“What a rare opportunity it is,” Ellsbeth said, “to get to see one of my favorite authors in such an intimate setting.”
“Oh,” Amos Paul said, giving Ellsbeth another glance. His eyes lingered for an instant on the strip of pale flesh between where her boots ended and her skirt began. “Well, thank you.”
The old man in the sweater vest cleared his throat, but Ellsbeth refused to cede any ground at the signing table. She slipped the receipt out from her newly purchased hardcover and fished a pen from her purse. “I’m sure you’ve got plenty of friends in town, but if you want someone to show you where to get the good drinks around here—” She slid the receipt, with her full name and phone number written on it, toward Amos Paul, then left before she could see what he chose to do withit.
The first text came at ten thirty-five that night:so miss ellsbeth, good drinking places in town?
It was followed a moment later by another text:this is amos paul by the way.
Ellsbeth’s heart was racing. She hadn’t imagined it would be quite so easy.Hi there. Glad you texted. Consider me your local tour guide. What area are you stayingin?
He gave the name of a hotel, and twenty minutes later, Ellsbeth was shivering in the back of an Uber wearing a cotton dress and lingerie that she had bought months ago but hadn’t yet found the opportunity to wear. He was waiting in the hotel’s lobby bar, wearing a sweater that pulled across his belly, and Ellsbeth ordered an Old-Fashioned, because that’s what he ordered.
Was she attracted to him? She wasn’t entirely sure. If she was, it was an attraction to the situation itself, the thrill of imagining herself as he saw her: the shamelessly flirtatious co-ed.
He was strangely stiff as they drank, talking about his book tour and his complaints about his recent publisher and the possibility of an adaptation in America that didn’t seem to be progressing. Ellsbeth drank, and wondered if this was a mistake, if she had misread the cues, if she had spent forty pounds on a car to come here to say things like, “Oh, sure,” and “That sounds so frustrating,” and “Well, you’re brilliant, that’s why.”
When Amos Paul finished his Old-Fashioned, he licked his lips and looked Ellsbeth square in the face: “Well, how about popping up to my room?”
They kissed in the elevator, a shockingly wet, full-contact kind of kiss during which Ellsbeth had to remind herself to keep her eyes closed.
The smell of his sweat became acrid as it chilled on his naked body, and as soon as he finished, he rolled across the bed into the bathroom, where he remained, with the light on and the door closed, for a considerable amount of time.
She called her own car to return to her place, and though Amos Paul would politely reply to her texts on occasion (ha ha), she never saw him again.
Ellsbeth was not ashamed for having sex with a man she desired; she was ashamed upon realizing that her ego had written a self-aggrandizing narrative in which she had dazzled the famous and talented Amos Paul and he had slept with her because of who she was as a person, not because she was merely young and available. It was whiplash, a sting to the ego more than to the heart.
The experience hardened her in a way she hadn’t anticipated, reinforcing her unspoken beliefs that sex was transactional andmechanical, a mutually enjoyable endgame of a seduction well played.He says X, I say Y.Every possible response from a man had some corresponding response she could calculate in order to move the dance forward. It was more fun than chess; there were more possible variables, more improvisations she could tease out, and also occasionally at the end she had an orgasm.
Sex had not been the goal with Rawlins. She needed him to like her, because she needed him to study writ magic. If she had to perform the bubbly co-ed in order to achieve that, then so beit.
She had been thinking of Amos Paul when she was preparing to meet Rawlins at The Frayed Page, of her ability to say the correct things in order to achieve her desired outcome. She hadn’t found any information on the internet about whether Rawlins was married or dating anyone (she couldn’t resist searching), but that was no indication of anything really: There were mentions of his book, and citations of his many academic articles, but the closest Ellsbeth came to finding anything personal was his faculty page for Newlyn University. It featured a list of the classes he taught and a biography only a few sentences long: “Thaddeus M. Rawlins is a graduate of Yale University, where he also received his master’s and PhD in ancient translations. He received his DAA from Cambridge University, where he also served as a distinguished lecturer. He is the author of seven books, including the international bestsellerThe Arcane and the Ordinary,which won the Keller Prize for excellence in academia and has been translated into twenty-four languages.”
The photo was low-resolution and probably at least a decade old, a grainy shot of Rawlins offering the photographer a pained smile against a blank wall, probably somewhere on campus. Rawlins was an anomaly in the internet age—an unknown entity—but because she had readThe Arcane and the Ordinaryso many times, Ellsbeth had felt an unearned kinship with him, a sense of knowing him, or at least the rhythms of his voice.
