Breakable

I got a definitive answer to how much he knew about what was going on between Jacqueline and me when he batted his lashes and said, ‘I’ll take Hot Tutors for two hundred, Alex,’ as he left their aisle. Jacqueline full-on blushed as he hummed the Jeopardy! theme song, climbing the steps towards the exit. He grinned at me before disappearing.

Neither of us spoke until we were outside.

‘Does he, um, does he know? About …?’ My teeth grazed over the ring as she told me that her classmate was how she found out.

‘He’d noticed us … looking at each other. And he asked me if I went to your tutoring sessions.’ She shrugged, as if she was beyond it.

I could imagine that conversation and how she must have felt, after Moore’s betrayal, to be lied to again. ‘God. I’m so sorry.’ But words couldn’t make up for those lies, and I knew it.

We walked towards her Spanish class, silent and hunched into our jackets. My old friends in Alexandria would laugh and say this sunny, late fall day was shorts weather.

‘I noticed you the first week,’ I said then. Like a flash flood after an unexpected summer storm, I confessed everything – watching her in class and cataloguing her mannerisms, from tucking her hair behind her left ear to her musical fingers. I told her about the rainy day – her thank you, her smile, and how those two things affected me. I told her about my jealousy of Moore, before she ever knew me.

‘And then, the Halloween party.’

She went very still. We’d never discussed what happened that night – my view of it.

I admitted that I’d watched her leave. That I’d watched Buck follow her. ‘I thought maybe … maybe you two had decided to leave early together, without everyone knowing. Meet outside or something.’ My heart thumped beneath my ribs, revealing this failure to her – the fact that I’d been standing inside, debating following her at all, while a predator wound through the parking lot behind her.

As I suspected, Buck was more than a guy she just knew by name. He was someone she’d seen as a friend. ‘He’s my roommate’s boyfriend’s best friend,’ she said, no condemnation for me or my too-slow reaction that night in her voice. From my childhood, I recalled the symbolic gesture of absolution from the priest, and I felt she’d just given it to me.

In the same moment, we realized we weren’t surrounded by masses of fellow students any more. It was past the hour – she was late to class. ‘I have an A. I don’t really need the review,’ she said. I had an hour before my next class. I stared at her cold-reddened lips, running headlong into inappropriate territory. I wanted to kiss her, right here in the middle of campus.

‘You never did sketch me again,’ she said. She licked her lips, a small brush from the tip of her tongue, and by some miracle, I jerked my eyes away instead of pushing her into the bushes and taking possession of that mouth.

‘Coffee,’ I said.

I seldom stopped by the student union Starbucks as a customer. There was a line, but Gwen and Ron were a well-oiled machine.

‘Lucas,’ Gwen smiled tightly, refusing to look directly at Jacqueline. She was unhappy that her wise words had fallen on deaf ears, no doubt.

‘Hey, Gwen. A couple of Americanos. And I don’t think you’ve met Jacqueline.’

Like an owl, Gwen swivelled her head to eye Jacqueline. ‘Nice to meet you,’ she said, her teeth clamped.

Jacqueline smiled back, as if my usually sweet coworker wasn’t bristling with frostiness. ‘Nice to meet you, Gwen. I love your manicure – so cute!’

Gwen’s nails were painted like wrapped, multicoloured Christmas gifts. They looked kind of hideous to me. But she turned her large, dark eyes to Jacqueline, enhancing the owl likeness. ‘Oh. Thanks. I did ’em myself.’

‘You did?’ Jacqueline held out a palm and Gwen put her left hand in Jacqueline’s for closer inspection while ringing up our order and swiping my card with her right. ‘I’m so jealous! I can’t paint even one colour on mine without making a mess. Plus, I play the bass, so I have to keep my nails too short to do anything fun with them.’

Thank God, I thought.

‘Aww, that sucks!’ Gwen said, won over. I was impressed. I was also glad Eve wasn’t working, because she distrusted compliments to the point that she regarded them as an attack.

Once seated at a table in the corner, Jacqueline brought up the fact that I wear glasses, prompting a legion of inappropriate musings, courtesy of my cruel, vividly detailed memory of the reasons I’d flung those glasses away.

I don’t want you to stop.

‘I could sketch you now,’ I said, and grabbed my sketchpad from my backpack as if it was a life preserver, meant to save me from drowning. I slid the pencil from behind my ear, balancing the pad on my crossed knee, and leaned back to look at her. She flushed like she could read my thoughts.

Read this, Jacqueline. My pencil swept across the page, and I envisioned my fingers sliding across her skin. I watched her chest rise and fall, as I had last night. She stared at my hands as they interpreted the curves of her body and converted them to lines and shadows on paper.

I imagined stretching her out on my bed, crossing her wrists above her head, as she was in the drawing on my wall. I would run my fingertips over her, applying no pressure. Light strokes only, raising the tiny invisible hairs, training her body to recognize my touch. To rise to it. She would hum deep in her throat, as she had last night, restless, especially when my fingers grazed over her thighs, starting at her knees and moving up.