Professed

by Nicola Rendell

  That’s when it hits me.

  It’s not the napkin. It’s not the salad forks. Not red galoshes or thumbhole hoodies or eyes with a navy-blue edge. It’s not philosophy or laughter or that sizzle that she puts all through me.

  It feels like tear gas.

  I don’t just want her. I don’t just like her.

  I need her.

  I’ve never needed anything. Ever. I’ve never felt this deep, sinking desire inside me. I’ve never felt so exposed and wide open and fucking freaked out. Nothing is so consequential as to be needed. Nothing is so important as to be loved.

  Until now.

  With a bare semblance of sanity, because, you know, my entire worldview is crumbling, I keep my shit together. I don’t pinch my fingers to my nose, I don’t drive 90 miles an hour back to campus after we eat. Instead, through the foggy, dreamy streak of the nighttime drive, I keep my hand on her thigh, only moving it to shift gears when absolutely necessary.

  But there’s a weight in my stomach. Tell me this is real. How real?

  I love you, I love you, I love you.

  What if love isn’t a construct? What if it isn’t something soft-hearted humans made up to feel better about the world as they hurtle meaninglessly through the sky?

  What if I’ve been utterly fucking wrong all along?

  27

  I get us to campus. I’m grateful that the two of us can be quiet together because I have no idea what to say. None. Anything that comes out of my mouth now is going to be a hard-core profession of love, and I am not ready for that. I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to handle this.

  As we part a block away from college, I kiss her. I don’t know if she can tell I’m distracted.

  Back inside my house, I stand in the kitchen over the sink in the dark like a beaten man. A man who’s lost control.

  She’s let loose this great passion in me, this thing I never knew existed, this roiling angry volcano that wants to create and destroy, to take over and make new. To need and want and believe. She’s leveled me, and in this new wave of Ben Beck, he’s hanging on so tight, it’s fucking terrifying. Fighting against the need to not be alone anymore.

  I’m the atheist who’s seen God and wants to run from church forever. The unbeliever in the light.

  Being alone, it’s easy. It’s fine. It’s good.

  She’s my student. She’s a junior. I’m falling in love with a girl twenty years younger than me. I think this is love. It must be love. It feels like getting mugged. It’s fear. It’s helplessness. It’s all of me right in her hands.

  Her scholarship. My job. There are ten thousand reasons that this is the worst idea in the world. Ten thousand little reasons, ten thousand big ones. I look up at her window. After a while, I see the light go out.

  I feel sick, I feel wrecked.

  I cannot do this.

  No way. I cannot. I cannot open up my heart. I don’t know how.

  I take my phone from my pocket and straighten up. I’m an asshole. I’ve spent my life being the asshole that believes in nothing and who keeps everybody away. I can be that guy again. I am that guy.

  Signal opens up. I stare at the blank message field for a second. And write,

  We can’t. I can’t. I’m so fucking sorry, Naomi.

  Before I can grasp what I just said, I close the app and put my thumb on the Signal icon. I press the tiny x to delete it.

  It’s too much. It’s too fucking terrifying.

  And then I go to my messages and delete her number too.

  It’s a little after eleven at night when I decide to go for a jog in the needling rain. My lungs burn with the cold, but I breathe harder and make it burn more. My skin stings, my body aches. I have to get Naomi out of my mind. I don’t need her. I don’t need anything. I’m fine.

  God damn it.

  The truth is, I hate running. I’d rather sit on my ass. But running is the best kind of self-punishment I’ve found.

  Behind me, I hear footfalls in the rain. Slap, slap. I turn to look. Just my luck I’m going to get murdered out here.

  But it’s Naomi in a drenched hoodie and jogging pants. Her hair is wet against her head, and she’s got this look on her face. Like a panther. I can see her by the light of a faraway street lamp.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I moan to myself.

  She is coming right for me. She’s not stopping.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, holding out my arms.

  No response. She tackles me, straight on, like some untrained housecat. She makes contact and latches on to me with all fours. I go tumbling and land with a smack in the leaves.

