Heart the Lover (4)

‘It’s not that. It isn’t. But “future promise”? Like someday far from now I may show the faintest flicker of talent?’

‘So you never took another one?’ I ask.

‘No.’

‘He didn’t even take that one,’ Sam says. ‘He dropped it after three weeks.’

‘None of the writers I admire ever took a class in creative writing,’ Yash says. ‘I think I’ll be okay.’

Ivan passes me a slice of pizza on a delicate white plate with a gold rim and a cluster of rosebuds in the center. ‘Apart from the night of the red dress, why have we never seen you before?’ he asks me. ‘Where have you been hiding?’

I wasn’t in a sorority and I didn’t go to frat parties and I worked at a restaurant three nights a week. ‘I don’t know. I was on the golf team for my first year, so I traveled a lot.’ This is stretching the truth a bit.

‘You were on the fucking golf team?’ he says. Our university has a very good golf team—ACC Champions eleven years straight.

‘Freshman year. Then I quit.’ I quit the first week.

‘Damn. You were a recruit.’



‘Everyone’s a recruit.’ Did he think it was 1920? No one walked on anymore.

‘She’s not Daisy Buchanan, she’s Jordan Baker,’ Yash says, then bends an ear toward me. ‘Does your voice sound like money?’

‘No. It sounds like someone who gave up her golf scholarship.’

I can tell they all like me better once they’ve changed my name to Jordan. They use it a lot.

Yash carries the empty pizza boxes into the kitchen and comes back with cards. ‘Surely Jordan knows how to play hearts.’

I don’t, but I love card games and am a quick learner and shoot the moon in the second hand.

‘Jordan. Sly J. Watch out there, Sammy.’

Sam glances quickly at me, that little smile above his fan of cards.

‘Well,’ says Sam after we play six hands, gathering up all the cards and not dealing them out again.

‘Time to show her your etchings?’ Ivan says. ‘There are actual etchings in his room. God’s truth.’

‘Have a look?’ Sam is blushing and also asking me with his eyes.

Yash is loading the dishwasher in the kitchen.

I nod.

In the hallway he takes my hand and I follow him up the tight steep staircase. There’s a turn at the top then two more steps. He reaches for a switch on the wall. An old sconce comes on after a delay, dimly. He leads me into the front bedroom. He doesn’t turn on the overhead and we don’t look at any etchings. He pulls me onto Dr. Gastrell’s tall double bed.

We kiss and wrap our legs around each other and he says he’s been wanting to get me up here all night. We press hard against each other and I feel like I might come before I get my jeans off. We laugh because my fingers don’t seem to be working but I get them unzipped and he reaches for me as soon as I kick them off and he makes a sort of low growl when he feels how wet I am. I feel him, too, straining against the zipper of his jeans. I reach for his belt and he says something that sounds like no. I can feel his pulse through the fabric, the shape of his tip. It takes all my strength to remain still. He kisses me and starts to finger me and doesn’t explain why I can’t touch him.

I sit up and pull my pants back on. The desire is still careening around inside me, irritatingly, like being drunk when you need to be sober.

‘Please don’t take it the wrong way,’ he says.

I can hear Yash and Ivan arguing downstairs, a few thuds, then Yash laughing. I feel mortified, like the two of them already know what has happened. Ivan sent us up here. He knew how it would play out. I have a paranoid streak and I need to get out of here.



I put on my shoes, adjust my bra, and open the door.

‘Jordan.’ Sam can move very quickly. He touches my arm, my hip. Lifts my shirt and strokes it with his thumb. ‘Please stay. Please, please, please. I can explain.’ His lips in my hair, his thumb moving over my hipbone. I don’t want to go downstairs and see Yash and Ivan on my way out. Eventually I relent.

We get under the sheets. We keep our shirts and underwear on. He spoons me and kisses my neck and my ear, and my body is in a riot. I need to leave. I need to stay. I can feel him hard against me. I never felt anything like this for Jay. He falls asleep way before I do and does not explain.

I wake up early. I need to go in search of a bathroom. I slip off the bed without waking Sam. Once more I put on my jeans and open the door. The sconce is still on and there are two doors at the end of the hallway. Both shut. My guess is that the bathroom will be above the kitchen because of the plumbing, so I open the door on the left slowly, just a crack.

It’s not a bathroom. It’s Yash in a twin bed under a yellow bedspread. He is surrounded by books. Books in piles along the walls and all around the bed, and a few beside him on the yellow bedspread. He’s on his back with a concentrated, serious expression I’ve never seen before, as if sleep were very hard work. I shut the door and go into the bathroom across the hall.

Sam is awake when I come back. I get in beside him and there’s a lot of kissing and pressing together. With Jay I never liked sex in the morning, but sexual frustration in the morning is even worse. I try to distract myself by looking over his shoulder at the spines of the books on his bedside table. Confessions of Saint Augustine, Paul the Apostle, Mere Christianity.