The Uber ride takes about twenty minutes. Ahmed is our driver, 4.9 stars, and he’s got a cluster of about thirty pineapple air fresheners on the rearview mirror.
Ahmed is now undergoing the barrage of Lucy’s barked orders about driving directions. “Don’t take Chapel, okay, Ahmed? Copy that? We’ll get all jammed up there by the hospital. Elm, Elm all the way. Ahmed? Got it?”
“Lucy, he’s got a damned GPS,” I tell her. I want to clap my hand over her mouth. Poor guy, just trying to make a living, and then he picks us up only to get verbally assaulted by little Lucy Burchett.
“No problem!” Ahmed says. “I like a lady who knows what she wants!” And within minutes, we’re zooming towards I-95 and the Quinnipiac Bridge. Out the window, I see IKEA flash past. Part of me wishes I was there, eating chicken fingers and drinking lingonberry soda all by myself. But I’m not. Probably for the best. Brooding sadly over display furniture and flopping down onto mattresses isn’t exactly the sort of thing I’d call healing, even if it does feel really, really good. No. The thing to do is be with people now. To keep myself busy and distracted.
Lucy sits back contentedly, backseat driving well done. I clutch my purse in my hands and try desperately not to look at my phone every 30 seconds.
“Fess up. What’s going on with you?” Lucy says. “No tricks.” She taps her temple. “Lucy knows all of them.”
Ben’s body flashes into my head. I used to wonder who in the world those people were who thought about sex every however-many-second seconds.
I am now one of those people.
“Classes. They’re stressful.”
Lucy shakes her head slowly, wagging her finger at me in an oh-no-you-don’t way. “Not for you. And I know it’s not dad problems.”
I groan and press my head against the headrest behind me. “He called the other day. Almost dropped tears on C.S. Lewis.”
Lucy has no interest in manuscripts at all unless they’re mostly lurid. “It’s not him because you haven’t been obsessively cleaning your room. When your dad pisses you off, I smell Pledge next door and hear lots of rattling. So that’s out.”
Here’s the thing. Stonewalling your best friend when she’s a girl like Lucy, it’s impossible. I feel like this is how it must feel to get interrogated by the CIA. They know every last fucking thing about you and won’t let you off the hook until you crumple.
Lucy wiggles her nose. “I mean, obviously you met a guy. Summer dress? Please. I saw you dancing with that stud at Lux. Ever since then you’ve been all…” She makes a big circle with both her hands, pinching up her face in my general direction. “…whatever is going with you.”
God. She’s right. What Ben and I did that night, it’s like it unleashed my inner Naomi. This sexy, fearsome girl inside me that I never knew existed. A girl who asked to be hurt and who did some hurting back. I wonder if the bite mark I left on his thigh has healed yet. “So what if I did?” She claps. “Knew it!”
“Why did you invite me anyway?” I ask. If she hadn’t, none of this would have ever happened. Probably.
“I didn’t. The society did.” She lifts her shoulder. “They agreed on you. Nothing makes any sense whatsoever. I might as well just resign myself to that. “Anyway, it’s just…” My breath catches at my words. “A guy.”
“Riiiiight. You don’t wear your eyeliner like that for just a guy.”
She notices everything. Everything! “A professor,” I whisper, as far under my breath as I possibly can. Not far enough through because I see Ahmed’s eyebrows shoot up in the rearview mirror.
Lucy has exactly no reaction to this at all. Her eyes are wide, her mouth open, and she’s just frozen like that, as if she’s waiting for a surprise party to yell her name. “And?”
“And! It’s a mess!” “Married?”
I shake my head.
She lifts her shoulders. “So? What’s the problem?”
I groan. “We don’t all have your hereditary disregard for ethics.”
“I can teach you, sister. It can be learned.”
My phone buzzes. I yank it out of my bag. It’s a thunderstorm alert. Fuck it. Suddenly, a rush of emotion comes flooding up to my face. Disappointment, sadness, breakage. My nose stings, my vision gets blurry. It’s not just the usual Naomi eye-mist. It’s real tears. Stupid, stupid, heart on my sleeve. Giving me away always. I clutch my freaking phone to my chest. In the rearview, I can see poor Ahmed looking at me sadly.
