by Daryl Banner
“Um, ouch? And no I haven’t.”
“Other than this Bailey kid, I never see anyone more than once, like you get bored with them the moment they show any interest. Brant’s said as much, too,” I point out, taking a curve too quickly and causing my tires to squeal. “It’s exhausting, really, watching you flip through all these guys. And now you’re into some guy at the Music school? Really? The Music school?”
“You forget tonight’s my opening night? Are you just trying to ruin my good mood? You’re the one being a dick right now.”
“Yeah, I’m the dick. Alright.” I slam my brakes too hard once again at another red light. I swipe my phone out of my lap and start texting Riley back, telling her I’ll call her back in ten.
Maybe something about Eric pursuing a guy at the Music school triggered me. Maybe I don’t want Eric poking his way through Sam’s department, even if she’d never be an option in his dick-fishing eyes. I feel strangely protective. Or possessive. Or obsessive. All those feelings are siblings to each other, really.
“I think what you need is some dick,” mumbles Eric, arms folded.
“I got one between my legs,” I spit back. “You know, the one you drained by sucking millions of my unborn children down your throat and then deciding I wasn’t worth your time.”
I see Eric gape at me from the corner of my eye. I keep my gaze on my phone, waiting for Riley’s reply as I fume inwardly. Why am I so angry? What the hell crawled up my ass?
“Is that what this is about?” he asks quietly. “Valentine’s Day?”
“I’d never gone that far with a guy before. You treated me like just another fuck you have and toss aside,” I blurt, unable to keep it in for some reason. I guess I’ve secretly harbored this resentment toward him within me, protected by a dam that his comments, or this night, has somehow destroyed. All of it is flooding out. “You just moved right on without another word, almost like what happened on that couch didn’t happen at all. Then you had the nerve to take up Brant on his stupid offer for you to move in. And for what? So I could witness firsthand while you fuck everything with a dick in front of me? In my own home? It’s sick. I’m fucking sick of it.”
Eric stares at the side of my face for quite some time. Then, after shifting in his seat to better face me, he speaks in a low, even voice. “I want to say a few things, Dmitri.”
Ugh. He’s saying my name. His tone sounds so condescending, like a counselor’s verbal pat on the head when you get too emotional and need to be told so by an adult who knows better.
“I don’t care about any few things you want to tell me.”
Eric huffs. “Really, Dmitri?”
Again, with the name. “Why don’t you just call up one of your butt sluts and celebrate your play’s opening in your own way? Why are you even hanging out with me at all?” I blurt out, feeling my hands start to shake. “You can even be as loud as you want. Brant and I are quite used to the noise we hear through the wall, and we both know you love an audience so fucking much.”
“Alright. Screw this.” Eric pops open his door and steps out.
“Where the hell you going??” I call out after him, but the door slams in my face. I watch him pull out his phone from the pocket of his tight jeans with so much conviction, he nearly sends it flying out of his hands. Then he brings it to his ear and strolls down the sidewalk.
I’m fuming. I’m so hot about this that I don’t even feel bad about him having to call an Uber or a fuck buddy or whoever he’s got pressed to his ear right now. I literally wouldn’t even care if he stayed the night elsewhere for the rest of the week.
Isn’t it intriguing what anger does to the mind? I’m imagining all the worst things happening to Eric—he gets robbed, he gets jumped, he ends up on the news in the morning—and I feel nothing at all.
Just a ringing in my ears, red in my eyes, and knuckles on the wheel.
My phone buzzes. I glance down at its brightening face.
RILEY
So do u want to meet up to talk workshop?
English building in an hour?
More than ever.
A car horn brings my eyes back to the road, the light having turned green. Eric’s gone from sight, but he’s more than used to the area and we’re less than five minutes from campus, so I let him have his space as I take off. Besides, I have some workshopping to do.
I switch off the engine in the apartment complex parking lot, Nirvana blasting at top volume one minute, then dead silence the next. Without bothering to freshen up, I take off across the street toward campus. The buildings seem to crowd me like threatening shadows as I cross the courtyard of the School of Music.
I wonder if Sam’s in there somewhere, giving one of the pianos a good time. I smile at the thought, then whip out my phone and shoot her a quick text telling her I’m passing the Music building.
The text lightens my heart.
When I reach the English building, Riley is outside the front door leaning on a stone column. She straightens her posture as I approach. She’s wearing another peasant top, but this one is baby blue with lace ties on either side. It only comes halfway down her stomach, giving me a hint of her cute build and her belly button. Her hips are hugged with a tight pair of doesn’t-keep-many-secrets blue jeans and a pair of boots. Her hair is a fixed bundle of blonde curls that seem to bounce even when she’s just standing there. Riley is a total cowgirl wet dream.
“Hey there, D,” she sings with her Texan twang. “Good news and bad news. Good news is, the English building is totally locked up at this hour. Imagine that.”
“That sounds more like the bad news,” I say with half a smile.
“Bad news is, we gotta trek our butts to the Architecture building if we want any privacy to go over our work. It’s the only building I know of that’s open at this hour.”
“That sounds like the good news.”
