by Noir, Roxie
“Are you pure of heart?” she asks.
“No,” I say. It’s instant, the word bypassing my brain and going directly to my mouth, a truth spoken straight from the heart.
It’s not the answer she was expecting.
“Of course I’m not,” I say, going on even though I know I’m giving the wrong answer to this question. “I slept with you while you were a student. I wanted what I shouldn’t have. I took what wasn’t mine to take. I lusted after you before I even knew your name and if you gave me half a chance I’d do it all again. No, I’m not pure of heart.”
Now she’s got her eyes closed, one hand to her forehead, and I think she might be smiling.
“I’m not pure of anything,” I say.
“That was a really weird question, wasn’t it?” she says.
“A little,” I admit.
“Can I try again?”
“Always.”
“Why’d you write the letter?”
I wonder, for a moment, if this question also has a right answer that I don’t know, if I’ve wandered into a labyrinth with a sphinx at the center, and to get past it to Thalia I’ve got to outsmart it.
But then, I open my mouth and the truth pours out.
“It’ll be easier for me to start over than for you,” I say, simply. “Because I already have a post-graduate degree and I can find some other job. Because I didn’t want to throw your life off track.”
I hold out one hand, palm up. Slowly, she takes it, and I fold her small hand into mine, hold on tight.
“And because it was my responsibility and I fucked up,” I go on, just as she looks up at me.
“Caleb —" she starts, exasperated.
“It was literally my job not to sleep with students,” I remind her. “I’m older, I’m allegedly wiser, I was in charge. It was my job to be in control and do what was right and I didn’t. You can say what you want, but it was my job and I fucked it up, and that means I should be the one to take the fall.”
Her hand is a fist inside mine and I squeeze it, fit my fingers to her knuckles.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Don’t be.”
“It doesn’t feel right,” she admits, her eyes on our hands, and she swallows hard, takes a deep breath. “This wasn’t something that you did to me. We did this together. I knew what I was doing when I kissed you in the hospital, and when I gave you that bottle of wine, and when I saw you at the organ concert and went over to flirt with you —”
“And I understood the consequences,” I tell her. “I knew precisely what I was risking when I invited you over for dinner, and I was in full possession of my faculties when I did it anyway.”
“Still,” she whispers.
“I wanted to be with you more than I wanted to be a professor,” I say. “That’s all. In the end, it was that simple. There are other jobs but there’s no one else like you.”
Thalia just sighs quietly, looking down at our hands and I look at her and finally, finally, the words I’ve been searching for this past week start pouring out.
“I thought I had what I wanted,” I tell her, slowly, blindly. I speak like I’m cutting myself open and words are coming out instead of blood. “But then, there you were, hiding in the men’s bathroom.”
“God,” she mutters, but I think she’s laughing.
“Until then I thought I wanted to teach and publish papers and go on coffee dates with women who wore flannel, but I was done before you were out the window,” I tell her. “Because it turns out that none of that can hold a candle to you telling me that you like believing in magic for the space of a second, or that sea monsters were really just oarfish, or that you suspect werewolves want to howl at the moon even when they’re human. I want to live my life next to you. That’s all.”
“I was really sure you thought I was a lunatic,” she says.
“I should have told you about the letter,” I say, and I close my eyes, lean my head down to hers, her hair warm and smooth against my forehead. “I’m sorry. I was afraid you’d try to do something and wouldn’t let me.”
“I probably would have,” she admits.
She breathes. She offers me her other hand as well.
“I’m sorry I got so angry,” she says. “But I really want — I mean, you’re — “
Thalia takes a deep breath, pulls away, looks up at me.
“I want to be next to you too,” she says, simply. “That’s all. This is once-in-a-lifetime, and I know it, and you know it, and I don’t want it to be me and you. I want it to be us. Always.”
“Always,” I echo. “Whatever we face, we face together.”
“Promise?” she asks, whispering.
I take my hand from hers, graze my fingers along her chin, tilt her face up toward mine, hold her eyes with mine.
“I promise,” I tell her.
I touch my lips to hers slowly, softly, so gently I almost don’t feel it because I want this kiss to last forever. I pull back, push forward, run my thumb along her cheekbone. She steps forward, into me, suddenly on her toes, her arm slung around me and I kiss her deeper, harder.
I can’t help myself. I never could, not with her, and now I want to fall into this girl, drown in her and never come up for air.
At last, I make myself pull away. I want to pull her onto the couch, brace her against the back of it, wrap her legs around me. I want to give her that promise, skin to skin as we intertwine, but I don’t.
We’re in Seth’s apartment, and it’s Seth’s couch, and I have a better idea than I’d like of what that couch has been through.
So instead I drop kisses on her fingertips and say, “Thank you for finding me,” and she laughs.
“I’m the one who stormed out, so it only seemed right,” she says. “You did enough.”
She tilts her head, looks at me.
“Also, I was afraid you were on some incredibly long hike and I’d never find you,” she says.
“That was only if you didn’t take me back,” I admit.
“You know what we should do?” she says, leaning into me.
Before I can say anything, there’s the sound of keys in the front door, and then it opens.
