The next morning, I sat through my (very early) eight a.m. business economics course, eyelids drooping, wondering why I decided that getting such a complicated class over with first thing in the week was a good idea. I straightened in my seat, gulped one-third of my cooling coffee in its cardboard container, and rubbed my eyes awake. My fingers went on autopilot and typed everything on Professor Byrd’s powerpoint and his lecture, thinking if not now, I could go back through my notes later.
Last night had gone particularly long. Laurie had gotten sick—from food poisoning or too many shots, who knew—and I offered to take the rest of her shift even though I was supposed to knock off. I ended up serving a rowdy football crowd well into three a.m. but managed to fall into bed for an hour and a half before waking up again and making my first class.
It was tough to do, maintaining both a job and a college career, but I was young, my body could handle it. I was hungry, eager for success, and the piece de resistance: I. Needed. Money.
I repeated this mantra as I wiped a string of drool from my chin.
Class ended with a farewell and good luck from Professor Byrd after he’d happily reminded of the mid-term in one week. Closing my laptop, I thought maybe I should employ Jade to try and make two of me for the next month.
My phone blipped as I was rising, and I sat back down to read it as students shuffled around me.
Trev: I come by your apartment, you’re not there. Try to meet you after class, you walk by. I’m finally getting the hint. I love you, Em. Always will. But I can’t keep chasing you to prove it. I give up.
I muttered an expletive and blacked out my phone. Leave it to Trev to make this all about his heartbreak.
As mighty as I tried to be, the first time he told me he loved me broke through the bitterness. We were at the movies, watching a horror flick, and just before the doomed actress wandered into the wrong room alone, the theater thick with tense silence as all eyes were on the screen, Trev leaned over and said at full volume, “I love you,” so abruptly that I jumped through my skin and screeched and had all the theater-goers screeching with me.
That was Trev. Impulsive and spontaneous. Whatever he felt at the moment, he expressed, and I supposed a slasher movie got his heart-strings twanging.
Six years, I thought. It was so hard to keep acting like he was only in my life for a minute. Cheating was supposed to be the end game. No amount of cajoling would get me back into his arms.
And no one had to know just how much it hurt to keep him away.
The ache in my throat stuck with me through my travels to my next class, the second in a double-header that I also thought would be great to get out of the way on a Tuesday. It was also the class that melted all my dreams into nightmares.
Medieval Culture.
I found my seat, bypassing the rest of the minglers who were chatting and downloading their weekend to their friends. Aside from Jade and Becca, there was no one I really talked to in school, no study buddies to commiserate to, no seatside neighbor to swap notes with. My personality wasn’t repellent. I could be funny, witty, heartfelt. Trev took up a lot of my time and dedication in high school and I was pretty much consumed by him and our relationship. We were that lasting couple, the two people that got together in freshman year and never strayed apart all the way up to senior year and beyond. A rare but fascinating breed, a source of jealousy but also a dream to others. How did two young kids who were supposed to have a fickle sense of life become so dedicated to each other for so long?
Hah. Loyalty. I knew better now.
The lecture hall quieted as Professor Harper strode into the room and toward the lecturn. Bodies made for their seats. One scruffy head popped up from the others, my gaze straying to it before my brain could bark some sense at me.
Sensing my attention, Spence’s profile turned into a full-on face and I ducked my head a millisecond after our eyes clashed.
I glared at my phone lying quiet and dark on my desk. There was something I was looking forward to dealing with. That stupid text with the kisses.
Professor Harper went straight into the third circle of Hell and I dutifully typed notes, the dull thwacking of keyboards creating a repetitive, relaxing noise. When my focus diverted from my monitor to the right, I yanked it back to where it belonged, but my inner miscreant had better ideas.
Eventually, Spence caught on to my drifting, and every so often he’d shift to the left, his fingers never pausing in their strokes on his laptop, and offered me a side-swipe of a grin.
His profile was one of the sexiest I’d ever seen. Sharp, with a perfect arc of a nose and jut of his chin, softened by full lips. Even his stubble was in a perfect line on his cheek, as if he sat with a razor every morning and carved at the hairline until it reached the perfect division of soft skin versus scruff.
He had no freckles or moles that I could see. No imperfections that would make him human at all. There had to be something there to make him flawed. What was he hiding? Why did every female coming within an inch of him instantly produce more saliva?
Ugh. Including me?
When a flash of green swept into my view, an irk sound came out of my throat and I focused back on my screen. He’d caught me. Again.
That was it. I shut my laptop and fished out a notebook instead. Handwriting would require a hell of a lot more concentration than typing. That way, I could remember that my tunnel vision, when it came to Spence, was solely due to my broken heart over Trev and not because I was actually interested. It was much too soon to be drawn into another guy, even if it was purely sexually motivated. Wasn’t it?
Forty more minutes and potential carpal tunnel syndrome in my right wrist later, class was dismissed. I packed up my stuff—not once stealing a look over to the right—swung my bag over my shoulder, and trotted down the steps to the door.
