by Rose, L. A.
“I don’t know why you think I’d be making out with James Reid when I could be doing math, Iris, jeez,” I say, stunning her with my logic, but James has already heard.
“It’s fine. I know a place. Meet me at the back entrance to the Anthropology department in half an hour.”
Excellent. Just enough time to shed my smelly midterm chrysalis and shower my way back to being Fiona. I hang up, leap out of bed and start hunting for my makeup case.
“Repeat after me—you do not need to wear lip gloss to study for a math exam,” Iris groans.
“Oh contraire. I’m going to seduce math into obeying me. It’s a brilliant scheme that cannot fail.”
Twenty-nine minutes later, I am dolled up and ready to rumble, with my math textbook under my arm and my sex appeal on high like every air conditioner in Southern California. I mean, my study game on high. Obviously.
One minute later, James shows up, parking in the faculty lot beside the building and then crossing the street to me.
“You’re not supposed to park there,” I observe as he opens the door to the building for me.
“I park where I want,” he says. “Come on.”
He brings me to the top floor and shows me a door I’d never noticed before. It leads onto the roof, a large flat expanse of concrete under a large flat expanse of sky, with nobody to see James Reid tutoring me math except the clouds. He sits down, and it’s then that I notice his huge, overstuffed backpack.
“Don’t tell me that thing is full of math.” I point. “Because I will jump off this roof.”
“What did I tell you about jumping off of things?” And from the backpack he pulls out something much better than math—a picnic blanket. Two wrapped sandwiches. A thermos of tea. Soft cheese, a baguette, raspberries.”
“I thought we could have a picnic while we worked,” he says with a note of uncertainty.
“I think I love you.”
He looks up at this, but it might be a happiness-induced hallucination, because I’m spreading cheese on a slice of bread and it’s the fanciest kind of cheese.
“Why don’t they have a requirement for a cheese class, huh? Cheese is more important than math,” I say with my mouth full.
“Cheese is definitely not more important than math.”
“Party pooper.”
We eat together, and once I’m in an awesome mood, we destroy it by doing math. Except not really, because math with James is much better than math by itself. Math with James means leaning into him, into the soft deep tone of his voice as he explains something with the sun turning his hair to gold. Math with James means studying him, memorizing each vein and shadow of his arm as he points to one number and then another. Math with James means…
“Fiona? Are you paying attention?”
“Yes,” I say immediately. “All the attention.”
Math with James means actually learning some math, because it turns out he’s a pretty good teacher.
We work until the sun moves from partway across the sky to more than halfway, until my four-page math problem is six pages and done. After that, we just lie flat on our backs on the picnic blanket, choosing shapes for clouds.
“That one is…” I consider. “That one is a pig with a horse’s tail playing an upright base while watching the Kim Kardashian show on his iPhone. No, it’s a Samsung.”
“That is oddly specific.”
“Well, what do you see?”
“A…” He squints. “A blob.”
“You’re kidding. Use your imagination.” I point at the cloud next to my pig. “What about that one?”
“I see an annoying girl who spends her time doing silly things like looking at clouds when she should be studying.”
When I look at him, he’s looking at me. But he’s smiling.
“You’re no fun.” I pout.
“And you’re lots of fun.” He kisses my cheek. “That’s why we should stick together. It evens out to about an average amount of fun.”
I try not to show how ecstatic this comment makes me. “I don’t know. I think my amount of fun is more powerful than your lack of fun. I’d say it evens out to more than average.”
“This is why you’re bad at math.”
“This is why you’re bad at fun.”
“Yeah?” He sits up, his abs tensing under his shirt with the effort. “Okay. Let’s do something fun.”
I consider this. “Fun is best when it’s also useful. How about a rain dance?”
“A what?”
“California’s in a huge drought right now, yeah? Let’s do a rain dance. It’s already cloudy. It’s probably the sky’s way of asking us for the rain dance it needs.”
“I am not doing a rain dance.”
“Yes you are.” I hop up, grab his hands and drag him upright. “Come on.”
I play Katy Perry as high as it will go on my phone and proceed to dance. Not seductively, but wildly. I flail my arms and kick out my legs and dare the sky to drench me.
“Come on, you damn clouds!” I yell at the sky. “Let her rip!”
“You look like a moron.” James is standing with his arms folded, but a hint of a smile plays at the corners of his mouth.
“There’s no one to see me!”
“Except me.”
“Except you,” I agree. “But I trust you enough to let you see me acting like an idiot.”
His eyebrow quirks. “You do?”
“I do. That’s what trust is all about. Letting the other person see you with your guard down.” I dance closer, picking up his hands and swinging his arms back and forth. “It’s really exhausting to have your guard up all the time, don’t you think?”
“Why do I get the feeling you’re trying to make a point?”
I drop his hands. “Sorry. Still bad at subtlety. What I’m trying to say is that you don’t have to keep your guard up around me. You can do stupid things or say stupid things. I won’t tell anyone, or report it to the press.”
“And what if I don’t remember how to let my guard down?” he asks quietly. “What if I’ve had it up for so long that it’s stuck?”
