Page 49 of So This Isn't Love
"Do you need to get that?" she asks.
"No." My answer comes out a beat too fast. I reach over and flip the phone face-down. "Just work. It'll wait."
It's not a lie. It's just the first true thing I haven't told her, and I feel the size of it immediately. Breckenridge is real. The site visit is real. The version of my life where I get on that plane and go build the dream I described to her in a barn two days ago is real, and it's lying face-down on her counter next to the toast I caught in midair.
I do what I always do. I change the channel.
"Twelve minutes," I say, nodding at her clock. "Go be a hero to your students. I'll get the dishes."
"You don't have to."
"I know I don't."
She grabs her folders and her keys. At the door she stops and turns around, and I get a goodbye kiss with her hand fisted in my collar—the kind of kiss that has no business happening on a school-day timeline. When she pulls back her eyes stay closed for one extra second.
"Lock up behind you," she says.
My eyebrows arch. "What will Mrs. Johnson say?"
She grins. "Let her talk. I don't want to be late for class."
She's down the stairs before I have a word ready, which never happens. I stand in her doorway, listening to her footsteps and grinning at nothing.
I wash the pan, dry it, and figure out where it lives. I fold my jacket over my arm, deciding to leave my shirt behind since it's been drafted into other service. I lock the door behind me and I go down the stairs into full Monday-morning daylight on Main Street.
Mrs. Johnson is watering the flower boxes in front of her shop, two doors down. She takes in the whole picture: Me, seven thirty in the morning, coming down the bookshop stairs in yesterday's jeans with no shirt under my jacket.
"Morning, Mrs. Johnson," I say, and tip an imaginary hat.
"Morning, Finn." She goes back to her flowers, smiling at them like they told her a secret. I have no doubt that by noon the whole town will know about this. I find I don't mind, which a week ago would have required a doctor's note.
In my pocket, the phone buzzes again.
I don't look at it.
CHAPTER 20
DARCY
It's second period, AP English. Jay Gatsby has been murdered, and I am standing at my whiteboard thinking about Finn's hands on my body. Finn's mouth on my body. Finn's body in my body.
The memories flood me in a high-definition, surround-sound, this-is-not-safe-for-public-school way. I'm mid-sentence about the funeral nobody attends, dry erase marker raised, when my mind helpfully supplies the exact sound Finn made when I sank down onto him. The marker just hovers there while twenty-six teenagers wait for the end of a sentence I no longer remember starting.
"Ms. Gable?" Ryan James, voice pitched with real concern. "Are you all right?"
"I'm excellent, Ryan." I cap the marker with authority and turn to face the class. "Where was I?"
"The funeral. You stopped in the middle and smiled at the whiteboard."
"I did not smile at the whiteboard."
The whole front row exchanges grins and laughter. "You totally smiled at the whiteboard," one of them adds.
Someone must have turned up the heat in my classroom, because suddenly my face feels like it's been lit on fire. "Everybody open your books to page one-ninety-two."
I redirect us to the last page, because that's the job. The class discussion that follows is actually good. We get to the green light Gatsby believed in right to the end, the wanting of a thing across the water. A girl in back of the class says it's romantic. Ryan James says it's delusional. I stand there feeling personally qualified to referee that debate because I'm also wanting something I probably can't hold on to in the end.
I manage to keep my body and my brain in the same room for whole minutes at a time. But the sensory ambushes keep coming—little flashbulbs with no respect for state curriculum standards. Finn's hands shaking on the knot of my dress. His mouth, giving and commanding between my legs while I gripped the couch cushion and lost hold of all my vocabulary. The weight of his arm over me at two in the morning, like I was something he needed.