“Did something happen to your car?”
I swung around at the sound of Spence’s voice, worried over the potential of looking like an idiot and responding because he couldn’t possibly be talking to me. I tested with a quiet, “What?”
“One of your stickers.” Spence, standing at the end of his row and a few steps above me, gestured to the part of my laptop that stuck out of my bag. I recognized the words he’d noticed, something my father had gifted me. It was a bumper sticker that read: HORN BROKEN. WATCH FOR FINGER.
At the dumb expression I kept giving him, he added, “I was making a joke about your computer. You stopped using it. Did it conk out on you?”
“Yes. Yes it did,” I said as students weaved around me. Hopefully, my tone of voice displayed utter conviction and not the deadened noise of being caught by surprise and coming up with zero wittiness. I tried again. “My father thinks he has a great sense of humor.”
“Let me guess, he got you that sticker along with the laptop because it’s pretty much as expensive as a car.”
“How did you figure that so easily?”
He shrugged, and it wasn’t arrogance motivating his movement. It was slow, half-cocked, almost as if he were humble. “I notice the small stuff. Plagued me as a child. I was that nightmare kid that ruined Santa and the Easter Bunny for my entire kindergarten class before my dad even knew the jig was up.”
The humor in his words was apparent. But his eyes. There was something wrong with them when he smiled after. I replied with, “Hence you noticing that I started handwriting my notes instead of using my laptop.” I added, “Three rows behind you.”
“Is that weird? That’s weird.” Spence smiled again, sparkle back in place, disarming me enough that I second-guessed my original thoughts. I tentatively mirrored one back.
“I sincerely hope you don’t still believe in Santa Clause,” he said.
“You dodged a close one, but nope. You’re safe there.”
“What a relief. So. We should talk about your text.”
Yikes. Spence was not one for segues. I held up a finger. “I can explain. I have two terrible live-in children that are also in their twenties and my roommates, and they tend to take my phone without permission and play with it.”
“Are we thinking of the same thing? I was talking about the text where you wanted to reschedule yesterday's session.”
“That’s the one I mean.”
“This?” He pulled his phone out of his pocket, tapped the screen a few times, then showed me his screen where my message was on full display. “What’s wrong with it?”
I took a second. At this crucial moment in time, I was realizing how innocuous the text was, just as Jade said. And true to form, I was making it a trillion times more awkward. “The…the kisses at the end.”
“The—” Spence flipped the phone so he could see it. “The two X’s?”
“Right, those,” I said before drifting off.
“I thought it was your signature or something. You know, how you sign off on all your texts.”
Yes, because I was a girl who ended all her messages to friends, family and tutors alike, with kisses.
Then again, if that was what Spence thought, I’d take it. “Totally. Just wasn’t sure if you’d think it was unprofessional or something.”
“I’m a part-time English tutor to a lot of desperate freshmen and sophomores. I get a lot worse shit than this,” he said.
I responded with a polite chuckle that had a bit too much enthusiasm. Oh god who am I. “I’d love to schedule another session. You said tonight?”
“Sure, eight-thirty’s good, right? At the library.”
“I can swing it. And this time, I’ll ask in you advance: What kind of coffee do you prefer?”
Spence’s answering grin was so genuine and sweet that my knees almost buckled. Like, actual loose muscle and weakening bones, a sensation I’d never before experienced and only barely caught before they went out from under.
“Not that your first choice wasn’t delicious,” he said, and I swore his teeth hurt just saying that, “but I take it—”
“Spence!”
The owner of such a liquid voice, like the sound one makes after their first puff of a cigarette when recovering from a long night of sex, made her way up the stairs to us. She had fine chestnut hair and bright blue eyes, and her gazelle-like legs strode smoothly despite the break in steps. Peering around, I realized we were the only ones left in the lecture hall—even Harper had exited. How long had we been here, I wondered, and more importantly, how long would it have taken for me to notice that I had no concept of my surroundings?
My bafflement at losing the space-time continuum with this guy nearly had me missing the moment when the woman came up beside Spence, hooked her arms through his, and placed a lingering kiss on his cheek. “I was waiting for you outside,” she said, “And thought Harper had maybe taken you hostage again.”
“Nah, he needs at least an hour with his scotch latte in his office before he tracks me down. I was making an appointment to tutor one of his students. Emme, meet Daya.”
My stomach sank at Spence’s description of me, but then I told it to stop being stupid. What else was Spence supposed to call me? His wife?
“Nice to meet you,” I said, but was eager to get away. Witnessing Daya’s comfort with Spence, the way her hip casually leaned against his, was doing funny things to my chest. “Um, I’ll see you later?”
“You bet,” Spence said, but then Daya whispered something in his ear which had him zeroing in on her.
I didn’t see their heads come together or hear the sound of kissing, but that was okay because my damned imagination was doing all that for me as I retreated down the steps and out of the room, where I could maybe find a bit more air to breathe.