If there was any arcanist alive capable of helping her learn writ magic, it was him. She knew it from seeing his name in the byline of an old article inTheNew England Journal of Mechanicals—an article that danced right up to the edge of what was publicly appropriate tosay about writ magic. The lesson she had overheard in the Practicum the other day had only confirmed it. Rawlins was bored by rote, mundane applications of magic, and he would be willing to bend the rules for a brilliant student with vision. More than willing, Ellsbeth believed. He washungryforit.
Her early flirting had been purposeful and planned; she hoped the guileless familiarity in her emails would jostle him off-balance enough to allow her to plead her case, to grant her more grace than he otherwise might in allowing her to join the program. She understood what was a shameful fact about men—that even the ones who believed themselves above flirtation were vulnerable to the biological response when faced with aningénuedeploying her charms correctly, the hero impulse.
And so her red lipstick and skirt that morning had been a tactical choice. It was the costume for the character she needed him to see her as: the alluring, impetuous young scholar. If he flattered himself with the notion that she had a crush on him, even better. Ellsbeth had no delusions about her own attractiveness—out of all of the lithe twenty-somethings Rawlins encountered, there was no reason to believe that he would be particularly dazzled byher.But if she charmed him, if she intrigued him…then she would be able to do what she came to Newlyn todo.
The battle plan was drawn up, the moves clear in her mind. Smile, flirt with plausible deniability, and get permission to study writ magic.
But when Ellsbeth saw Rawlins sitting at a small table at The Frayed Page, pretending to read a book, a jolt of something passed through her that she hadn’t expected. She smiled without planning on it. His hair was rumpled, almost boyish; a flush was rising in his cheeks. She ran her hand through her own hair. Shewanted him.
There was no tactical advantage to sleeping with him. An affair was out of the question. Ellsbeth reminded herself of that as the heat between them across the increasingly small table seemed to spark like an exposed electrical cable. Sleeping with her professor would be a disaster. It would be a distraction from finding the truth about Bertie. It would isolate her from her cohort and undermine her academic credibility. Rawlins would see her as a conquest, a disposable little girl, andnot a colleague. And then when things went bad (as they almost certainly would), her precious position in the program would be put at risk.
She knew that she would never sleep with Professor Rawlins. It was a cliché. It was foolish. And Ellsbeth Storer was not foolish.
And yet.
Why had she moved her leg to slide against his? Why had she held his gaze when she told him she liked to be controlled? It was a mistake, she recognized that as soon as she was walking the long blocks back to her apartment on Governor Street, her backpack thudding against her hip. He had agreed. He would let her study writ magic, and now she needed to quiet the voice in the back of her brain that imagined the long lines of his arm muscles, that flat firm stomach. The voice that wondered whether his lips would be soft on hers, what he would taste like. They were irrational, buzzing thoughts, and Ellsbeth found that she was almost dizzy as she walked, lightheaded in a way that she had thought only happened to heroines in gauzy romance novels. She forced herself to laugh out loud. It could live as a fantasy—of course it was fantasy! Who wouldn’t fantasize about their blue-eyed professor!—and be put neatly away into a box. And yet.
After she officially enrolled, theuniversity had offered Ellsbeth an option for standard graduate student housing: a prison cell room in a Soviet Bloc complex designed in the neo-Brutalist period of the 1970s when they thought that the efficiency and discipline of poured concrete would serve as inspiration to the academic minds within. But Ellsbeth found the rooms sterile to the point of suffocation, and so she opted to pay nine hundred dollars a month to sublet the second story of a crumbling Victorian house on Governor Street.
The walls were custard yellow, and both the fridge and the stove (white, disconcertingly sticky) seemed too risky to rely on with any confidence, but the place had—what was that old-fashioned word?—character.A word that hair-sprayed realtors use to seduce insecure newlyweds into spending two hundred over asking on a ranch without a working electrical system. But there was no other word for it here.There was the sense that this place had been lived in, that a hundred years of Newlyn students had occupied and then departed this very room. The smell of their anxiety and egotism and vomit had soaked into the walls like rum into a Christmas cake.
So:character.The wood of her bedroom window frame splintered upward like the spears of a Roman phalanx, and the floor tilted drunkenly, which meant the bathroom door left a scratch every time it closed and that Ellsbeth’s dresser drawers habitually hung open. But those were the things she loved about the place. The house was from the 1800s, two blocks away from the campus of a college that was founded before the country. The settling creak of the floorboards and the way the wind whistled through the flue might have made someone else fear the place was haunted, but she found the house’s noises comforting. Ellsbeth liked the thought that she was sharing the world with forces she couldn’t see. Perhaps it was why she had always wanted to study arcane mechanicals.
