“Wh…what happened? Who are you?” she said.
“You got knocked out by some drunk girl. I caught you before you fell in that puddle and hit that rock,” I motioned with my hand to the crime scene.
“Where are my friends?”
“They took off toward the parking lot where the drunk girl was. I think they wanted to bitch her out or something.”
She looked suspicious. The emerald flames billowed as they studied me. They went up and down my body searching for any sign of insincerity. I straightened up and stared intently back at her so as not to give the impression I was not telling the truth. As her eyes finished their scan Lily reached up and touched the side of her head where the girl’s fist had connected. She flinched. Our eyes locked again and in those few moments any doubts she had about my honesty melted away.
“Thank you, um . . .” She smiled, waiting for me to fill in the blank.
“My name? Oh, I’m Shaw. Augustine Shaw.” The hero was gone. I was a bumbling romantic again.
“Thank you, Shawn,” she started to say, but I cut her off.
“It’s Shaw, S-H-A-W not S-H-A-W-N.” I still don’t know why I spelled my name but at the time it must’ve been a good idea. My voice stuttered. “My first name’s Augustine. But most people go with just Shaw.”
She giggled and smiled widely. “Well Augustine Shaw, S-H-A-W, thank you for catching me.” She pronounced the first name without the long I, like Augustan.
“And Augusteen,” I interrupted again. “Like Bruce Springsteen.”
Her giggling grew to full-out laughter.
“You don’t do this much, then. The whole taking home injured girls while they’re passed out. Well that’s good, actually. Makes me know you aren’t a serial killer.”
“Yes, definitely,” I said a little too eagerly.
“It probably would’ve been much worse if you didn’t catch me.” She winced again, put her hand up to her head.
I tried regaining my composure, which wasn’t easy in her presence.
“You should get some ice on that, looks like a nice bump,” I said, my body calming slightly.
“Yeah, but we don’t have a fridge in our room,” she said. “It’s probably too late for the dining hall to be open. It’s ok, I’ll tough it out.”
“Where do you live?”
“I live with this girl Meghan over in Aquinas Hall, third floor. How bout you?”
“Oh really? I live in Adams right next door, third floor too. I bet we could look right into each others’ rooms.”
My brain laughed at my choice of conversation. Of course I never saw into her room but that little comment probably didn’t help my chances.
Luckily she giggled again. I was starting to enjoy the fact that she wasn’t taking my incompetence too seriously. Hopefully it wasn’t just because of the knock on the head. She filled the silence with small talk.
“Yeah, Meghan’s not bad. Have you ever noticed how many Meghans are on this campus? Is it some sort of quota, that they need to fill a certain number of ditzy Irish girls named Meghan?”
I didn’t know any Meghans but I took her word for it and laughed all the same.
“So where am I right now?” she said and propped herself up on her elbows, drinking in the sudden solitude we enjoyed.
“On the steps outside McVinney.”
“Oh, well my hero, do you have ice in your room or are you just going to let me sit here on the cold steps with a throbbing pain in my head?”
It was the first time she called me Hero. In my eyes I was the furthest thing from that. It became her nickname for me, like Mary Jane calling Spiderman “Tiger”. Except Spiderman was a hero. I just caught the girl from falling into a puddle. Unfortunately I never lived up to the nickname. I always tried to be her hero. I never actually was. It never stuck except with her, and at times she said it laced with cynicism. But at that moment, she was genuinely grateful.
“So, how bout that ice, Hero?” she repeated when I didn’t answer right away.
“Um, yeah sure we have ice.”
We walked in silence across the quad to Adams Hall. There were no security guards at the male dormitories so we walked right in and up the stairwell to the third floor, room 203. Adams was a strange hall, the first level was actually the basement due to the sloping landscape and the room numbers were in the teens. The second floor had the one hundreds and the third floor the twos. I never understood it, just another endearing curiosity about the college.