“I guess I just get all mixed up on what’s good and what’s … bad.” She chuckles, then hugs her binder to her chest and sweeps her hand in front of her. “Shall we?”
I smile, finding her charm to be just the thing I need right now. We make small talk along the way to the Architecture building, which ironically is about the ugliest building on campus: a giant cube of beige bricks with circular windows and big, blunt stones lining the walkways that trace the building, branching out toward the Theatre and Art schools to one side and the Psychology and Math buildings on the other. It sits like an ugly white spider in a field of green, lit up by the starkest streetlamps on the whole campus.
But its doors open welcomingly when we approach, and I’m reminded once again not to judge a book by its atrocious cover. Inside, the building is open, tiled, and several stories high, its insides showing balconies and landings with desks that have a sprinkle of Architecture students, even at this late hour, staying up to finish projects, measure, draw, and construct miniature to-scale models.
It’s in the corner of the third floor that we find an entire section of tables that are completely unoccupied. Up here, it feels like we have the whole bright building to ourselves. A circular window—much, much bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside—oversees the grassy, stony courtyard we just crossed to get here, but all I see in the window is my own reflection due to it being so dark outside and bright in here.
“So I have this little thing here,” Riley starts, flipping open her binder and pulling out a notebook that was bound inside, “and I’d like you to tell me why it sucks.”
I chuckle. “My opinion would be totally subjective.”
Her eyes turn playful. “Give me your worst.”
“Be careful what you ask for,” I tease her right back, then pull the notebook in front of me and start to read.
I’m so absorbed in actually giving her work due attention that I don’t notice how close she’s sitting by me. We’re talking shoulder-to-shoulder, thighs and knees grazing, and feet so close I can feel the vibrations from her foot as it hops in place nervous
ly under the table.
I finish reading quickly. It’s only a page and a half. “I … I like it. I think …”
“You hate it,” she murmurs with a crooked smile.
I meet her gaze. It’s a lot closer than I was expecting and I’m taken aback. “N-No. I really don’t. I think, um …” How do I put this into words? Does she really want me to give her my worst? “I think it’s a bit—”
“It’s just awful. I should give this up and pursue law school.”
I laugh, which makes me realize it’s the first time I’ve laughed all night. I was so tense and uptight around Eric. I shouldn’t have said what I said in the car. It was too harsh. It wasn’t fair. I ruined his opening night.
“I think it’s sweet,” I tell her evenly. “But maybe it’s … too sweet.”
“Too sweet?”
“The characters are all too … perfect. They all do the right thing and have good hearts and are well-meaning. But human beings—us, you and me—we’re flawed. We can be selfish sometimes. We make horrible mistakes. We’re neurotic and stupid and blind.”
Her face rightens and she cocks her head. “Goodness. Who’s hurt you?”
I blink. “Uh, no one. I’m just saying—”
“You think so little of people?” she asks as she props her head up on the table with a palm, her fingers tickling the side of her cheek suggestively. A fingertip worms toward her lips, which she gently bites.
She wants to fuck me. Like, right now. On this very table. Her body language is and has been so blaringly obvious since that fateful, dim Wednesday night we met.
“I don’t think I’m being jaded. Actually, well … just look at it from a storytelling perspective,” I suggest. “Damaged people are just more interesting to read about. We as readers relate to flaws, and we react to a hero or heroine making mistakes and learning from them. It’s sort of thrilling, actually, to see someone make a mistake and then wonder what they’ll do to make up for it. Or learn from it. Or not learn from it. It’s like wish fulfillment.”
“I beg to differ,” she says back. “The world’s full of heaviness and regret, so why not write stories where things go right, and people are kind to one another, and love triumphs?”
Despite how completely unideal that sounds for writing a decently engaging story, I’m smiling. There’s something totally refreshing about her idealized vision. In this moment, secreted away on the third floor of this ugly building, I feel the warmth and promise of Riley’s utopia.
I might like to live in it for a change of pace.
“Then in that case, I think you’ve told this story just right,” I tell Riley, nudging the notebook back toward her. “It doesn’t suck.”
“So how long do I have to wait?”
I lift an eyebrow at her, not following. “For?”
“For you to ask me out to dinner,” she finishes, shifting her legs under the table and folding her arms protectively to herself.
She’s nervous. I can see it in her eyes. Her nervousness somehow gives me power, like I have nothing to be nervous about at all. I kinda enjoy the attention, to be honest, especially after a semester and a half of so much rejection and neglect.
I shrug. “Well, then. You wanna go out with—?”
“No, no, no. You have to do it for real. Not because I’m asking you to. Don’t you know the rules, silly?” She chuckles and pulls away from me. The absence of her warmth makes my side instantly chilly. “You have to catch me unawares. Maybe at the end of one of our Wednesday night workshops. Or if you run into me on campus. Or right before dinnertime tomorrow, you just send me a surprise text.”
“Oh. Okay. I can do that. Maybe—”
“No, no, don’t tell me,” she says, putting a hand on my shoulder. “I want you to give me the whole experience. I want to be a girl you woo, take out to dinner, and then bare your soul.” She giggles. “I think I’m gonna like you, Dmitri. Oh, sorry. Too soon. I’ll hold back. Do you like that? The hard-to-get thing?”
