Professed

by Nicola Rendell

  At the door of her Zipcar, I wrap my arms around her waist. She raises both hands and places them around my neck. “Thank you,” she smiles up. “I’ll see you in the dining hall later today, maybe?”

  It’s like an arrow. That’s not enough. That’ll never be enough. Not now, after this time away together. “Of course you will. Over lemon bars. Or cauliflower.”

  It lightens the mood just enough for her to get up on her tiptoes to kiss me goodbye. I make sure she has her seat buckled and tell her not to be an idiot and text while she’s driving.

  “I won’t,” she says. “Promise.” She smiles up at me, past the roof of the Prius.

  I thump the roof with my fist. “I want the receipt for this, Miss Costa.”

  “It’s okay,” she says, “I have it covered.”

  “Please,” I say.

  She lowers her eyes and reaches out to hug my body. It’s awkward and beautiful. “Okay. That’s a deal.”

  I watch her pull out of the driveway. There is a knot in my throat and a hole in my stomach. It’s like an aching, throbbing, dark nostalgia for something I knew once but might never know again.

  I hope so fucking hard that this isn’t the end for us. With all my heart, I love her. But I know, as she disappears down the way, that we might be doomed. That we are star-crossed. That our love is impossible. And for the first time in as long as I can remember, I wipe tears from my own eyes.

  41

  Back at Durham, the dream over, it takes only a few showers for his words to wash off my body. Of all of them, Lover, written boldly above my ass is the very last to fade.

  During the following week, in class, I watch him closer than I’ve ever watched anybody in my life. He utterly possesses me. I watch him with the intensity of a lover while still acting like his student. I always dawdle after class, messing with my phone, hoping for a chance to be alone with him, but that moment never comes. Students love him and ask a thousand questions, until the next professor enters the lecture hall. So that we have to part with just a glance and the barest smile.

  He doesn’t come to my room—that was pure madness. We are careful in public. At fellows’ dinners, I stay on the other side the room, only occasionally passing by him with a plate of cut-veggie nonsense. At Master’s teas, I stay by the door while he stays by the fireplace. If we need to, we make cordial talk and don’t hold our stares too long. When I get close to him, I can actually feel my body tense up. It takes all my willpower not to reach out and put a hand on his chest. Osgood seems placated, but I notice him keeping a close watch on the butler’s pantry.

  November barrels on. We text, trying to find another way to meet. One night, he does pick me up way past campus on Crown, and we drive to an abandoned parking lot and make love in the back of the Jeep. Every night I fall asleep like some lovesick schoolgirl, clutching my phone, thinking of him four stories away, alone in his bed, hopefully doing the same.

  Life itself becomes fuzzy and distant. I go through the motions, but I forget ordinary things. My laundry piles up, my to-do list for classes gets longer and longer. For the first time ever, I’m late handing in a paper. My thoughts are all with him, not with the world. Until one day, I realize all of a sudden what I would have ordinarily seen coming a mile away:

  Tuition is due, and I’m short.

  It’s not that I haven’t been careful enough with my money, it’s just that there’s not enough money to go around, not enough hours in the day to work.

  I do the math again and again. I’m short. A thousand dollars short.

  I know why it’s happened, and it’s not because I’m lovesick or in the clouds. It’s because every term, I dip a little ways into my savings—the tiny bit my mom left me—and finally the little dips have added up to a big one.

  Right on cue, my dad calls.

  “It’s a glut. You have to come back,” he says. No hello. Just an update on the situation on the boat.

  I stare at my bank account. “Dad. Listen…”

  The seagulls fill the silence on his end and the rain hitting my windows on mine.

  “I need some help. I’m short on money for room and board.”

  Oh, the satisfaction that must be on his face. I’m sure even the stupid lobsters notice it.

  “I told you this was going to happen,” he says.

