He exhaled shortly through his nose. Rebecca was unsure whether this was a laugh or a sigh, because her presence tended to elicit both reactions from David.
Then he placed his fingers on her bottom lip—pointer finger on one side, thumb on the other—and gently squeezed as if plumping her lip to ready it. “I’m going to kiss you now, Rebecca. Don’t scream.”
Her nervous laughter was cut off as his lips met hers.
Since those long-ago summer days of play, she had considered David her dear friend. He was important enough to her that she had hidden their friendship carefully from her grandmother. But now they were both eighteen. Over the recent months, the very secrecy of their relationship had turned dark in her mind, and needful. David was a man now, she a woman pursued by others, driven toward this kiss. She opened her mouth for everything she had dreamed of and expected.
What she had not expected was David’s hands upon her bodice. They first grasped her waist, then smoothed up her back and wandered to her front. When one thumb traced her neckline, dangerously close to her bosom, she broke the kiss with a gasp.
DID I GASP MYSELF? I WAS terrified that I’d made a noise while reading my own story, surrounded by my classmates. My copy of “Almost a Lady” stared up at me from the long table of dark polished wood, just as it stared up at the other six students seated around the table, only half the class. But none of them were reading it. Two of them whispered together, two read textbooks, two typed on their laptops. And none of them were staring at me. To disguise my gasp just in case, I took another long breath as if I simply couldn’t get enough of the good, fresh New York City air. Then inhaled again and held it while I concentrated on my heart, which seemed to be palpitating.
I was nervous. Me, nervous! My story, by the luck of the draw, would be one of the first three critiqued in class. I only hoped it wouldn’t be the very first. I was confident in my writing, but nobody wants to go first. And nothing mattered more to me than my stories.
This one especially. I’d written it from life, sort of, about my very own, very real stable boy back home in Kentucky. We’d started out as friends, like David and Rebecca. Then something awful had happened and for years I couldn’t get past it. Now we never would.
We could in my story, though. I could set up obstacles to love, just like in real life—and then, unlike in real life, I could knock them down. Making every piece slide into place for my characters, writing them an unrealistically happy ending, gave me a rush and made me high. This was why I wanted to be a novelist.
The people in my high school creative-writing classes hadn’t felt this way. But now I was in an honors creative-writing class at a New York university famous for its programs in creative writing and publishing. Granted, every freshman in the honors program had to take this class, and most of them weren’t English majors and might not care about writing fiction, but surely some of them would see what I saw in my story and love it as much as I did.
If that were true, they would not be able to tear themselves away from reading and rereading my delicious romance. Yet strangely, they seemed to be getting on with their lives. I could hardly hear their breathing over their taps on laptop keyboards and the noise of late-afternoon traffic outside the window, but I was pretty sure nobody gasped. The girl nearest me texted on her insidious-looking black phone as if reading my story had been just another homework assignment and had not changed her life.
Screw all of them. I dove back into my story.
* * *
“Shall I stop?” David whispered, kissing the corner of Rebecca’s mouth. “If we’re caught, you may be confined to your room, but I will lose my position. My father may lose his position, too, and then he will shoot me.” David kissed her chin, left a trail of kisses down her neck, and mouthed her breastbone. Placing one kiss at the lowest point of her neckline, between her breasts, he paused and glanced up at her, his blond hair catching in the frills of lace upon her dress. “Better make it worth the trouble.”
“By all means,” she breathed—none too easy a feat in her corset. If this kept up she might swoon of tightly bound excitement.
With her leave, his tongue lapped at the tender skin between her breasts. He licked his way up the other side of her neckline, blazed another trail of kisses up that side of her neck, and nuzzled past the smooth ringlets of hair that her maid had arranged so artfully.
“Some things will have to wait until we are truly alone,” he growled in her ear, sending chills down her neck and across her arms in the cool night. “I should like to put my lips here.” His hand wandered down her bosom again, and cupped her breast. His thumb moved back and forth across her nipple, hard beneath the lace.
Now it was she who grasped him, her fingers finding his white shirt beneath his riding coat, her palms sliding over the warm, hard muscles of the chest that lay beneath. She kissed his lips.
Then he took charge of the embrace, grasping her shoulders to hold her still while he explored her mouth with his tongue.
Rebecca had no concept of how long this ecstasy went on before he pulled back, panting, and set his forehead against hers. “Well, that satisfies my curiosity, Miss O’Carey. Thanks for a lovely evening.”
“Cad.” She shoved him lightly.
Smiling like a scoundrel, he backed against the boughs. White petals rained down upon them both.