  “You’re an asshole.”

  “I know that,” I say.

  She lets loose a tiny-fisted punch and it lands almost comically on my chest. I grab her wrist. Her hair is coming down over her face and she’s got her teeth set close and mean.

  “A real asshole.”

  “Naomi,” I say, rolling over onto her in the wet leaves. My knees grind into the ground on either side of her body.

  “Let me go, you bastard,” she says, squirming underneath me. There’s all manner of kicking and punching going on besides. I’ve got my hands wrapped around her wrists, but she’s a fighter.

  “Stop trying to hit me,” I say. Hanging on to her is like hanging on to my brother’s toddler right now. So tiny but so difficult to pin down, not to mention she’s all wet and she’s determined to beat me as hard as she can with those tight little fists. What goes one into my abdomen, and I involuntarily clench up, roaring into the dark.

  “Holy fuck,” I groan. “Calm down,” She does not. She even gets my jaw with a glancing hook.

  Trying to contain her is like putting a tornado in a box, or a raven in a cage. Totally impossible. She squirms and she pounds. I hear her tennis shoes scratching like mad on the ground. I try to get a little bit of purchase with my own shoes on the wet, gravelly path, but I just can’t. She won’t let me. She’s too angry to hold. Finally, I get her by the shoulders by wrapping my arms entirely around her body in a bear hug.

  This quiets the tornado, barely. “Thanks for that message. Super job, Professor.”

  “I’m fucking sorry,” I say, sounding angrier than I intended. “You just don’t understand, Naomi.”

  She grips my shirt so tight, I hear threads breaking. “Actually I do. I do fucking understand. I know what it’s like to be so independent you don’t want to say the word feelings. I know what it’s like to be on your own. But I also know that when you see something you want, and need, and love, you have to grab it,” she says. She punctuates these last words, pounding on my chest, driving her elbow into my body

  She’s a shitload stronger than she looks. Inside and outside. And everything she’s saying, it’s so fucking true. All true.

  “You and me,” I say, grinding my knees into the ground now, “It’s impossible.”

  Just when I think I have a handle on the situation, she hooks her legs over the backs of my thighs, and she manages to flip me. Unbelievable. Right over onto my back, where I land with a cold, mucky thunk.

  She growls at me. “A guy who says nothing matters, and fucking me like you do.” She gives me a shove. “And an illiterate fisherman’s daughter at Yale. A girl who doesn’t fucking belong here, who is terrified forever, and then finally finds you, you, you nihilist asshole!”

  “Calm down,” I say, totally unconvincingly, my voice shaking.

  “No, I will not. You don’t get to tell me what to do. Not now, not ever.”

  She struggles a little harder but now we’re nose to nose. Now her chin is trembling. I see it thanks to the faint far-off light of a blue police telephone by the side of the path.

  I cannot help myself and put my thumb to stop the trembling. But she swats my hand away. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare do that. I’m not yours to care for, not unless you stop acting like such an insufferable asshole. So fuck you, Master Beck. Fuck you and all your nothingness.”

 
; My vision starts to funnel in on her, just her, not the rain, not the night, not the wet leaves, not even my fucking thoughts. Just her. Her. Her. Her

  “You want me to show you how I feel?”

  She blinks just once, still fuming. “Do you want to send it to me via secret text? Stick it between some stones? Whisper it on the stupid wind?”

  Now it’s my turn to flip her, and I do, face down into a pile of soft wet leaves. I rip her running pants down. I push my palms into her ass, and then press my cock inside her from behind. I part that ass and let the rain come down on it.

  “Show me,” she seethes over her shoulder. “If you can’t tell me you love me, show me. Or go, go back to your bullshit solitary life.”

  God, it’s so insane. She shouldn’t have one bit of power from down there below me, but instead she’s got all of it. She’s got me by the balls. Always has, always will.

  “Shut…” I reach up and hold her down by her neck.

  “The fuck…” I position myself at the opening of her pussy.

  “Up.” And thrust deep, deep inside her.