Even though I want to tell Lucy all about him, every last thing, what happened today in front of his door was so deeply humiliating, I don’t have the words at all. I want this to be my own private failure. My own secret broken-hearted mistake.
“Whoa,” Lucy says. “This is serious.”
She’s right about that. It is serious. And I just want to forget about it for tonight.
As we arrive at the Yacht Club, the sun is just slipping past the horizon. The boathouse itself is an old wooden gray building on the Connecticut River, with crew boats moored for a hundred yards either way. I've been out here just once, for a party with Lucy and her parents. It looks a whole lot different now than it did then. The Jack and Coke guys have hung up incongruous Japanese lanterns. They’re sort of milling around, leaning on things, looking loose and cocky in their boat shorts and loafers. Just as Ahmed drops us off, someone hooks up their phone to a big set of speakers perched on the back of a truck. Out comes “Cake by the Ocean.” And that’s when I spot Isaac.
I saw the J. Crew catalog for Fall/Winter. They’ve got him in a corduroy slim-fit blazer available in pewter and coffee in both regular and tall sizes. He was helping a small child in a yellow dress organize her blocks.
The feeling I get when I see him is somewhere between excitement, dread, and relief. Isaac is an ass, but at least he’d answer the door if I knocked.
Being with him, though, it all seems so long ago. The stuff of kids, almost.
As we enter the milling crowd of guys, two Jack and Cokes hoist Lucy up on their shoulders like she’s a cheerleader and hustle her down to the river. I lose sight of her but hear a delighted squeal and then a splash. Isaac sidles on up, gazing down at me like he’s not sure if I’m going to attack him. We broke up after he followed me after class and then gave me the third degree on why I was “having coffee with some other guy.” The “other guy” was my TA and we were talking about my paper. That’s when I gave old Isaac the heave-ho. I gaze up at him. Time to be nice. “You looked handsome in that blazer.”
He looks stunned. “I feel like you actually mean that.”
All my fight is drained out of me. “Lovely lining.”
“Thanks,” he says. “For Winter/Spring, I just learned they’ve got me wearing a light pink cashmere turtleneck. Assholes.”
I snort. “You actually don’t look that bad in pink. Sorry about that.”
“Yes, I do. Don’t lie.” Isaac hands me a drink. Clear plastic cup, ice, slightly fizzy. Lime. Definitely a gin and tonic. This is that kind of party anyway, and the Jack and Cokes don’t just drink Jack and Coke.
I take a sip and am utterly flattened. “Whoa Nelly, what is this?” “Naval gin,” Isaac says. He pulls out a little bottle from his pocket. The label is rudimentary and seemingly hand-drawn.
“Where’d you get that, a seventeenth-century schooner?”
“It’s legal now,” he says, triumphant. Apparently, all the illegal liquors are now in Yale’s liquor cabinets. We’re all going to end up with Swiss cheese for brains and be institutionalized before we turn forty. But at least we’ll have fun going crazy.
I take another drink and cough a little as it goes down. I lick the tonic off my lips. That bitter deliciousness. “If we don’t drink all of it, we should donate it to the hospital so they can use it to clean their syringes.”
Isaac laughs. This big, bold laugh, like all of him is in it, through and through. The laugh of a guy who knows that when he laughs, everybody else will follow. A congressman’s laugh, real
ly. He’s just arrogant enough to become one.
“How was your summer?” he asks. He slips his arm through mine. At first, I stiffen. I don’t want him touching me. I don’t want anything to do with him. But seriously, Naomi, it’s an arm against an arm. Calm down.
Except his warm arm immediately sends me back to the way Ben pinned me down on the bed. The feel of his hands on my forearms, so beautiful and gentle, but then getting stronger and more possessive as the night went on until we had our hands knitted together while he fucked me, staring me right in the eyes.
“Naomi?” Isaac says, waving a hand in front of my face. “Hello?”
“Sorry. This gin!”
“Who was that guy at the ball?” he asks. He’s trying to be casual. He has on his casual face. I've seen it before. He was wearing a merino sweater vest while carving a turkey in the special Thanksgiving issue.