He fumbled with something in his breeches. She had thought the past few minutes the most intense of her life, but they were nothing compared with the alarm and ashamed delight now rushing through her veins—until she realized he was only bringing out his pocket watch.
Glancing at it, he said, “You’d better go back before you’re missed.”
“All right.” She backed a pace away and observed him, calmly now that her heart had quieted. He carried the watch for timing the horses, of course, but it was easy to imagine him a gentleman, with a gentleman’s pocket watch, his clothes the fashion of a young dandy rather than the uniform of a stable hand. He could so easily have been the great catch of the neighborhood, and in that case they could have been married.
But it was not to be. She shook her head to clear it. It was one thing to arrange an assignation with the stable boy, and another thing entirely to fall in love with him.
“I had almost lost the wherewithal to ask,” she said, “but did you bring my glove after all?”
He stared at her blankly for a moment, and she thought he had not brought it, and that her grandmother would demand some fine explaining if Rebecca had the misfortune to meet her on re-entering the party.
But this was more of his usual stonewalling to frighten her. With a grin he pulled her glove, tightly rolled, from another trouser pocket.
“I suppose I can’t stroll into the party with my excuse flopping about,” she said. “That would look odd.” She fished her reticule from her own pocket and attempted to work the rolled glove through the small opening. It would not go.
“Here, let me.”
Instinctively she pulled back, not wanting him to soil her glove and her reticule with his dirty fingers.
She looked up at him in embarrassment. Of course he had washed before meeting her. His fingers were not dirty, as usual in the stable. She was horrified that she had instinctively thought such a thing, as if he were dirty permanently. From his somber expression she could tell he knew exactly what was going through her mind.
Gently he took the glove and the reticule from her. As she watched, he worked the glove through, careful not to open the reticule too far and tear it. “I saw a snake eat a rat once,” he commented, “out behind your grandmother’s north barn. Unhinged its jaws to do it.”
“That may be beyond the capacity of this snake,” she said—and just then the reticule gave, and the glove slipped inside. They both sighed their relief.
He fastened the jeweled top and handed the reticule back to her, his fingers brushing hers. “When will I see you again?”
At dawn, when you drive us in the coach
back to the house, she could have said cattily. But he gazed seriously at her, and something told her the kiss they had finally shared had changed everything between them. She might not love him, but she could not disappoint him.
“My grandmother leaves for business in Frankfort tomorrow,” Rebecca said. “Let’s look for an opportunity.”
“Let’s do.” He touched the tip of her nose with one finger, then her bottom lip again. “Take care, and watch out for captains.”
She laughed and whispered, “Always.” Then she fled the bower.
She returned to the party, furtively examining the revelers as she entered. No eyes were upon her, not even those of her grandmother, across the room, or Captain Vanderslice, conversing with elderly Mrs. Woodson, boring her ever closer to death. Everybody seemed involved in their own pursuits. The mint julep was Rebecca’s friend tonight, throwing a shroud over others’ powers of observation. Nobody saw her come in or commented on her reticule, obviously full to bursting.
She would not even need to use her pin money to pay off her maid, as she had done several times in the past when David had met her in the barn. They had simply played then, not kissed. He had taught her to swing on a rope from the loft down to the hayrick below like a pirate conquering the poop deck. The issue had been that she was too old to be playing, and much too old to be playing with the stable boy.
The latter had not changed, she thought as she gazed out the doorway she had just entered. Blinded anew by the candlelight, she could not make out shapes in the darkness as she had earlier, but she did detect a flash of blond head keeping its distance across the patio. Watching her, and waiting.
I LET OUT A LONG, SATISFIED sigh. This story set up a grand adventure for Rebecca and David, with a fairy-tale ending—everything I’d longed for with my stable boy. It was perfect. The class would love it.
I only wished they would reassure me by telling me so. But they kept their heads down, focused on their own work, as if we were waiting for the subway. Maybe later in the semester we’d be comfortable enough with one another to start a group convo as we waited for the whole class to trickle in. But it was only our second meeting. Even so, normally I would have started the group convo myself. I hated silence.
Today was not normal. To get my mind off the impending judgment of my goal in life, I pulled my calculator out of my book bag. My boss had offered me a double shift at the coffee shop on Saturday. If I took it, I wouldn’t be able to go to the Broadway matinee I’d scoped out. If I didn’t take the shift and I bought the cut-rate Broadway ticket, I might have to dip into the reserves I’d saved over the summer to make my first payment on my dorm room. My scholarship covered tuition only, and I’d been able to talk the university into a payment plan for my rent since I’d unexpectedly become destitute the night of high school graduation.