  She snarls out this long, furious Yeahhhhh into the ground. Her fingers are digging deep into the dirt.

  We are beasts in the forest. I am rutting her raw. We get rude and ferocious, tearing through the leaves with our hands. I see her fingernails encrusted in dirt as I fuck her into the mud. I fuck her into the rocks. I fuck her until I can’t see straight. Until there is nothing but Naomi, alone in the goddamned universe.

  “I’m going to mark you,” I say low into her ear.

  She starts squirming again, but hanging on to my hands too. “Do it, Master. Mark me. Do it.”

  I pull out and pump my cum all over her back, all over her hair, all over her ass. She’s the one. Right now in the filth and the mud, it’s all so simple.

  Coming out of this dark haze, I finally snap to. I look around. I’m fucking Naomi Costa on in the ground in East Rock Park.

  Seriously?

  How does she do this? How does she make me lose my logic, my common sense, my decency?

  I’ve got no idea. But she most definitely does. How can any living person do this to another?

  Flipping her over under my bent legs, still with my orgasm ripping through my body, I get down low over her face, rain dripping from my hair onto hers. Half her face is smeared with mud, like some little warrior. An assassin of hearts.

  “You know I fucking love you. You know I do.”

  And she takes my face in her filthy hands and kisses the hell out of me, teeth-to-teeth, smiling at me against that kiss as the rain begins to slow.

  I reach down between my legs to get to hers and start working her clit, I let the rain fall, washing the dirt away. I use my own spit to get it perfect again. Then I hook three fingers into her like I did in the Jeep. I bring that screaming orgasm right out of her. With my free palm, I cover her mouth while she grips my shirt in her hands, shaking me at the height of the climax, like it feels so good she hates me.

  I know that feeling.

  I’m in love with that fucking feeling.

  Eventually, I don’t know how long it is—she does that to me, warps time—I stand up and help her from the ground, offering my hand and then hoisting her up. In every way, we’d battled it out, and now here I am, neither the victor nor the loser, helping up from the ground the one who’d given me a knock-out punch. I wipe the mud off her face a little.

  Shit has gotten more serious than ever. I need her and I admit it. I accept it and let it boil up and stay there, all through my body.

  “What are we going to do?” she says.

  “I have no idea. Something.”

  She sighs, hard and worn out, and then she presses her head to my shoulder as we emerge from the forest, back into the real world.

  “We better split up,” she says.

  Fucking A. I’d like to scoop her up into my arms and carry her into college, Beauty-and-the-Beast style. But she’s right. Of course she is.

  “Sorry I tackled you,” she says under the streetlight.

  I push a little hair back from her forehead. “I’m so glad you did.”

  Without a goodbye, she lets me go, and takes off jogging back to Durham. Leaving me without her. All alone in the rain.

  28

  By the time I get back to my room, it’s almost 1:30 in the morning. Everybody’s still wide awake because it’s just before midterms. This is not exactly optimal. While I can’t see myself, I can feel the mud caked on every single part of my body, and I’m pretty sure I smell like really, really fabulous sex.

  But there’s nothing for it. I can’t hide; I’ve got to go up the stairs. As I walk, little bits of mud fall onto the steps, and I look back behind me. I've left a trail like Pig-Pen.

  What we did in the forest, it got a little violent. It got a little raw. I just loved it. I needed it. We are not missionary position people. We are Naomi Costa and Benjamin Beck. Catalyst and reaction.

  I peek into Lucy’s room, and there she is, furiously doing the readings she hasn’t done all term. I’ve seen this rodeo before. She stockpiles her ADD meds for just such occasions.

  “Proust, who the hell is Proust?” she squeals and lifts her eyes. “Holy shit, what happened to you?”

  Now I try to elegantly smooth my mud-crusted jogging pants, like, It’s nothing. I do realize, of course, that I look like I just got done with Tough Mudder or one of those horrible game shows where everybody gets hit by big foam hammers into a frothy moat. I try to shrug it off. “Took a spill on my jog.”