The room was a mess and it embarrassed me to be bringing a girl back. My roommate Ben was a slob and his clothes were tossed to the four corners of the room. Lily didn’t seem to mind and made herself at home by immediately sitting down on the edge of what she decided was my bed. Very forward of her I thought, and then dismissed it.
“This is a pretty big room for just the two of you,” she started. “It is nice though, lots of space. Hey you can see my window from here.” She was glancing out the big window over at Aquinas.
“Yeah I love it. I actually work down in the Residence Life Office for work study so they hooked me up big time.”
The initial awkwardness was melting. I was beginning to feel very comfortable around her. The bumbling romantic was still there but he calmed down a bit, releasing the tension in my neck.
She didn’t say anything so I kept going.
“I think someone in Residence Life felt badly for the situation my roommate and I had last year so they put two of us in this quad room. Not a bad deal.”
“Bad freshman roommate?”
I managed a weak smile. The tension in my neck wasn’t totally gone.
“Ha, yea you could say that.”
“Really?” she asked, with surprising interest. “Who was he?”
“Oh nobody, he actually switched rooms halfway through the year with one of our friends. At first, we never told Res Life so when they figured it out at the end of the year, I think they figured they’d hook us up with a big room to keep us from complaining about their incompetence.”
She must have sensed it was a touchy subject so she dropped it. That was part of what made her the perfect conversationalist. She pierced into you with her vivid green eyes when you spoke. Whether she was actually paying attention or not was beside the point; she gave the appearance of listening intently, like she was starving and your every word nourished her. She knew when to hang words in the air, let the silence draw us closer. And when the conversation slowed, she stared out the window towards her building—not longing to get out of my room but rather, just a little reminder that she wouldn’t make this easy for me. I normally wasn’t an emotional guy, but this girl drew something from deep inside me never before tapped.
“So how about that ice?”
While she was gazing across the quad I threw the remaining ice cubes we had in our mini-fridge into a plastic bag and wrapped it in a hand towel.
“Here you go, Lily.”
“Thanks. Wait, how’d you know my name, I don’t think I ever told you?”
I hesitated. She saw me hesitate. I heard her talking to her friends before she was knocked down. I was watching her but I could not tell her that.
“Your friend yelled something about Lily being hit when they were chasing the drunk girl to the parking lot. I just assumed it was you, ya know since you were the one that was hit.”
Nice save on my part.
“Oh, right.” She seemed content with that response so I took a seat on the bed a few feet from her. We sat for the next few minutes in silence while she held the ice bag to her head. I didn’t know what to do. Later in our relationship she confessed to being nervous that night.
As if to cut the growing sexual tension, she let the dripping towel fall to the floor and put the bag of ice on it.
“I should probably be going, my friends must be worried.” She said this but she did not get up off the bed. I knew her friends weren’t worried and I knew Lily knew they weren’t.
She looked a
t me and nudged closer, putting her hand on my thigh.
“I really am glad you caught me, Shaw,” she said in a low voice. Her face drew closer to mine so that she could whisper right into my ear. “I knew your name was Shaw, by the way. I heard some kid say hi to you when you were staring at me earlier.”
I froze and before I knew what was happening she kissed my ear lobe, then my neck. Finally her hand slipped behind my head, slid into my hair and she pulled me into a deep, full-body kiss. A warm shiver shot up my spine from the depths of my stomach. When she pulled away my eyes were still closed but I could feel the emerald flames burning into me.
“I do have to go now, though.”
I opened my eyes and the fool spoke first. “Do you want to stay?” stumbled over my tongue. I regretted it the second I said it. But again she giggled. I was confused as to whether she pitied me or thought it was cute. But still, she giggled.
“Not this time, hero.”
I didn’t want her to go but I also had no idea what to say to make her stay. She stood up and pulled the silver headband from her hair and twisted it up in the back holding it there with a clip from her purse. I followed her to the door, gears churning for something witty and urbane to say. But she did it for me.
