“Tempting,” he called back from the bathroom.
She heard him rummaging through a medicine cabinet when the buzzing started from his phone, which had somehow landed on thefloor halfway underneath the couch. She leaned forward to peek at the screen and saw it flashing with the name:Margaret Lennox.Ellsbeth stared, perplexed, wondering why the dean might possibly be calling him this late—but as she heard his footsteps, she shifted back where she could not see the phone.
Rawlins returned, his erection visibly pressing against the fabric of his jeans, holding up the foil square. “Found it.”
“Your phone is ringing,” Ellsbeth said. “It’s on the floor.”
Rawlins lowered himself onto the couch and pressed into Ellsbeth to kiss her again. “I could not care less about anything in the world right now.”
Ellsbeth twisted her head away from him. “What if it’s important? No one calls this late if it’s not something important.”
Rawlins’s mouth tightened but he acquiesced, reaching down to pick up the violently vibrating phone. “Hello?”
He listened for a moment, his face growing tight. Ellsbeth could faintly hear the dean’s voice on the other line, but she couldn’t make out any of the words. Without looking at Ellsbeth, Rawlins walked into another room of his home and closed the door.
Ellsbeth had begun putting her shirt back on before Rawlins even hung up the phone. The real world had arrived at their evening together and shifted the temperature. “I’m sorry,” Rawlins said. “It’s something of an emergency. I have to go…handle something.” He didn’t offer any more of an explanation. Ellsbeth felt herself wanting to ask, but she stopped the question before it made it out. He clearly didn’t want to tell her, whatever it was, and if she asked, he might lie. She had lied to him, hadn’t she? When she had been going to the police station. There were things about her life that she wasn’t willing to tell him, and she realized at that moment with a small chill that the same might certainly be true for him.
“You can stay if you want,” Rawlins said, lacing his shoes. “I’m sure it won’t be longer than a few hours.”
It was an idle offer, not a request. It was bad enough to be the graduate student lusting after her professor. Ellsbeth’s sense of internal shame and pity wouldn’t let her be the girl hanging around a man’s home if he didn’t want her to. Ellsbeth shook her head. “I should get home. Try to actually get some sleep.”
Rawlins looked as though he’d aged ten years in the span of a ten-minute phone call. His lips were tight and eyes bloodshot. They finished getting dressed together in silence, Ellsbeth wondering the entire time if she should say something, but unable to come up with a good answer for what that something mightbe.
Rawlins put on his shoes and grabbed his coat. “You didn’t bring a jacket,” he said.
“No.”
“Please, borrow one of mine. I insist.” He shrugged the heavy waxed coat off his shoulders and wrapped it around Ellsbeth. It was still warm from his body heat.
They stood by the door for an awkward moment, Ellsbeth feeling very small in his oversized jacket, unsure how to say goodbye. Rawlins leaned down then and kissed Ellsbeth square on the forehead. “Ellsbeth Storer,” he said in an exhale. “You have no idea how much I wish I didn’t have to go.”
The walk back to herapartment seemed to take no time at all, and within an hour she had brushed her teeth and pulled herself into bed. Had that really happened? Had she really done that? She would have thought the entire thing was a dream, if it hadn’t been for the coat that hung neatly on the hook behind her door, and hunger that still gnawed in the center of her chest, and the way that if she closed her eyes, she could feel his fingertips brushing her skin as vividly as if he were there in bed beside her.
Rawlins
The car engine whined as Rawlins sped through the night, leaving Newlyn behind as he headed south. By day, the drive would have been scenic—lined with leafy trees turned gold and red by the arrival of fall. But in the night, his headlights illuminated only a shallow pool of asphalt and the menacing hint of branches stretching over the road while everything beyond vanished into inky abyss.
Occasionally the darkness ahead was pierced by another pair of headlights hurtling toward him before sliding past. But mostly the drive was solitary, leaving him alone with the panicky feeling in his chest and a mind that swirled with dark, chaotic thoughts.
His mind had alreadybeenchaotic before the call came. The entire evening had spun him on his axis, starting with Ellsbeth’s email, and the reply he’d fired off without a thought.Come over.Like a reaction. Something he was doing before his rational brain could kick in and talk him out ofit.
Rawlins could not explain the effect that Ellsbeth had on him. He wanted her in a way that short-circuited his defenses. She had not broken through his walls; she had simply passed through as if they didn’t matter. He wasn’t sure when that Rubicon had been crossed, but it frightened him to realize that after years of keeping everyone at bay, avoiding any emotional entanglement, he had let her in without evendecidingto. It was not something he’d intended to pursue, it was whatshewanted. Yet his suspicion that he had been played wasnot sufficient to overwhelm his desire to see her. Tohaveher, at least once.
While he had waited for her to arrive, he busied himself nervously, straightening the books on his coffee table and smoothing his shirt and lighting a candle, all the while second-guessing himself: Was this real? Had she even seen his reply? Should he send another and tell her he’d changed his mind, he was foolish for being so rash, they shouldn’t get carried away…
And then she was there. Standing at his front door, slightly out of breath, her skin flushed from hurrying through the cold night. In that moment, she came into sharp relief to him—not as a student, or a younger woman, not any concept or category, she was just…Ellsbeth. Shockinglyspecificin her beauty. Eyes alive with intelligence and verve and vulnerability all at once.
A frozen moment as he met her gaze. A split second of wondering.Will we…Should we…Can we possibly, at this point, not?Thenwillandshouldbecame irrelevant concepts as their lips met and their bodies collided, as he was lost in his passion for her.Consumedby desire, in a way he didn’t know he was still capable of—a way he was not sure he hadeverbeen capable of. A way that narrowed his world and broke his brain and realigned the cosmos around their mouths, hungry for each other, and their hands, craving and searching and pulling their bodies into each other, a straight line toward the thing he wanted more than anything and could not possibly be deterred from…
Until he was, by the ringing phone. The moment he glanced at the screen, Lennox’s name had brought a dose of sobriety—which was followed by a stomach-dropping plunge into reality with the first words she spoke when he pickedup:
“Max is in the hospital.”
It was one of those jolts that felt like waking up, imbuing the moments preceding it with the hazy sheen of a half-forgotten dream.
The conversation on the phone with Lennox was brief and focused. Rawlins’s mind fought to make rational sense of the information she communicated, even as he was puzzled by the lack of emotion that it evoked in him, until he realized he was simply numb from shock.
When he returned to the living room, he was almost surprised to find Ellsbeth there.