  I’m filled with a rage so profound, I can’t even reply at first. Sometimes I wonder what my mom must have seen in him. That cockiness must’ve been attractive once. When it was totally inconsequential. But now? Now, he’s just an arrogant, distant thorn in my side. If she were alive, she’d probably have dumped him out to sea herself. “My grades are fine. It’s the money.”

  “Lobster’s down to five a pound. Five a fucking pound. For lobster. I can’t haul it in fast enough, and I make shit when I do. It’s hardly worth my doing,” he says.

  That little pang of desperation just kills me. That big bear of a man, so crude and rough, brought low. “If I come back for Thanksgiving and work the glut,” I say, “Would that help?”

  He inhales deeply. “You know it would.”

  “Can you help me with money, just this once?”

  He just lets the chains clank a while. “Pay depends on the haul. Or have you been gone too long to remember that?”

  “Alright,” I agree. “Deal.”

  “You helping will make a little cash to spare,” he says softly. “So we’ll see what we can work out.”

  As I hang up, though, the situation keeps eating away me. Working a lobster glut to pay for spring tuition? It’s unsustainable. There is absolutely no way I’ll make it through senior year. It’s piling up on me. Ben aside, this place is burying me, and I can’t see a way out. Three more semesters. Even if I went to the loan office, then what? Then I have to bury myself in debt to stay here, and not be with Ben?

  The answer is actually profoundly simple. It fills my head with a warm, calm obviousness. The solution was there all along. All I had to do was look for it, and I realize just the thought of it makes my shoulders loosen up.

  So with a deep breath, I open up Signal. The thought that has been bothering me since I first started falling for him begins to make utter sense: That I could make this so much easier, that I could make life so much smoother with just one decision and a little paperwork. If I asked my dad about this, he’d tell me I told you so again. If I ask Lucy, she’ll tell me her parents would pay my way. Or she would herself. And I’m not doing that.

  Ben’s life hasn’t been altogether different from mine. He might be the only person around here who will understand. And it’s for us, too, besides.

  hi.

  Well hello.

  i need to see you. i have something to run by you.

  I like the sound of that. I’m in my office on campus.

  oh. shit. never mind.

  Come see me, beautiful.

  You’re my student after all.

  His office is in Connecticut Hall, on Old Campus. I’ve never been to his office, but I know where it is. Right around the corner, second floor. It still doesn’t have his business card or even his name on the door. Being a Master’s Aide, I realize I should probably order him some business cards; surely he will never, ever think of doing it for himself. At first I’d have mistaken that for some nihilist cocky B.S., but now I know he’s just the same as me. He doesn’t feel worthy. Simple as that.

  But he’s worthy. He’s everything. And I have this impulse just to take care of him, to do everything he needs, to love him senseless in every single way.

  Except I can’t do that if I’m a student at Yale.

  With a deep breath, I knock on his door. There’s a fire in his eyes I haven’t seen in ages.

  He pulls me in and locks it behind him. “I think Osgood is onto us.”

  “How? Where?”

  He opens up an email and reads, “Beck. I need to see you about Miss Costa. – Osgood.”

  My heart drops right to the floor. “What does that mean?”r />
  “I have no fucking idea,” Ben says, staring at his phone worriedly before putting it in his pocket.

  “I should go,” I say. I don’t know why, but I’m suddenly smoothing my hair. As if we’d been caught.

  He nods. “Did you have something you need to ask me?”

  I did, but I don’t anymore. “It’ll wait,” I tell him.

  “Come to the house in an hour. I’ll tell you what he says.”

  On my tiptoes I give him a brief kiss on the cheek, my body already aching for more. For everything. For every cell in his body to be openly, proudly, admittedly mine.

  Heading down Prospect, I tighten my scarf and clench my gloves to my body against the coming blizzard. Osgood suspecting, that seals it. Decision made.

  A spray of ice comes up from below and also, somehow, above. Not even the god-awful New England winter can deter me now. I turn left, brace myself, and head into the Admissions Office.