“Like I said, not this time hero, but hopefully this won’t be the only time you’ll come to my rescue.”
With that she pushed another deep kiss down onto my waiting lips and then strolled out the door. I ran to the window to see her leave Adams and make the quick walk over to Aquinas. The soft autumn breeze blew her sundress and it pressed tightly to her curves. As she opened the front door to her dorm hall she looked up at my window and blew me a kiss. I could tell she was giggling.
Chapter 5
Lily and I never really dated formally. There was never any official arrangement to our relationship; it rose and fell with the emotions of two very busy but very passionate students. There was love, though. I convinced myself of that.
After our initial run-in sophomore year we became close friends. I wasn’t initially aware but Lindsey and Emily knew Lily, so she completed our circle of friends.
There was some sexual tension that spring. Lily and I flirted mercilessly, but so did Shoddy and Lily and Shoddy and Lindsey and Shoddy and Emily. We all chalked it up to hormones and the archetypal nature of the season.
I was content with the situation, mainly because I enjoyed being around Lily more than I enjoyed being around anyone at any point in my life up to then.
I decided to remain on campus that summer and work with the maintenance department doing landscaping. Lily was an Orientation Leader and would be on campus for the entire months of June and July giving tours and keeping an eye on incoming freshmen.
The college let student summer workers live in campus apartments, and the jobs paid a small salary. During that summer I cut grass in ninety-degree heat, then I’d go back to my apartment, shower and meet Lily for dinner almost every night. The flirting escalated but for a while I received nothing more than a few bats of her big green eyes and a peck on the cheek every now and again.
One afternoon in July she caught me in between her meetings and asked for the combination to my apartment lock. She said she needed to borrow something.
It wasn’t until I got home that evening, sweating and smelling like fresh cut grass, that our relationship truly changed.
As soon as I walked in she stepped out from the kitchen in nothing but one of my long-sleeve collared shirts. She was wearing her fierce red hair pinned up, for the first time I could remember. The shirt hung loosely and only the bottom few buttons were fastened creating a milky V of her skin. The point of the V ended just below her waistline and the shirt’s teasing purpose was served.
She bent one of her knees and cocked her body, the shirt folding back on the right side, exposing the majority of one of her perky breasts. The edge of the pink nipple was just visible. Her thin finger was slipped through the eyehole of a half-empty jug of cheap red wine and it hung, swaying down by her thigh. She had two glasses in her other hand and a seductive smile on her face. Her green eyes were hungry. They held the emotion, the desire and the passion.
I dropped the water bottle I was holding and she burst out laughing, apparently at the sudden increase in gravitational pull on my entire body, especially the lower jaw.
She dropped the glasses and jug of wine on the carpet when she leapt at me. The red wine leaked from the jug, staining the carpet and trickling onto the linoleum kitchen tile. I had to react quickly to catch her and was momentarily blinded by the flurry of red hair over my face.
The door slammed automatically, heavily, but we fell gently together onto the kitchen floor. I cradled her head and when she kissed me, she tasted exactly the same as she had the first time she kissed me, in my dorm room so many months before. I never forgot that taste, like the taste of wine after brushing your teeth—minty and fruity all the same.
We made love for the first time. Together, on the kitchen floor we slowly unscrewed the release valve of sexual tension that had been building for months.
She was unhurried and full of passion. And she made sure I was thorough. We rolled over and she was on top of me, her body slick with perspiration and purple streaks of wine. Before pulling my grass-stained t-shirt off she ripped at the few fastened buttons on the shirt she sort of wore, not wasting time to undo them properly. The plastic circles clattered to the linoleum and the motion of Lily’s writhing body shook the shirt from her shoulders. It fell behind her back and eventually, but not immediately, she took her arms from my chest to remove it completely.