“Is anyone naked or crying?” Seth calls out.
“Yes. Both,” Thalia says instantly. “It’s really cathartic. Come try!”
There’s a very, very long pause. We’re both laughing silently when, at last, Seth peeks one eye around a corner, quickly followed by the rest of his body.
“I was being polite,” he says, quickly walking through the living room, toward his stairs. “Sorry, I forgot something. One second and you can go back to your orgy of tears.”
“An orgy requires more than two people,” Thalia points out as Seth disappears.
“Oh, he knows,” I tell her.
“Is he the slutty one?” she whispers.
I almost say yes instantly, but then I stop.
“He was,” I say. “It’s… I don’t know.”
I doubt that Seth would appreciate me taking it upon myself to lay out his entire love life and recent lack thereof to Thalia, so I don’t.
“All right,” he says, coming back down, though he doesn’t seem to be carrying anything else. “Sorry about that, please go back to groping each other or whatever you were doing.”
“We were exchanging haikus,” Thalia volunteers.
“Is that what they call it?”
“Bye!” I say, and Seth just laughs as the door shuts behind him.
I look back at Thalia.
“We can’t stay here,” I tell her. “We’ll get lulled into thinking we have privacy, but we’ll only get caught in a compromising position.”
She raises one eyebrow.
“Which one?”
Several possibilities present themselves, and I push them all away.
“Don’t,” I say, bending toward her, my voice dipping lower.
It’s been two weeks. I’m pretty sure that if Thalia said eggs Benedict in
the right way it would set me off.
“All I said was —”
I put my thumb over her lips, silencing her. She smirks, her eyes wicked.
“No,” I tell her. “We’re going on a date. In public. Dinner and a movie. We’re gonna hold hands and everything.”
“What’s every —”
“No,” I say again, pressing my thumb to her lips again. Now she’s laughing but my pulse is racing and I’m quickly flipping through a mental catalog of available beds in Sprucevale.
Scratch that. Available private spaces. I don’t care if there’s a bed, but I’m coming up blank: not here, not my mom’s house or Levi’s, not Daniel’s spare bedroom or Eli’s couch.
Okay, I think. What if we just took a tent into the woods —
Then, I think of the obvious answer, and I start grinning.
“What?” she asks, suspicious, the word still slightly blurred by my thumb.
“A date,” I tell her. “We’re going on a date, that’s all. Let me go change.”
She starts to say something else but I lean forward, kiss her, then practically run upstairs to Seth’s study where the pull-out sofa is currently functioning as my bed. I put on clothes that aren’t covered in sawdust, run a hand through my hair, make sure there’s nothing weird on my face.
Then I pull out my phone. I do a quick search. I find what I’m looking for.
And I place a quick phone call.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Caleb
I take her to the only Thai restaurant in Spucevale, which is uncreatively named Taste of Thailand, but it’s slightly better than the Thai place closest to campus in Marysburg, so I can’t complain.
It’s still odd to be with her in public, and it’s even odder to know that it doesn’t matter if we’re seen. We hold hands over the table like we’re in a cheesy movie. I lean over and kiss her more than once.
And we talk. I tell her about all the irritating things my brothers have done this week, about Thomas and Rusty, about preparations for Levi’s wedding, and she laughs.
She tells me that Javier is doing well in rehab, that he’s making ceramics in arts and crafts class, that he’s painting again, that he’s made friends with a barn kitten named Eustace, that he’s seeing a PTSD specialist every day.
Thalia tells me that Margaret was the one sending the emails to me. She tells me about the huge fight they got into in the middle of the night, and even though I think she downplays it, I can tell she’s rattled by the whole thing.
Then she heaps more sticky rice on her plate and scoops ginger stir fry on top, and pauses.
And she says, “My dad reported us.”
“I saw the pictures,” I say, and Thalia just nods.
“It was probably stupid of me to introduce you,” she says, shaking her head. “Not that I’ve ever introduced him to a boyfriend before, but I didn’t need a crystal ball to know how he’d react. Or that he’d find out you weren’t a grad student with a one-second Google.”
“You had other things on your mind,” I point out, eating one more spoonful of soup.
“I should have known,” she says.
“You should have done no such thing,” I tell her, and I reach out, across the table, capture her hand in mine again.
“I can’t believe he didn’t even talk to me first,” she says, and a pang of guilt works its way between my ribs, but then it’s gone. “He didn’t even ask what was going on. No, ‘Are you okay with this? No, ‘Are you happy?’ Because yes, and I am, and that’s not what mattered to him.”
“We can’t choose our parents and we can’t account for what they do,” I tell her, running my thumb over her knuckles.
She watches my hand for a long moment, then looks up at me.
“We’re no longer speaking,” she says. “I called him when I found out and told him he wasn’t welcome in my life any more.”
“Are you okay?” I ask, and she just nods, pushing her hair out of her face.
“Yeah,” she says, thoughtfully. “Yeah, I’m very okay.”
* * *
“The movie theater’s downtown?” Thalia asks, looking around Main Street, her hand in mine. “It must be a really small theater.”
“It is,” I confirm, trying to hide a smile. “One more block.”