  42

  My mind is full of Naomi as I walk up Science Hill in the wind and falling snow. A blizzard, they’re saying. Nobody can stop talking about it, and the damn thing even has a name, Winter Storm Veronica. Even the wind makes me think of her, on being on that beach together. I’m not even really thinking of Osgood now. Just clinging hard onto what she is and how I love her, as if this is the last moment I’ll have with her alone in my head.

  That first night I saw her, fuck if I knew what I was doing. I wanted her, and I took her, but then by slow slips and starts she unfolded me, piece by piece. Or maybe it wasn’t so slow. Maybe it was all at once and it took this long for my head to catch up to my heart. Never in my life did I think that those panties on that perfect body would become an obsession. Whiskey in the belly button, a million proof. Never in my life did I think I’d write on every inch of that skin, and what didn’t have ink I covered in kisses. Never in my life did I think that the smell of lemons would make me weak. Never in my life did I think I’d become a tea drinker, head-over-ass in love and just wanting to know what she tastes, to think of what she likes and how. To be bound to those things, to hold them so fucking dear, to cherish them. To cherish anything, let alone everything, that is her.

  I never thought I’d fall in love, because I didn’t believe in it. I never had hope for love, because I didn’t believe it. I needed nothing. I needed nobody. But it’s her I need now.

  She’s an addiction. One I never want to quit. Not unless someone takes her away from me.

  Which Osgood very well may.

  His office is stuffy and a little dark. There are those damned box frames on the walls, filled with butterflies and beetles and bugs.

  “Beck,” he says. “Shut the door.”

  I do. At first, I don’t sit. I’m feeling hostile and angry before he’s even started talking. That email put me in a fighting mood. “What do you want?” I ask, forcing myself to take a seat at last.

  “Are you having a relationship with Miss Costa?”

  “Not this again,” I say. I have this urge to put my feet up on the table, on his padded desk, and cross my arms. But I don’t.

  He looks off towards some box of butterflies. “Facilities cleaned the Guest Suite.”

  For a second, I hear nothing but a high-pitched roar in my ears. But then I remember the obvious. We cleaned up. We were super fucking careful.

  “And?”

  From his top drawer, he pulls a pair of red lace panties, holding them squeamishly with two fingers.

  Those panties.

  Her panties.

  The ones I peeled from her skin? Are in his hands.

  “What are those?” I ask. When in doubt, play dumb. Always play fucking dumb.

  He drops them back in his top drawer. “I think you know. Between the sofa cushions.”

  That goddamned button-tufted oxblood sofa. She probably thought I kept them, I realize. I’d said I wanted to do that before. I thought she had them all along.

  What I want to say is Prove it, you bastard, but I don’t. Because I say that word proof, I’m implying guilt. “Strange,” I say.

  “I told you, Beck, that any whiff of scandal would get you kicked out of Durham. All I need to do is start this rumor before the Provost throws you to the wolves. One of the janitors—under the merest of pressure!—said he heard furniture banging against a wall and a man veritably panting Miss Costa’s name.”

  Now I’m just seeing red. Now I’m plain furious and thinking how much I’d like to punch those tortoiseshell glasses right off his fat face. “Bullshit.”

  He smiles. Victorious. “So maybe he didn’t.”

  The motherfucker.

  Standing, I give nothing away, nothing more than I have, or try not to anyway. My hands are fucking shaking, so I stick them in my jacket pockets. “That’s it?”

  “Oh yes, Professor Beck. That’s it.”

  I've told the staff to go home. They think it’s because of the blizzard and Thanksgiving that I’ve let them go. Letty left looking pleased and talking about sausage stuffing. I tried to make nice conversation and said something about mashed potatoes, I don’t even know. All bullshit. I just need to be alone. Completely alone with her in this house, just once before I lose her.