  She’s sort of plucking her way towards me with her hands out. “Don’t come in here. You’ll ruin my rug.”

  I have this momentary flash of myself rubbing my body all over that white shag. It’d be like a Rorschach. It’d be hysterical. But she’d never forgive me. “I’m going to shower. Look up the number for facilities in case I clog the drains.”

  Lucy nods slowly and puts a lollipop in her mouth.

  The shower is long and hot. Everything aches. My skin stings. My muscles burn. Even my ass hurts from when he pulled apart the cheeks so ruthlessly there, with my face in the leaves.

  And I love every single pain he gave me. I see I’ve got scrapes all over my knees from when he had me on my stomach. God. So fucking bestial, so animal, so hot. Growling in my ear that he loves me.

  The very last thing I wanted to do was leave him. I want to keep my hand in his always. I want to have adventures and make mischief. So as I give myself another once-over with my body wash and check for remnants of dirt in my hair, I try to ignore the sinking feeling inside that says that we are ineffably, uncomfortably, impossibly doomed. I try to tell myself that this could be forever. Forever, forever, forever, Naomi. It exists. This feeling inside me could last always.

  The squeeze bottle of shower gel sputters sadly.

  And I try not to analyze the shit out of that metaphor.

  Back in my room, still in my robe, I look at the calendar. Brutal. A million shades of events, day after day. I have been starting to fall behind, my mind has been so distracted by Ben. And now? God.

  All of philosophy seems utterly trivial compared to Benjamin Beck.

  Just before I’m going to crawl in bed, my email pings. It’s from Professor Beck to the class, reminding us of our midterm paper. The prompt asks us to apply the philosophy of mysticism to The Four Loves.

  Under the covers, I open up Signal.

  nice prompt, professor.

  Right?

  i’m glad you like the book though.

  i may be obsessed.

  That last line. I realize he might think I’m talking about him. Am I?

  It’s too late for me. I’m there already.

  Me too. Me too. Me too.

  The next morning, I wake up to a light rain tapping on the window. Minimal seepage through the gaps in the frame, and happily, no wet leaves either thanks to the packing tape. Still in my sleepy dreamy half-wakefulness, I know that what I really
need to do, of course, is get things done for classes. Like make outlines and do some complex color-coded highlighting maneuvers. But instead I’m slated for an extra shift at the Beinecke, doing grunt work.

  I don’t even have time for breakfast, I realize, throwing on my clothes and grabbing an apple. I look outside. With a sort of flipping delight in my heart, I realized the old yellow galoshes are out and the new red Hunters are in. For a moment, a moment I don’t have to spare, I admire them and me in the full-length mirror. I feel almost guiltily glad wearing them. Never in my life have I gotten anything so nice. Maybe it’s just one gift, but never have I felt so spoiled by anybody. Not even Lucy. And that’s saying something.

  Today in the library, I’m in a new room in the basement that smells like carpet glue. One of the lights above me flickers, and the heating system whistles in the vents. The shift begins with moving small, ancient, paper-bound books to do entirely with butterflies into archival acid-free storage boxes. I have a strong suspicion these archival boxes are just regular boxes and the powers-that-be pay $50 each just to feel righteous, but I don’t say that. I just do my job, arranging them carefully in each box with my white gloves and my paper hat.

  This utterly simple task is overseen by a man with enormous glasses and a mass of curly white hair, who points at everything I’m doing. He is the world’s authority on butterfly pamphlets. His name is Professor Hammerwell, and he smells a lot like Rice-A-Roni.

  Pamphlet. Box. Pamphlets, box. Occasionally he will sort of whisper something, “Oh yes, good! Capital!” when he looks at one of them.

  “Yes! Miss Costa! Look! The monarch!”

  “Wonderful!” Pamphlet. Box.

  One of the librarians comes and interrupts us. She’s very nice, really. A little odd, but nice. Her name is Lillian, and she’s forever telling me things are “highly irregular.”

  “Miss Costa,” she says.

  Pamphlet. Box. “Everything okay?” I ask.