Scandalous

Chapter 32

She stayed on the bed for a long time after the call ended.

The phone was face-down on the duvet beside her, which was where it had been for most of the last four hours — she'd stopped holding it somewhere around the second hour, when the conversation had settled into the kind of rhythm that didn't require her to pay attention to the physical object, only to the voice coming through it. She'd been lying on her back with one knee bent and the other leg stretched out, looking at the ceiling of her room with the unfocused gaze of someone whose attention is entirely elsewhere, which it had been.

Four hours and twenty-something minutes.

She'd checked when she heard the knock through the phone — the crisp, non-negotiable quality of it, the voice behind it like a door being closed — and had registered the time on her screen with the specific, slightly disoriented feeling of someone surfacing from something. The afternoon had disappeared. The turkey sandwich was long finished, the coffee cold on the nightstand, the room darker than she'd noticed it getting.

She looked at the ceiling now.

She thought about Catcher in the Rye and the argument they'd been building toward when the knock ended it — whether Holden's inability to see himself was tragedy or armor or both, the specific, spiraling pleasure of a disagreement that was going somewhere rather than simply moving. She thought about his mother. The way he'd said she was very bright with the particular, unguarded quality of a memory that still lived close to the surface, and the way the sentence after it — she died when I was twelve — had landed without weight in his voice, the tone of a man who has said a true thing so many times it has stopped requiring decoration but has not stopped being true.

She thought about three people.

Claire. Gwendolyn. Terry.

Then there's you.

She had said it the way she'd meant it — plainly, without performance, the way she said things she actually believed — and she had heard what it did to the quality of silence on his end of the line, the particular, fractional pause of a man receiving something he wasn't quite prepared for. She had liked that. She was aware that she had liked it.

And then.

She had said goodnight and then she had said his name.

Nathan.

She hadn't thought about it. That was the thing she kept coming back to, lying on her back in the November dark of her room with the ceiling above her and the phone silent beside her. She hadn't constructed it, hadn't made a decision, hadn't felt the familiar small deliberateness of choosing something for effect. It had come out the way words came out when you weren't monitoring yourself — naturally, in the register of someone speaking to a person they had, somewhere without announcing it, stopped treating as a title.

Mr. Kingston was a classroom. Nathan was the voice on the other end of four hours.

She turned it over in her mind.

Nathan. Two syllables. The specific way her mouth had shaped them, the way the name had felt — not unfamiliar, she'd been thinking it privately for long enough, but different spoken aloud, aimed at him, received.

And then his goodnight in return. The single word before the line went quiet, with the particular, slightly unsteady quality of a man who was managing his register and almost had it.

She turned onto her side.

She thought about his voice — the general fact of it and then the specific details, the ones she had been accumulating since September without intending to. The British in it, the particular warmth the accent gave certain words, the way it dropped lower when he was saying something he actually meant rather than something he was performing. The way her name sounded in it. Shae. He said it the way he said everything — without unnecessary ornamentation, with the full weight of his attention behind it, as though the name itself was worth the consideration he was giving it.

She closed her eyes.

She was aware of her own body in the specific way she became aware of it when she'd been refusing to acknowledge something for long enough that it stopped waiting for acknowledgment and made itself known regardless. The warmth of it. The specific, low throbbing that had started somewhere around the moment she'd said his name and he'd gone quiet, and had not entirely stopped.

She let herself think about it.

Not with the edited, managed quality she usually brought to these thoughts — the quick redirection, the subject change she performed on herself the way she performed it in conversation. She let it come the way it wanted to come and she lay in the dark and did not look away from it.

She thought about his hands.

She had looked at them enough times in Room 214 without being obvious about it — the way he held a book, the way he moved a pen across a margin, the way they rested on the desk when he was listening. Capable hands. Long fingers. The focused, deliberate way they moved when he was working through something carefully. The hands of a man who had been up since five in the morning cooking a meal nobody would thank him for.

She thought about those hands on her.

The image arrived with a specificity that surprised her — not the vague, formless shape of a daydream but something detailed and particular. She was lying exactly as she was lying now and he was above her, not rushed, not careless, moving with the same unhurried and deliberate attention he brought to everything he considered worth his time. One hand at her jaw, tilting her face up. The specific quality of being looked at by him — truly looked at, the way he looked at things he was deciding were worth understanding — directed not at a page or a student's argument but at her, only her, in the dark.