We cross a street, pass two antique stores, and then I stop, open a door, hold it for her.
“This is a movie theater?” she says, frowning, reading the sign. “It says it’s the Martha Johnson Inn and —”
The moment she says it out loud, she stops and gives me an I see what you did there look, like she’s trying not to laugh.
“Seth’s sofa bed squeaks,” I murmur into her ear as we walk for the front desk.
“What, when you sleep on it?” she teases.
“Well, it squeaks every time I roll over, so I can only imagine the symphony it’s capable of producing when people fuck on it,” I tell her.
She’s faintly pink from the cold, but I swear the look she gives me glows.
“And here I was hoping for a dark parking lot and the back seat of your car,” she says.
“Never say never,” I tell her, and she laughs.
Check in feels like it takes hours. I went to high school with the owner’s daughters, of course, so I have to get updates on what Amanda and Bethany are doing these days while all I want is to take Thalia upstairs and listen to the way she says my name when I’m inside her.
After all, it’s one of my very favorite sounds.
At last, I’ve got the key to the Lafayette room, and when I turn, Thalia stands from her overstuffed armchair, tosses Rural Equestrienne onto the coffee table, and saunters over to me.
“After you,” I tell her, and nod at the stairs.
I’ve never been inside the Martha Johnson Inn before, but it’s pretty clear that it caters to the ten tourists that Sprucevale gets every year, most of whom are drawn by some obscure point of early American history.
Fittingly, the Inn looks like it was plucked straight out of Monticello or Mount Vernon — everything is hand-turned wood and thick, lushly patterned carpet, including the stairs. The place has a severe, buttoned-up feeling, as if someone in a waistcoat is about to bid me good day and maybe also refer to me as a rake.
After all, I’m about to be rakish as fuck.
Just for fun, I grab Thalia’s ass as she mounts the stairs. I’m pretty sure that my hand is in full view of everyone and anyone in the lobby, and I couldn’t care less.
“Don’t you know half the people watching us right now?” Thalia asks, looking at me over her shoulder.
I don’t unhand her ass. In fact, I squeeze it harder, sliding one finger into the crevice between her legs, and I can hear her breath hitch when I do.
“Probably,” I say. “And I don’t think they’re used to their upscale inn being used like a cheap hourly motel.”
“You never know,” she teases, looking around, then glancing back at me. “Early Americana gets some people pretty hot.”
“Some people?” I ask, as we reach the first floor and I spin the key around one finger, looking for room 104, my other hand still on her ass. “It’s working, then?”
“Sure,” she says as we walk up to the door. “A hand-turned bannister really gets me going, you know.”
“I knew we were in the right place,” I tease, looking down at the key in my hand, then at the door.
It’s an old-fashioned, heavy skeleton key, because of course it is. I shrug and shove it into the keyhole, but it doesn’t turn.
“Come on,” I mutter.
“Maybe you need to be gentle with it,” Thalia suggests, her voice dipping low, her words sending an electric tingle up my spine. She’s leaning against the wall by the door, winter coat open, hips cocked, the curve of her body a tantalizing suggestion.
“You think that’s it?” I ask, pushing a little harder, twisting both directions.
“I’m just saying, make sure it’s good and ready
for you,” she says. “Go nice and slow.”
I glance down at her, eyes dancing, a laugh tugging at her lips.
“And how exactly should I go about doing that?” I ask, matching her tone. “Do you want me to talk dirty to a door, Thalia?”
“Only if you think you might get it open that way.”
Now she’s definitely laughing at me, her voice husky, tantalizing, and there’s a moment where I think I might lose my mind. Then I take a deep breath, focus, take the key out, put it back into the lock slowly, carefully.
“Ooh, just like that,” she whispers. “Fill it up nice and deep. Mmm.”
“Do you imagine you’re helping?” I tease.
“No,” she laughs.
I reach out, grab her by the waistband of her jeans, her hip hot against my cool fingers, pull her in toward me.
“Well, you’re not,” I tell her.
“Try turning it real hard and slow,” she murmurs. “Make it beg.”
I let her go but her body is still pressed against mine, still standing outside this stupid shut door. I run my thumb across her bottom lip, and all at once I’m trying not to laugh and also trying to get this door open before I give up and tear her clothes off in this hallway.
“Quit it,” I growl, twisting the key again and motherfucking hellfire bitch-ass fuck, it still doesn’t turn.
Thalia grins, and now she’s got one hand underneath my shirt, slowly tracing shapes along my skin.
“Have you tried,” she murmurs. “Jiggling it?”
I jiggle the key, ever so slightly.
It turns the tiniest bit, and Thalia gasps. It’s the same way she gasps when I do something she likes, and the noise goes straight to my already-painfully-hard cock.
“Don’t stop,” she murmurs, looking up at me, teasing me even as her face flushes a shade of pink I’ve come to know well. “It’s so close, Caleb. Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”
I jiggle it again and the lock turns, slowly, then all at once and the bolt slides back.
I swear Thalia makes the quietest of moans as it does.
I shove the door open so fast it slams into the doorstop on the other side, the crack echoing through the hall so loudly I’m certain someone will come investigate.