“My TA,” I say. “Same guy who I had coffee with. You were right all along. We’re having a torrid romance, conducted in secret after our Philosophy seminars.” Jesus, Naomi. Humor can get way too close to the truth. Careful. Batten down the hatches with this gin in your hand.
“Sorry about that, Naomi. I just…” Isaac says, running his hand through his hair, “I really like you, liked you. I guess I got a little possessive.”
Weirdly, this seems absolutely inappropriate from Isaac; at the same time, if Ben were to say that, to get all possessive, I’d be absolutely flattered. Desire, it makes all the difference.
“Friends?” Isaac says.
“Friends.”
And his face lights up in that all-American smile.
He leads me to the dock and sits down with his legs dangling off. He pats the dock, and I sit down beside him. “I saw you in Mysticism. I hope it’s good.”
Cue sad violin music. I nod. I sip my rubbing alcohol and tonic. “Lots of hype.”
He shrugs. “I guess. Have you started the reading?”
“Jesus, no. I haven’t even started. How bad is it?” Somehow I can just see Ben assigning, like, 2000 pages a week, I don’t know why. Because he writes philosophy books, that’s why. Because he probably reads a thousand pages a day. That kind of smart. Scary smart.
“Just… weird,” he says, pulling up his phone and showing me the syllabus. The standard mystical philosophy texts I’d expected to see…only there at the bottom? I grab his phone. The world is slightly woozy. Could be the gin, or the fact that The Four Loves is now on the reading list.
For the love of all that is sane in the world, why, oh why, oh why? I don’t know if I’m going to cry or laugh uncontrollably or both. I gulp down the rest of my gin and tonic all at once.
“Ahoy, sailor,” Isaac says, smiling at me, slipping his phone into his pocket.
“Rough day,” I tell him.
And as if in some kind of secret camaraderie, he bottoms out his G & T too. He sucks air through his teeth, with the final swallow. Perfect teeth. Perfect face, perfect body, and yet not even close to what I need and want.
“Wait,” I say, “Why are you drinking? Isn’t it rugby season? I remember last fall you wouldn’t even eat the cookies in the dining hall because you needed to stay… what was it?” I try to remember. “In fighting condition?”
Now he looks like mischief, glancing from side to side. “I’m having neck problems. Like Peyton Manning.”
“Oh shit,” I say. “I’m so sorry.” Instinctively, I touch my neck.
“Nerve compression.”
Internally, I recoil. I know that pain from the propeller accident. Absolutely nothing like it in the world. “Are you okay?”
“I mean, it’s fine.” He stretches his neck from side to side, as if that’ll make a difference. “Rugby, it’s not life. But upshot.” He pulls a white pen from his pocket. “I got a medical marijuana license.”
I stare at the pen. It’s not a pen. It’s an e-cigarette with a tiny pot leaf on the end.
Dropping my voice, I whisper, “Is that…”
He nods. Nice and slow. “Top grade. It’ll blow your mind.” And then he inhales smoothly from the vaporizer. He holds his breath, and just a little steam, barely noticeable, passes through his nose.
“That’s it?” I ask.
He nods again, super slow now, his eyes just a little sheened over. “Try it.”
“I've never…”
“Why not now?”
Shit. I try to get out of my haze of gin. Why not now? Thursday night, no class tomorrow until the afternoon. I’m upset and furious. Why not now? Why not?
“Come on, Naomi. Get a little crazy with me.”
He’s so gorgeous. My heart is aching so hard. He might be Isaac, he might be generally an asshole, but he likes me, and he’s warm and delectable and right here.
He hands me the pen. “C’mon. I want to get stoned with you. Not marry you. You’ll be so fun stoned. You’re hilarious already.”
The pen is light, weighted at one end. That must be where the battery is. “Am I?” “Fuck yes! That joke about the syringes? The schooner? Pfffffft,” he laughs, just a little bit harder and bigger than normal. “Come on. It’s no fun to get stoned with stupid girls. I should know.”
I cannot help but smile. In my head I see them all lined up like pretty paper dolls around him.
“I'll shotgun you a hit,” he says, leaning into my shoulder, “How about that?”
