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“I’m not seventeen. I turned eighteen three weeks ago.” The age of consent in Washington is sixteen, anyway. I have looked it up.
“What?” A crease between his brows vanishes almost as quickly as it appears. Then he shakes his head like my age doesn’t change anything. “It’s not a question of whether I like you or not, or how old you are. This is—I don’t do things like that. I can’t do things like that.”
“Kiss people?” Even when I am not talking, I part my lips, painted with an extra layer of Siren red, in the hopes he won’t be able to look away from my mouth.
The forehead crease reappears. I’d like to iron it out with my lips. “Even if you weren’t my student, it’s still . . .” He gropes for the right word. Wrong. Inappropriate. “Unprofessional,” he finishes.
I love seeing him flustered like this. I already feel more like myself. “You still haven’t told me you don’t want to.”
“Adina.”
He has to stop saying my name like that. Like a growl. Neither of us dares move for a long time. The power I discovered with Eitan, I want it with Arjun. I want to tell him all the ways I’d touch him, with my hands, with my mouth, how I’d make him feel so, so good. How he’d make me feel good too. How I’d wrap my legs around him in his chair and scrape my nails down his back . . .
“I think about you so much,” I say. “I think about touching you all the time.”
He grips the arms of his chair, skin stretching tight across his knuckles. My breath catches in my throat, my heart going more allegro than the final movement of a Brahms sonata. It’s going to happen. It’s finally going to happen. Then something changes in his face, and he gets to his feet, rolls up his shirtsleeves. Paces.
I get to my feet and follow him, weaving a few fingers through my wild hair, hoping he will imagine what it would feel like for him to do the same thing. He is only a couple inches taller than I am, and we are nearly eye to eye. There’s half a foot between our chests. If we exhaled at exactly the same time, we’d be touching.
“I see how you look at me. How you’re always finding ways to touch me. It’s not accidental. I know it. Haven’t you—haven’t you thought about us? Together?”
I let my gaze drift toward his belt buckle so he understands what I mean by “together.” Rest-two-three-four, rest-two-three-four.
He shoves his sleeves up even more, past his elbows, showing more of his bronze skin. “You’ve had a lot of stress today,” he says slowly. “You should be spending this time with your family. Not here.” He adds more distance between us, stands beneath Beethoven. “I’m so sorry.”
I wish he’d stop apologizing.
“You want me to go.”
“I think that would be for the best.”
I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek, so hard I taste metal. “Arjun. Don’t you find me attractive?”
He pauses, and for a second I’m certain he won’t even answer me, considering he’s skirted all my other questions. Instead he does something I’ve never seen him do: he rakes a hand through his hair and makes this sound halfway between a grunt and a sigh, this action that seems at once frustrated and flustered. It’s not something Arjun the teacher would do. His hair is sticking up, but he doesn’t seem to care.
He puts his back to me, so I can’t see him when he speaks. “You need to go, Adina. Please. I’m not going to ask you again.”
Somehow I buckle my viola back into its case and shove my arms through my jacket sleeves. Somehow I find my way to the door. Somehow I stumble down the hall and into the elevator, where I punch-punch-punch-punch-punch the first-floor button five times in a row.
Age seems to matter so much when you’re young, but to me it’s a meaningless number. I should be able to relate more to the kids at school than to my twenty-five-year-old teacher, but I don’t. I can’t tolerate any of their insipid conversations about who cheated on who and who asked who to homecoming and who drank so much they threw up at whoever’s party last week.
This, with Arjun, isn’t going to happen. I have a finite number of minutes before I start dropping plates the way Ima did at the beginning, before I lose coordination in my fingers, before I can no longer stand in front of an audience and do
the only thing I’ve cared about for years. Despite all that, I cannot have what I want.
I hate him for sending me away.
Ten
Tovah
I HATE MYSELF FOR LETTING her go. I’m not certain of many of my emotions today, but I’m positive about that one.
Positive. I have to strike that word from my vocabulary. I’ll never be able to use it casually.
Rain pelts the windshield, wipers slashing across it. My vision blurs. A car behind me honks. I’m in a loading zone, so I circle the block and find a new parking spot. Turn the wipers off so I can hide underneath a layer of rain-spattered glass.
Why couldn’t we both be lucky?