Her usual energy and vibrancy was there, but channeled into the methodical force pressing her body against mine. Her eyes remained open save the final moments of climax. As her back arched, her hair fell over her face. I pulled my hand from the small of her back and gently draped the crimson bangs behind her ear, brushing her cheek in the process. She smiled and squeaked and opened her eyes. A droplet of wine slid from her moistened hair, down to her cheek. I pulled her face back in toward me and kissed away the droplet.
When we finished we were both soaked through from sweat and the puddle of wine we laid in. The apartment smelled like sex and grapes for the rest of the night. We didn’t move from the spot, spending much of that evening staring at each other in a clichéd post-sex haze. Every few minutes I’d run my finger up her inner thigh, over her navel and between her breasts. And each time I did it she kissed my hand when it got to her mouth. We fell asleep there on the floor, naked and at ease in the classic spooning position. When she shivered I reached across my body and pulled a throw blanket from a chair. She instinctively pressed into me tighter. My arm draped over her body, I found her hand and interlocked it with my own. She squeezed my fingers.
For the rest of that summer Lily and I would eat together, sleep together and escape together. We left our respective jobs early one Friday and spent the weekend in Newport. Another morning, I nudged her awake while it was still dark and drove her to Horseneck Beach to see the sun rise. We had sex on the sand in a sleeping bag while dawn’s rosy fingers spread across the sky.
Even after Orientation ended and she moved back to Connecticut for the month of August, she would visit me at least once a week. She had concocted some fairytale for her parents about staying with a girlfriend in order to get a jump on thesis research.
I barely saw Shoddy or the other girls that summer. I saw Lily. I saw her eyes, her burning hair and her perfect body and she saw me, whatever it was she saw in me.
I studied her body. I knew the small dimple on her left buttock and the tiny scar on her back where she picked at chicken pox as a child. All over her body had very faint freckle patches one could only notice up very close. She was a masterpiece.
“Shaw, before this is over, I’m going to lighten you up. I’m going to make you come alive,” she said to me one night. She stole the line from a song we discovered over the internal radio at a clothing store.
>
It was one night toward the end of that summer. We were at the Providence Place mall, a four-story, sprawling capitalism Mecca built to revitalize downtown and satiate political backroom dealings.
My dealings that night were meant to be very straightforward and honest. I wanted Lily and I to have a proper date, not just take-out dinner and dorm room sex.
I took Lily to a movie, some Will Ferrell comedy. Before the show we strolled hand-in-hand through some of the stores, happening upon a trendy clothing outlet frequented by the college crowd. As she perused the racks I noticed the song blaring on the store’s internal radio. I enjoyed the acoustic tune. The music was good, haunting and didn’t seem to fit with the heavy bass or techno twang of the other songs played before it.
I must have been staring because Lily’s hand wiped away the musical haze.
“Hey, Shaw, you there?” she said, waving.
I blinked and stared into her green eyes.
“Oh yeah, sorry. I was just listening to the song.”
“This song? I actually noticed it too. It’s good, isn’t it? Not like the crap they had playing before it. I hate coming in here when they’re blasting that dance music. I feel like they’re going to give me some ecstasy with my jeans.”
She held up a pair of jeans she intended on buying and I laughed. We headed for the checkout counter where they had set up an impulse purchase rack selling CDs of the music played in the store.
“Hey, who sings this song?” Lily asked, pointing at the ceiling.
“Um, I don’t know,” said the girl behind the counter. “The CD is on track three, though.”
Lily grabbed a disc and tossed it on her folded jeans.
“The Refreshments. Never heard of ‘em. You, Shaw?”
“Nope. But I like them.”
“I’ll take this too, then.”
In the remaining time before the movie we went to the music store and bought out the two Refreshments albums they had along with the lead singer’s latest project with his new band, as suggested to us by the music store clerk who said he was a huge fan. Perhaps we were a little hasty, but with Lily I enjoyed acting on impulse.
Stone Angels Page 4