Lord. There was a time when that very sentence would have melted me. But thinking of kissing him now, it just makes me feel guilty. And gross. And then guilty again. “No shotgun. I'll do it,” I say.
Putting my lips to the end, I inhale slowly. It’s pepperminty and a little like inhaling steam from a humidifier. I have no idea how hard to inhale. After about a second, Isaac’s eyes flash. He says, “That’s good. Hold it.”
My brain is already spinning. He takes the pen away, as I hold the inhale. After another second, he nods, and I let it go.
Immediately, and I mean immediately, my pussy rushes with wetness. An absolutely instantaneous turn on, uncontrollable desire, throbbing clit. “Holy shiiiiit,” I say.
Isaac nods again. Told you so.
I see he’s got a hard-on himself. Whoa. Whoooaahhh.
When he looks at me again, his eyes are heavy. A little red around the edge and the lids almost puffy. Stonnnned.
The music gets louder, the river starts to get farther away. The leaves are, weirdly, rustling louder than I've ever noticed leaves rustling before. There’s a bird across the bank which is, without a doubt, the most beautiful bird that ever was, ever, in this history of birds.
Hollllyyyy shit. I take off my sandals and lie back on the dock, looking up at the barely visible stars. My toes just dip into the water. Isaac lies back with me and does the same.
My brain whooshes backwards in time. The walls of my pussy part for him, and I groan. He’s thick, he’s so fucking hard. I feel his balls just brushing my ass. “I want to see what you’re all about.” Yeah, I say. “Tied down, this how’ll you get to know me?” Yeah. I’ll take you that way, take you apart. What do you say to that? Then he thrusts into me, I slide up the sheets. I say yes. Take me apart, Ben. Take me apart. Please.
My sense of balance, even lying down, is completely askew. I have a brief flash of panic that I've been roofied. Not entirely false as I’ve effectively roofied myself. I look at Isaac, pressing my cheek to the rough old dock boards. “I’m super screwed up.”
“Right?”
There’s a freckle on his ear I never noticed. It’s quite nice. He’s quite nice. The whole world is rolling around. I shut my eyes to find my center and it’s nowhere. We listen to Vampire Weekend a while, and then something that sounds sort of like U2 on another planet.
“Seriously, Naomi. I’m sorry. I miss you. I wonder if we could…”
Everything goes quiet. My thoughts drift back to Ben. The way I felt when he came into the butler’s pantry. The way I was horrified at what I’d done when first I realized who he was, but
then absolutely thrilled in the same instant that he wasn’t gone forever. The way the words in his book shot off the page and made me want to march down to his house and say, “How can you believe in nothing? Isn’t what you feel right now something?” How this all, most definitely, unequivocally, insane as it is, doesn’t feel like just some crazy fling.
I fumble for my phone and sit up. This takes me a second because I have no idea what’s happened to my true north, but then I find it again. Kind of. Maybe. Who the hell knows. Only one thing matters. I open up the text from Unknown. I stare at the broken heart emoji and magically, in my head, the two halves of the heart come back together. Without thinking at all, I tap off a message and hit send.
where are you?
It could be a minute or possibly an hour that passes. I’m that screwed up. Next to me, Isaac is talking about his plans for after graduation. Flat-front chinos, Milan, MBA? L.L. Bean? I don’t even care.
Then I see those little shimmery dots in the corner. Oh my God, he’s typing. I clutch my phone. Far in the distance, thunder rumbles, and there’s a flash of faraway lightning.
Master’s house. My house. Weird.
Where are you?
I glance around. Where in the world am I? Why does my mouth taste weird? Oh shit. Right.
parted.
part.
PARTY.
Be careful.
Time to get to the point, skipper. Time to get down to business.
why didn’t you open the door?
Osgood came. He warned me.
Believe me, I wanted to. I wanted to open that door.
I heard you there.
I’m so sorry, Naomi.
That, at least, makes sense. Osgood’s favorite topic at the moment is avoiding scandal. It’s verging on obsession. So I can imagine how that conversation might’ve gone down.
does he know?
No. Suspects, maybe.
I take a deep breath. There’s this expression in sailing, from Lord Nelson back in the Royal Navy. Never mind the maneuvers. Go straight at them. I've always found it a pretty damned good motto, so…
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