“Then I guess I’ll just have to pull at it until it comes loose.” I tug at his hands again, and finally he steps forward, slipping one arm around my back and keeping one hand in mine.
“I don’t know how to do a rain dance,” he says. “But I do know how to waltz.”
I let the wildness in my limbs cool as he takes the lead, stepping slowly back and forth across the roof. The Katy Perry ends and we’re dancing in silence. The air is cool and sweet. I rest my head on his chest.
“I’ve never done this before.”
“Just follow me. Step, step, forward. Step, step, back…”
It’s so different from the charged starving dance we had when we first met, so different from any way I’ve danced before. It’s not sexual. Just tender and kind. I don’t want to move any other way than this ever again. I’ll have to waltz to all my classes. Waltz to the bathroom…
“Fiona?”
“Yeah?” I say into his shirt.
“You make me want to let my guard down,” he whispers.
A drop of wetness hits me. At first I’m afraid a bird pooped on me a little bit, but then another drop hits my arm, and then my foot. I look up. The clouds have darkened and gathered.
“It’s raining!” I scream, leaping up and latching on to him with my legs and arms. “We did it!”
As if to make its enthusiasm match mine, the sky opens in the sudden way that rain comes in warm places, like a bucket overturned. In three seconds, it’s pouring. The water pounds down and bounces off the concrete in a million crazed zigzags, creating a white haze. It soaks my clothes and glues my hair to my back. When I laugh, it gets in my mouse.
“Shit, come on!” I laugh, racing for the door. James gets there before me, his longer legs taking him faster. He tries the handle and freezes.
“It’s locked,” he says.
“Oh, God. We�
�re locked onto the roof in a rainstorm?”
He jiggles the handle once more, then sighs and lets go. “Might as well make the most of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“May I have this dance?” He extends a hand to me. Rain-drenched, his eyes matching the sky, hair dark with water, chest rising and falling a little faster from the mad dash across the roof—he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I let him pull me back into a waltz. The rain seeps between us at first, but gradually we get closer until our bodies are sealed together. The rain makes a little pond in the cove between our chests.
“It’s interesting, doing this in silence,” he says. “Usually you do it in time to the music.
“It’s not silence. Listen.”
We dance to the sweeping rush of the rain, to our own breathing, to our own heartbeats.
We dance to the clouds overhead, to the cracked ground below swelling again with life.
We dance to each other’s bodies, to the way we fit together.
Eventually he stills, just holding me in his arms. I look up and his eyes are closed.
“James?”
“Shhh,” he says. “I’m trying to memorize this forever.”
We stay like that for a long time, part of the rain, under a thunderbolt splits the sky and a roll of thunder booms out almost immediately.
I flinch into him. “What is it they tell you in first grade? Not to stand on rooftops during thunderstorms?”
“Come on,” he tells me.
“But the door’s locked…”
But this time, when he tries the handle, the door’s not locked.
“Sorry,” he says, pulling me into the dark hallway where the noise outside vanishes and our inside dripping is suddenly deafening. He smiles. “I couldn’t stand to go inside just yet.”
As I look at him, I don’t just see the smile.
I see his walls crumbling, bit by bit.
And my heart pulses harder than the rain outside.
~16~
“So it was like…a weird pulsing feeling, sort of hot. It was the same sort of feeling as not being able to breathe, but I was breathing just fine. I felt it right here…” I touch the center of my chest, the wax paper crinkling underneath me as the nurse nods.
“Would you describe it as painful?”
“Kind of? It hurt, but it wasn’t like any hurt I’ve felt before. It was…it almost felt good.”
“And does this feeling happen at any time in particular? How many times?”
I concentrate. The haunted house a few days ago was when I really noticed it, but if I think about it, I’ve had it a couple times since then. Like when James called me in the middle of the night to tell me the moon was beautiful and that I should go outside to look at it. And when I saw him walking into the Philosophy classroom the other day, this distracted look on his face and eyes a little heavy-lidded from sleep, but then he looked at me and it was like he was waking up to the early morning sun—
“No. I mean, yes. Well, it usually happens when this friend of mine is around. But I’m sure that’s a coincidence.”
The nurse lays down her clipboard. Her face is gentle. “Is this friend a boy?”
I fidget. “Maybe.”
“I remember,” she says cautiously, “when I was young, the first time I felt something similar, I was a little scared too. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever experienced before. Because love is—”
I jump up. “Thanks a lot, Doc, but whaddaya know, I’m suddenly feeling all better! You are so gosh darn talented. Med school really paid off, huh? I’ll be on my way now.”
Before she can try to play the wise old mother figure again, I grab my bag and flee. Damn doctors. A few years at Harvard and a piece of paper and they think they know everything.
But something tells me it wasn’t a medical problem we were talking about.
Which is a completely unwanted thought, so I hoist my bag higher on my shoulders, set my jaw, and leave that thought behind. It’s early but not too early, so that most students are asleep and the ones who aren’t are in their morning classes. I don’t have to worry about anyone staring at me.
James has to worry about getting stared at wherever he goes. I only have to worry about it on campus. It drives me crazy, and I love attention. I can’t imagine how it must affect a private, complicated person like him. No wonder he wears that icy demeanor like armor.
