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He gestured to the chair at the carrel beside him, and I sat. As I pulled out my secondhand laptop to take notes and my phone to record, I tried not to think of how close his arm was to mine or how the sound of his breathing made the little blond hairs on my arm stick up.
“So let’s talk about how you won the eight-hundred-meter freestyle at the semifinals last week. That was huge, and you were so—”
He held up his hands, laughing in a way that made his eyes sparkle.
“Why don’t we get to know each other before we start?”
My cheeks grew hot, and I cursed myself again. How could I be fucking this up so quickly?
“Sorry,” I mumbled sheepishly.
“No need to apologize,” Eric said, and I could feel him looking at me, even as I kept my gaze locked on the table. “I just want to get to know you a bit first.”
I had prepared all last night for this interview, thinking up questions, identifying conversation starters, but I hadn’t prepared forthat. What aboutmecould he possibly be interested in getting to know?
“You’re a freshman, right?”
I nodded, realizing how effortlessly he’d taken control of the interview I was supposed to be leading. But I didn’t mind. I could listen to his voice all day.
“What do you think of Hudson so far?” he asked.
I wouldn’t say I was enjoying myself at Hudson University. I had a roommate I barely spoke to, bullish professors, and omnipresent anxiety that I wouldn’t make the grades necessary to keep my full academic scholarship.
But it was what I didn’t have that bothered me the most. I hadn’t met a single person I felt like I connected with. It was as if the stigma of my mother’s trailer park had followed me all the way from Kentucky, clinging to me like a stench I couldn’t shower off. All the other female students, clad in their Lululemon leggings and perfect contour makeup, seemed to smell it on me, knowing immediately I wasn’t worth their time.
I planned to respond with a nonanswer: “Good,” “Fine,” or even “A lot of fun.” So I was shocked when my voice turned on me. “It’s been a bit of an adjustment,” I heard myself say.
“I get it,” he said, his words woven with understanding. “I had some trouble when I first got here too.”
I shot him a look that made my disbelief clear. I couldn’t imagine Eric Verrino feeling uncomfortable in any setting. He laughed, a sound that sent a flutter to my chest.
“It’s true. I didn’t click with the other guys on the swim team right away. I was so used to my friends and my team back home in Connecticut. It took me a few months to figure out where I fit in here.”
As if I wasn’t taken enough with him before, his vulnerability made me want to melt into the library carpet.
“Have you picked a major yet?” he asked, deftly changing the subject.
“Yup, journalism,” I said. There was never any question that was what I would study.
“Journalism,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “That’s a respectable profession.”
“I spent a lot of time watching the news when I was growing up. My mom raised me, and she…worked a lot, so usually it was just me and the TV at night. I kind of became obsessed with it.”
I didn’t tell him how much I came to rely on the people who reported to me from my screen, how they became the closest thing I had to friends back then. Some of the only regulars I could rely on. Instead, I felt my cheeks grow hot, realizing how much unsolicited information I was sharing. But Eric didn’t seem to mind. Instead, he listened, really listened, his eyes growing wide at the right times as I talked. And as we kept talking, he began sharing too, telling me about his family back in Connecticut, his friends on the team, the finance major he felt his parents had forced him into.
We’d been there an hour before I realized I hadn’t asked him a single question about the swimming team. But for the first time since I’d arrived at Hudson, it felt like everything would be okay.
The text came in when I got back to my dorm that night, hours after Eric, in a flurry of apologies, had ended our conversation, admitting he had to get to class.
Want to finish that interview at my place tomorrow night?
The first thing I noticed when I stepped out of the cab the next night was how quiet it was. There was no house music pumping from speakers, no kegs in the backyard, no scantily clad girls laughing on the front lawn. Just one light glowing from the ground floor of the house.
I knew Eric had said he wanted to finish the interview, but I had expected that was just pretext; I had predicted a party. Wasn’t that what seniors did on Friday nights?
I rang the doorbell, forcing myself to remember to breathe as I waited for someone to open the door. After what felt like several minutes, someone finally did. A girl with long, brown hair that had been straightened to the brink of death. Her bangs clung to her forehead. She looked me up and down, clearly unimpressed.
“Can I help you?”