She exhaled.

She let her own hand move.

Down the line of her throat, slowly, the way she imagined his would — learning the shape of her, unhurried. Over her collarbone. The thin cotton of her sleep shirt warm from her skin. She felt the throbbing sharpen into something more specific, more insistent, and she did not redirect it.

She thought about his mouth.

The accent of him saying her name against her neck — Shae — the specific music of it, the way the vowel would open in his voice, low and deliberate, right at her ear. She thought about the scratch of his jaw, the days-old stubble she'd catalogued from across a classroom. She thought about what it would feel like against the curve of her shoulder, the soft skin below her ear, dragging slowly down in a way that would make her arch into it.

You have my full attention, she imagined him saying. Quiet. Just for her. The British in it like something warm poured slowly. You've had it for a while.

She pulled her sleep shirt up and ran her palm flat across her stomach, feeling the warmth of her own skin, and she imagined his hand there instead — the weight of it, the deliberateness. She thought about the way his fingers would move. Not tentative. Not performing confidence. Simply sure, the way he was sure of things he'd decided were true.

She thought about him kissing her.

She had imagined this before and redirected it and she did not redirect it now. She let it come fully — the specific, detailed imagination of his mouth on hers, not hurried, the kiss of a man with something to say and the patience to say it properly. The way his hand would come up into her hair, the dark of it between his fingers, and the sound he might make against her mouth — quiet, involuntary, the sound of a man whose composure has finally and completely given way.

She pushed her shorts down.

Her own hand found the heat of her and she was already slick and wanting and she pressed into the feeling with a soft exhale and kept his voice in her head — Shae, Shae — the way he said it when he wasn't being careful, the way it had sounded on the phone tonight at the end of four hours when the professional register had slipped just enough.

She thought about his eyes. The specific quality of them when he was paying attention — the focused, unhurried clarity of someone who sees more than they say. She thought about what it would be like to have those eyes on her in a dark room with no one else present and no performance required and nowhere to redirect anything.

She moved with more intention and felt the pleasure build in the specific, climbing way of something that has been approaching for a long time — not just tonight, not just the phone call, but months of accumulated redirection finally released into one direction. She thought about his hand where hers was, his deliberate, certain attention turned entirely on making her feel something, and she thought about his voice in her ear saying her name one more time in the low, unguarded register of a man who has stopped managing himself entirely.

Nathan, she whispered. Nathan.

She came quietly, her back arching slightly off the duvet, one hand fisted in the sheets, his name a silent shape on her lips in the dark of her room on Thanksgiving night.

Afterward she lay still for a long time.

The ceiling. The dark. The specific quality of a room after something has happened in it.

She breathed.

She thought about three people on one hand. She thought about then there's you and the silence that followed it. She thought about four hours and twenty-three minutes and a conversation that had not felt like four hours because she had not wanted it to end. She thought about goodnight, Nathan coming out of her mouth like something that lived there already, like something that had always been true and was only now getting around to being said.

She thought about his face in the classroom. His handwriting in the margin of her pages. The way he moved through a room with the unhurried ease of someone entirely comfortable occupying space. The specific, complicated, entirely non-professional quality of what she felt when he looked at her directly and held it a beat longer than a teacher needed to.

She put her arm over her eyes.

She was in love with him.

Not the soft, constructed version — the manageable, feelings for language she had been using in the privacy of her own head as though imprecision would keep it contained. She named it plainly, in the honest, unsparing way she named things she actually believed, and she felt the full dimensions of it settle into her chest. The weight of it. The impossibility of it. The complete, inconvenient, non-negotiable truth of it.

She was in love with Nathan Kingston. Her teacher. A married man, eighteen years older than her. A man with his wife's knock audible through the phone and his study door closed and his heart racing — she had heard it in his voice, in the slightly unsteady quality of goodnight — on the other end of a call he should probably not have answered.

She lay with it.

She did not try to make it smaller.

She reached over and picked up the phone. The screen lit. The conversation still open, his last message sitting there — have a good evening, Shae. And then the call log. Four hours, twenty-three minutes.

She set it back down.

She thought about follow it. Don't decide in advance. His handwriting. The red pen against her blue annotations, the specific, chosen quality of advice that knew exactly what it was doing.

She intended to follow it.

She wasn't sure yet where it went.

But she was done deciding in advance.