  When she knocks on the door, I yank her inside and pull off her coat, dropping it on the floor. The zipper rattles on the marble. I say nothing. All I can do is want her. We’re already fucked, and I’m the only one who knows it. I need to have her one more time before our universe blows apart. The cosmic shit hitting the fan.

  I’m not worried about me. I’d give up the teaching and the books for her in an instant. It’s her that I’m worried about. Her, her, her.

  Furiously, I force her up against the door and pull down her pants.

  “Not here,” she says between my almost angry, deep kisses.

  “Doesn’t fucking matter,” I growl at her, and dig my hands into that ass as hard as I can, so hard that she turns to look at me worried, panicked. “I just need you, Naomi. Don’t even talk to me right now.”

  She whimpers. She gets it. She damned smart. One word, one look, she knows everything. She spins back around to face me. “He knows?”

  “I need inside you.”

  Her eyes slide closed slowly as she inhales. But then she rebounds, and in two quick tugs she’s got my pants down and then my boxers.

  Almost violently, I spin her back around, bending her at the hips with my hand on her back. What I need is to release into her, to know all this danger has been worth it.

  And yeah, it is. Love and lust and everything in between. Tangling her hair into my hand, I force my way into her, but she’s ready for me.

  I am not going to lose her. But I might have no choice.

  “I need to take you hard,” I say.

  “Do it,” she tells me, turning to face me over her shoulder.

  “Really hard.”

  “I’m ready.”

  But goddamn, how times have changed. The last thing I want to do now, right now, right here, is hurt her. So I do slow down, as much as I can, but not relenting on the depth. Still inside her, I take her hips and guide her to the steps. Without any prompting, she takes hold of the banisters, and I fuck her even harder than before.

  Within minutes, she gives me that low, sexy, ball-busting, “Shiiiiiiiit,” of her orgasm.

  Gritted teeth, I come into her, roaring as I spill my seed into her body.

  Then there’s the beep-beep-beep of the security system, saying the front door is open, followed by a cold blow of air.

  We both spin, me still hanging on to her and buried deep. There he is. Osgood, not even looking at us but looking straight up at the ceiling.

  “Don’t mean to bother you,” Osgood says, keeping his eyes off the outrageously X-rated situation in front of him. “But I’d say this is proof enough,” he says, and then slithers out the door.

  Neither of us moves for a moment. We just stay there, and then she slowly groans and falls to her knees on the steps.

>   I step away and wipe a sheen of sweat off my face. If he didn’t know before, he’s got his proof now. I rub my temples. Idiot, Beck. Such a fucking idiot, losing control. That’s when I see her shoulder bag, on its side by the door, with papers spilling out. The top one?

  TRANSFER APPLICATION.

  The rage. I hear her voice suddenly, from that first day of class, I’d like to have your job one day, Professor Beck. She’d be brilliant at it, she should do it, she needs to do it. I want to see her follow that dream all the way to the end. And the desire to protect her and stop her from making idiotic life decisions because of me narrows my vision instantly. “Don’t tell me,” I say, snatching up the papers. They’re a photocopy of an original. I see her signature and the date at the bottom. “Don’t you dare fucking tell me you gave up this place for me.”

  I can see she’s afraid. She’s never seen me flat-out raging before. Not like this.

  She doesn’t stay in a ball though. She stands right up to me, still with her pants down past her ass. “This is the answer, Ben. You know it is.”

  Everything in my head makes a few solid revolutions. The consequences of this, the madness. It’s not the fucking answer. It’s giving up her future, for me. I can’t stand it. I won’t let it happen. She’s come so far, and now she wants to give it all up for me? No fucking way am I letting that happen. I’m not worth it. She deserves so much more than me. “Thought a few fucks was worth blowing up your life for?”

  Her eyes fill up with tears, and her chin starts trembling. “You don’t mean that.”

  The continuous dream of the last three months finally falls apart, giving way to the eternal epic fucking-over of the real world. What the fuck have I done? What the fuck has happened? All I know it’s a fucking nightmarish, epic, profound disaster.