up and leave.
An hour or so later, I was working on finalizing the list of pictures we would reference in our paper. I kept coming back to The Kiss, one of Klimt’s most famous works. I kind of didn’t want to use it because it was so expected, but it really was enticing.
As I stared at it, I thought of Daniel. The couple in the work were intertwined in an intimate embrace, and part of me couldn’t help but wonder if Daniel would ever hold me like that again.
I hated to admit it, but things between us had happened so quickly, and in the past few days they seemed to be falling apart just as fast. There had always been a passion in his voice before, a longing that I could hear in its undercurrents. Now on the phone it was flat. He said he would get home as quickly as possible, but it didn’t seem like he was trying that hard in my opinion. He must have lost interest in me was all I could think. I’d always known it was going to happen sooner or later, but I’d buried those thoughts deeper and deeper every time I’d looked into his eyes. Could it really be coming to an end so soon?
Suddenly as the tears began to whelm up in my eyes, I got up and hastily walked down and around the hallway to escape Ben’s line of sight. Making a sharp turn to avoid one of the librarians, I ducked into one of the private study rooms. The small soundproof room was a glorified closet really with a small built in desk and a chair. I sat down on top of the desk, and pulling my knees to my chest, started to cry. I wasn’t really a crier so my sudden emotional outburst took me completely by surprise. I balled myself up into a corner on top of the desk, but as hard as I tried the tears wouldn’t stop flowing.
I don’t know how long I’d been in there when I heard a quiet tap on the door. When I didn’t respond, I looked up to see Ben’s face as he peaked inside.
“I wondered where you ran off too. Are you alright?” he asked tenderly.
“Oh, yeah, I’m fine. I always cry in the library.” I tried to smile but a sob came out instead.
He stepped in and quietly closed the door behind him. Swinging my feet over the edge of the desk, I took a deep breath and tried to pull myself together. I wiped my eyes, but it didn’t do much good. The tears wouldn’t stop.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” he said softly.
Before I realized what I was doing, I leaned forward and buried my head in Ben’s chest, and as he put his arms around me, I lost it. He didn’t try to stop me, but gently began to rock me back and forth in his strong arms.
After a while when I must have cried myself out, he finally let go.
“I must look terrible,” I muttered, sure that my eyes were horribly swollen and red.
“Impossible,” was all he said in reply as he opened the door for me and we started back towards the table. “I think we have a good start. Let’s say we pack it in for the day.”
I agreed. I needed some fresh air.
Walking out the front doors of the library, I found myself thinking what a decent man Ben truly was. He really had every right to say I told you so. He’d warned me about Daniel, that he would only break my heart, but he never said a word.
Ben was nearly perfect as far as I could tell. I mean I knew he wasn’t, who is? But he seemed pretty close in my opinion. His only main fault that I could tell was ironically the same as Daniel’s. He was secretive.
The day she’d found out about Daniel and I, Tabitha had told me men aren’t like women, especially when it comes to relationships; that they don’t feel a need to share things. But to me, there was a difference between not sharing and keeping secrets, and both men were guilty of this sin in my opinion.
Daniel thought he was protecting me with his secrets. Was this excusable? I didn’t have enough experience with men to say with any certainty. Of course, Ben was only a friend, we weren’t in a relationship. He was under no obligation to share things with me that he didn’t want to.
I was quiet on the walk back and when we got to the front of
Capen Hall he stopped.
“So what are you going to do for the rest of the day?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Call Tabitha I guess and see what she’s up to.”
“I think she went to Poughkeepsie with Mike to go to the mall for the afternoon.”
“Oh, then probably not much.”
I watched as the breeze blew some leaves in a circle at my feet.
After a moment he said “Well, I’ve got nothing planned. How about you go drop your books off, put your hiking boots on and meet me out back in say fifteen minutes? I’ve got something I’d like to show you and it will get us out of town for a few hours. What do you say?”
“Sure,” I said for lack of a better answer.
Fifteen minutes later I walked out the back door just as an old mustang convertible sporting faded red pain pulled up in front of me with Ben in the driver’s seat. We drove through town and up County Road Seven off in the direction of Kingston. Shortly after passing a sign for High Falls, in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, he pulled off to the side of the road and parked the car.
“We’re here?” I asked.
He nodded yes. “You’ll see,” he said with a smile.
Trusting he knew what he was doing, I got out of the car when he opened the door for me and followed him up the embankment into the woods. Just out of sight from the road, we came across a huge cave like opening rising out of the hillside. It had large stone pillars holding up the ceiling and a small lake at the base that looked like part of a set from some old 1970’s caveman movie.
“What is this place?” I asked, as I heard my voice echo down towards the lake below.
“It used to be a mine. They did a lot of mining in these hills years ago. There’s a bunch of caves and old mineshafts scattered throughout these woods.”
We made our way carefully down the rocky floor of the manmade cave towards the perfectly still, black waters of the lake. When we finally navigated our way down to the water’s edge, we stopped to throw stones in while we tried to guess how deep it was. Of course calling it a lake was a bit of a stretch. It was really more of a glorified pond.
“I’ll bring you back in January when it’s frozen. You can walk out on it then,” he said as he threw the last stone and smiled my way.
Then we started up the hill at the outer edge of the cave. It was steep, and as we made our way, Ben kept glancing over his shoulder; presumably to make sure I was still there. We curved around to the left as we walked up to the top edge of the mouth of the cave and looked down the vertical drop at the view below. Through the canopy of leaves in front of us, I could just make out his red car off in the distance.
“How did you find this place?”
“One day I was driving by and spotted it. It’s easier to see from the road when the leaves are all off the trees.”
Then we hiked farther back into the woods and spent a few hours exploring a few more caves and relics of old mining equipment from the distant past. It was chilly out today. The sun was shining, but the persistent chill in the air made me think it wouldn’t go away until we were well into spring.