Not really. “Sure,” I say, still smiling from before. Something about her is tickling me just right this particular night, even if she’s a bit high energy for me at the moment. And maybe a bit neurotic. And a pinch perfectionist. And a little goody-sweetie.
But maybe that’s exactly what I need in my life. “So what’re we gonna do tonight, then?” I ask her.
“Oh, I’ll tell you. I’m going to pick up my things and go home, since it’s late and I have studying for some other classes to do. And you are going right back to your home as well because you’re a perfect gentleman, aren’t you?”
“A perfect gentleman,” I echo as she gathers up her story and her binder, then rises from the table. I suspect her perfect type is a boy who attends every Sunday church service with her and addresses her parents as “sir” and “ma’am” and rescues abused animals on the weekends.
What the hell does she see in dark, tortured me?
“Goodnight, Dmitri,” she nearly sings before strutting away. Her shoes tap along the tile as she descends the stairs, her blonde curls bouncing.
I watch her go, biting my lip as I smile and ponder what special thing I’ll do to ask her out. She basically gave me three or four options, and I probably ought to choose one, provided she did so to express exactly how she pictures the fateful, exciting moment to occur.
Or maybe I’ll think up some surprising way of my own. I drum my fingers along my chin and squint through the circular window at the nothing night sky, thinking, thinking, thinking.
And then my phone buzzes. I wonder if it’s Riley with some quirky afterthought, but then am reminded that I texted a certain someone else when I passed by the Music building:
SAM
if you passed the music building
then that means you also passed a room
with a certain girl you might know
having to endure the torture of a
bassoon trying unsuccessfully
to harmonize with a piano.
please pray for me tonight.
My smile broadens. Oh, Sam …
Chapter 18
Sam
He kisses me the way he kisses his bassoon.
Openmouthed. Wet. Breathy.
And loud.
Ugh. So loud.
I once kept my eyes open the entire time Tomas made out with me, wondering if he’d open his own eyes and notice. He gets into this weird zone when we kiss, like he’s thinking of something else. Or someone.
He might be. I have to prepare for that possibility.
What if he’s gay? My Uncle Ty told me he used to do that when he kissed his ex-wife, who is now sort of his best friend. Annie is her name, and when she discovered he was gay, they divorced peacefully (after a not-so-peaceful meltdown and subsequent reconciling) and then they playfully brainstormed who Ty was thinking about when they had sex and made a daughter: Rebecca, my cousin who I never see except for drunken Christmas gatherings.
Sometimes when Tomas and I make out, I spend the whole time brainstorming who he thinks he’s kissing. I run through sexy female celebrities. Then male ones.
Then inanimate objects. He’s making out with a box of Milk Duds. He’s making out with a fire hydrant. He’s making out with a blow-up anime doll.
Does that last one count? Or is it kind of a person?
“What’re you thinking about?” he asks me one night in my dorm after we make out for thirty minutes straight and my jaw is so sore from keeping up with him that it’s literally an effort to respond.
“Dissonant counterpoint,” I answer.
He frowns. “For class?”
“Do you want to get some dinner at the cafeteria?” I ask him.
His face pushes through three conflicting emotions before finally settling on an answer: “Sure. I haven’t eaten since my Chem midterm.”
And as usual, he pays for my food. I wonder if this means I have a sugar daddy now. Is that how it works? I really don’t know these things. He’s paid for every m
eal we share, which is nearly all of them lately. I find, for the first time in my life, that I actually have spare money. It’s like I won a tiny lottery with Tomas. I could totally go and splurge on a fancy new sheet music book, or a cute shiny bracelet, or a Twix bar.
Dessie gave me her laptop before she left last semester. It was sort of a trick. She told me I could install my music software on her computer because mine was being slow and stubborn, and then when it came time to move out of the dorms, she insisted that I keep the laptop, since my software was on it and it’d be such a bother to transfer my work onto my own computer.
I’ll never be able to repay her for her generosity. And I feel like I need to, despite what she says. Dessie has given me so much more than just some clothes, a computer, and a haircut. (Oh, I guess that’s a lot already.) But she gave me something that no price tag can quantify: she gave me self-confidence. I never quite thanked her for that.
“You have gravy on your chin,” Tomas complains, yanking me from my thoughts.
I wipe it away, self-confidence broken. “Did I get it?”
“You smeared it.”
I wipe again. “Now?”
“Yeah.”
This is what most meals with Tomas Novak are like. He’s not a big talker. He just likes to be a lump of flesh around me, and whenever we go to the piano practice rooms at the Music building, he likes to bring his bassoon no matter how unmatched his sound is to mine.
Pianos and bassoons don’t go together. I know the rest of the music world would disagree. I know it’s just my thing. But I feel his bassoon is so trying to be something it’s not. I wish—no, I pray—that his bassoon someday undergoes a great, mighty transformation. Maybe bassoons are bratty, baby English horns waiting to grow up. Or they’re oboes that haven’t yet shed their skin, like snakes.