Nothing makes you feel alone like having everyone looking at you.
That feeling slices my heart again. I stop dead under a palm tree, waiting for it to swell and fade like it always does. Except instead it settles deep inside me, making a nest for itself and refusing to leave, sending James’s name into my heart in soft little puffs of air.
I slap myself. Stop it, Fiona.
But I don’t know if I can stop.
And that’s terrifying.
Iris will know what to do. She’ll probably have some voodoo curse that’ll force my heart to behave again. I swipe my card key to get into the building and take the stairs instead of the elevator, hoping my pumping blood will wash the feeling right out of me.
When I get to the apartment, she’s laid out on her bed, groaning into her pillow.
“Iris?” I flatten myself beside her, injecting some pep into my voice. If she’s having a crisis, there’s no time for mine. “You okay? Did you fail your exams? Because I actually got a B- on my Cryptology exam, thanks to James—”
“No, you idiot, get off my bed. It’s this.” She thrusts her phone at me. I inspect the screen.
“That’s a nasty crack. Did you sit on it? You do have a rather pointy butt—”
“No, the crack is from our first week of college, when you got so excited about that naked guy calendar you found at Wal-Mart that you started jumping around and knocked it off the table. I’m talking about the email.”
I squint. Iris has her backlight so low that it takes me a minute.
“Beach party tonight at Mission Beach. Swimsuit competition! Wear your cutest bikini for a chance to win a date with James Reid,” I read. “What the hell? I didn’t get this email.”
“Check the sender.”
It’s from Sigrid. I groan and chuck her phone on her bed. Iris dives to save it. “Watch it! You already cracked my screen, you maniac!”
“I don’t care about your screen. Sigrid’s trying to exclude me from Phi Delta Chi parties. Also, this is nowhere near enough time to find a suitably hideous bikini. She’s sabotaging me. Also, what are you groaning about?”
“I hate beach parties.” She sits up and shoves me off her bed. I bounce onto the floor. “But you just made me feel all better. Because I have the perfect bathing suit for you. Saw it in the vintage shop down the road the other day. Fingers crossed it’s still there.”
Iris takes me to a tiny shop called Sadie’s Eccentricities, which is a warning sign right there. The inside smells like grandmothers and hamster cages. It’s a nightmare of frilly collars, long dresses, bone buttons, and lace the color of pee. Naturally, Iris looks like the world’s creepiest kid on the world’s crappiest Christmas morning.
As it turns out, the bathing suit is still there.
“I am not wearing that,” I say, staring at the monstrosity on the hanger.
“You want to lose the bathing suit contest? You’re wearing it.”
I shake my head. “This is worse than the chicken costume. That is Satan’s bathing suit.”
“We’ll take it,” Iris tells the ten-million-year-old woman behind the counter.
I hate my roommate.
“As long as James doesn’t come,” I tell her on the way to Mission Beach that night, after she’s picked out a sexy black lacy bikini for herself that looks more like lingerie than something meant to be worn in the ocean. “I can do this as long as James doesn’t come.”
“You didn’t care about him seeing you in the chicken costume.”
“Well, now I—” I stop.
“Well now you what?” She pulls up to a red light and uses the opportunity to give me the kind of glare used by the people who interrogate terrorists.
“Now that I have gotten to know and respect him more as a person, I don’t think he should be subjected to the sight of that bathing suit,” I say primly.
Iris sighs. “You’re just worried he won’t want to bang you again.”
“I am not—”
“Which would be perfect, because you shouldn’t be banging him in the first place.” She shoots me another evil eye.
“We don’t have to worry about that if he sees me in this bathing suit. This is the antithesis to desirability. The opposite of sexiness. The Kryptonite to Superbangableman. I cannot let him see me in this bathing suit, because if he does, his cock will shrivel up and fall off.”
“I thought your whole thing was ‘I’m sexy no matter what I wear.’” Iris imitates a voice that does not at all sound like mine, a high falsetto.
I shudder. “That was before I laid eyes on this bathing suit.”
When we reach the parking lot, she picks the darkest, furthest corner spot, leaps out, and holds my door closed as I attempt to follow her. “You change before you come out. I’ll keep watch.”
“Iris,” I moan, mushing my face into the side of the window. “Have mercy.”
“Mercy is for people who have not slept with James Reid.”
I grumble my way into the bathing suit. It’s sort of like trying to fit myself inside an evil, deformed squid. When I’m done, I wrap myself in the towel and knock twice on the window to be let out.
“Put the towel down,” Iris demands. “I need to see what it looks like.”
“You are sadistic, you know that?” I let the towel drop.
She laughs so hard that she collapses onto the parking lot and rolls around on the pavement, howling. I stand there and sigh increasingly large, dramatic sighs until she gets control of herself and stands up.
“I’m sorry,” she gasps. “You look like a manatee had sex with a candy cane and sent its baby to clown school.”
“That is uncalled for.”
“It’s pretty called for. Here.” She snaps a picture with her phone, flash on, and hands it to me. “Proof.”