I liked getting away from the dorm and campus, especially to a place where memories of Daniel didn’t fall thick at my feet. NPU always had a buzz about it, constant voices and sounds that seemed to echo like our voices in the cave. As we walked through the woods, I could hear no voices or sounds of modern life, just the reassuring silence found in the wind, the crunching of the leaves beneath our feet and the sound of my steady breathing.
Ben was right; this had been a good idea. Did it take my mind off Daniel? No, I couldn’t help but think of our hike together, the day I fell. That had been the day everything had changed for me, the day I began to develop a different kind of feeling for him. Walking along behind Ben, I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if I’d said no and gone hiking alone as I’d originally planned. These thoughts were agony. I loved Daniel, loved him heart and soul. Even if he had finally decided that I was only a temporary thing to be discarded for the woman with the high pitched laughter, I don’t think I’d have changed a thing.
I must be crazy for thinking that I’d rather have this pain than to never have loved. I knew even this was folly because I would always love him. Love would never be used in the past tense when it came to my feelings for Daniel.
I tried to focus on Ben and shoved Daniel to the back of my mind. We talked a little about our project and the odds of us being paired up together. It didn’t take long for me to begin to feel better. Ben’s steady calmness had an almost analgesic effect on me.
After a couple of hours of wandering the surrounding hills, we turned around and started back. When we got to the cave, we climbed the hill that led to the top of the cave entrance and sat down on the top rim with our feet dangling over the edge.
“You seem better now,” he said, staring straight ahead.
“You mean compared to the person who lost it in the library?” I tried to make a joke of it, but it wasn’t really working.
He didn’t reply, but just kind of smiled. After a minute of what looked like interior debate on his face he said “Just tell me one thing. Tell me he never … that he never laid a hand on you. I swear to God, if he ever touched you …” I could see the angry tension he was holding in his body.
“No, nothing like that. He’s always been a perfect gentleman,” I interjected quietly.
“Perfect, my –”
“I think that’s quite enough,” I said cutting him off.
We both sat there for a while in silence watching the birds dart from tree to tree in front of us. The birds looked so carefree, as if they hadn’t a bother or a care in the world. Something about the way they fluttered about made me remember part of a sermon I’d heard in church last summer. Something along the lines of Consider the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? I think it was from the book of Matthew if I recalled correctly. Perhaps God was trying to tell me that I needed to put my faith in him. He’d work everything out in a way that seemed best to him. After all, I hoped I was more valuable to him than one of these birds.
Looking to change the subject, I asked “So, tell me about your family. Where do they live?”
“Montana.”
I waited for him to elaborate but he didn’t.
“Where in Montana? Is it just your folks there?”
“Yes, and my brother.”
Again I waited for a longer answer but none came.
“Older or younger?”
“My brother? He’s younger, but only by a couple years.”
“I get the impression you don’t like to talk about them.”
“It’s not that … well, maybe it is. I love them, but we’re not exactly on speaking terms at the moment – my father and brother at least …. I still talk to my mother … sometimes. If it’s all the same with you, I’d rather not talk about it.”
“Alright.”
He got a far off look in his eyes as I sat there watching him beside me. It didn’t take a genius to see he was thinking about the family he didn’t want to talk about.
After a few more minutes of comfortable silence we finally headed back to the car. He was a good friend and tried to cheer me up again on our way back to campus. To be honest it was kind of cute, but I was in a much better mood by the time we got in the car so it wasn’t really necessary.
Ben was by nature a very upbeat person. There was a liveliness to his personality that was infectious if you stayed around him long enough. Even in his silence you could feel it.
When we finally pulled onto campus, it was getting on towards dinner time so we parked behind Gage Hall where he lived then walked over to Hasbrouck for dinner.
Tabitha and Mike were already there so we took seats across the table from them. Mike glanced up from his meatball sub only long enough to say hello, but Tabitha looked from me to Ben a
nd then back before smiling and returning to her salad. I had the feeling I’d be hearing about this later. I didn’t mind. There wasn’t anything to tell other than we were friends, good friends now I think.
We parted ways at the dining hall exit, and in the cool breeze of the setting sun I walked back over to Capen Hall to settle in for the night. I had emails that needed returning and a call to my mother on the agenda. When I opened the door to my room Darcy was there sprawled out on her bed with books scattered around her. The first thing I noticed was how she was strangely dressed from head to toe entirely in bright purple.
“Hey, where have you been?” I asked, happy to see her.
“Pledging is getting old. I can’t wait for it to be over. I needed a break from them for a night so I came back here to study.” After a pause, she added “Oh, Daniel called. He said he couldn’t reach you on your phone, so he left a message here that he was back in town and to give him a call.”
“I must have missed his call. I was out hiking with Ben and I don’t think there is any service up in those hills.”
I turned around, walked down the stairs, out the door and into the quad where it was quiet. After I took a seat at a nearby picnic table, I pulled out my phone and stared at it in my hand.
What was I going to say to him?
What was he going to say to me?
I was almost too afraid to find out. At least now, in this limbo, I didn’t have to know the truth for certain. In my ignorance I could pretend that everything was going to be fine, and that my apprehension was only a product of my imagination working in overdrive in the wrong direction.
Summoning some elusive inner strength, I dialed. It rang so long I thought it was going to voicemail, but he finally picked up.
“Sara!” he said as if he was almost surprised it was me. “I got back into town this afternoon. I wanted to see you but couldn’t get hold of you.”
Was that anxiousness or anger I heard in his voice?
“Yes, I was working on a project in the library all morning and then went hiking with a friend for a while. Darcy just gave me the message you called.”
The Purity of Blood: Volume I Page 32