A Broadway ticket might have been a frivolous expense when I was faced with eviction. But I’d wanted to study writing in New York City as long as I could remember. Now I was afraid I wouldn’t be here long. And if I didn’t make the most of my experience, it would be like I was never here.
As I crunched numbers—God, my hourly pay was low, and tips were abysmal no matter how low I wore my necklines—I resisted looking up at the students entering the room. I especially avoided meeting the eyes of the two noisy guys who blustered in and sat directly across from me, just as they had on the first day of class. They knew each other from elsewhere, obviously, and the Indian one in particular was the cocky type who might give me a hard time about “Almost a Lady.” People had made fun of me for writing romantic stories before. I hoped he and his friend wouldn’t gang up on me.
Summer was the last one in, and I felt my shoulders relax. I’d never been one of those timid girls who couldn’t take a step without the shadow of her best friend crossing her path. But putting my story in front of these strangers was like stripping naked in a men’s prison rec room. I turned to Summer, expecting a friendly roommate-type question designed to set me at ease, such as, How did calculus go?
She looked me up and down and shrieked, “Where did you get that scarf?” drawing the boisterous guys’ attention.
Busted! I tried to mix my expensive clothes from home with the cheap replacements I could afford. I was aiming for a gradual, graceful decline into poverty. But when I’d gotten dressed that morning after Summer had left for her eight o’clock, I’d been tired. I’d thrown on a T-shirt, a scarf, and my most comfortable jeans—all of which happened to be designer. I should have been more careful. Summer did not own any designer labels, but she wanted them. And she knew them when she saw them.
I gazed at her blankly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I meant that I knew exactly what she was talking about, and we should discuss it later.
But we’d been friends only five days, too short a time for her to decipher my unspoken messages. She looked me up and down again. “And those jeans,” she murmured.
“I beg your damn pardon?” I asked, still telegraphing for her to shut up.
She dumped her book bag in her richly upholstered chair, grasped my wrist, and dragged me out of my own richly upholstered chair. We both tripped on the edge of the Oriental rug as she pulled me toward the door.
Most of my classes were held in modern buildings, like you’d expect at any college. But the honors freshman creative-writing class met in a converted town house. Our classroom was a long boardroom, the dark wooden paneling hung with portraits of dead scholars staring down at us from their frames. The thick, carved table and big comfy chairs replaced student desks. The stately room made the class and our writing seem important—until Summer and I tripped over the rug, which reminded us that we were just freshmen after all, wearing shorts and hooded sweatshirts. Or, in my case, a designer scarf and—
“Designer jeans!” At least we’d reached the hallway and she’d pressed me against the wall before she hissed this at me, out of our classmates’ hearing. “I thought you said you shopped at the thrift store.”
“I do shop at the thrift store.” The only thing I had actually purchased there was an outfit for my belly-dancing class. A little flamboyant but a lot cheaper than new workout clothes would have been. And I often browsed in the thrift store, which counted as shopping.
“There is no way you got a two-hundred-dollar scarf in a thrift store,” she whispered. “And those jeans. They’re from last year. A size-four woman did not drop dead and give her almost-brand-new designer jeans to charity. I thought you didn’t have any money. You told me you were working at the coffee shop because your scholarship is tuition only. You didn’t say you have a line of credit from back home!”
“I don’t. The scarf and the jeans were gifts.” Not a lie. My grandmother had bought all my clothes for the six years I lived with her.
Summer pointed at me. “I knew all that detail in your story was a little too realistic. You’re really Rebecca, aren’t you? Just in the present day? You own a horse farm in Kentucky.”
“What? No! Why would you think that?”
“Last weekend when Jørdis brought the Sunday Times to the dorm, you went straight to the horse section.”
“There is no horse section of the New York Times.”
She poked my breastbone. “You know what I mean. The horse-race part of the sports section.”
I drew myself up to my full height and looked down at Summer, trying to impress on her the ridiculousness of her theory, which was of course pretty damn close to the truth. I said haughtily, “I certainly do not own a horse farm.” My grandmother owned it. Even when she died eventually, I would never own it. She’d made sure of that.
Summer stared stubbornly up at me. Then her eyes drifted down to boob level. “And that shirt. I should have known nobody looks that good in a regular old T-shirt, not even you. Who made it?” She grabbed my arm, whipped it behind my back, and rammed my face into the wall. Holding me there, she fumbled with my neckline to read the label. “We’ve only known each other a fe
w days,” she muttered, “but I always assumed I would share everything with my college roommate, and we are not getting off to a good start.”
She was a poor girl trying to look rich. I was a former rich girl suddenly poor. As a tall redhead, I could not have looked more different from Summer, tiny and African-American—but we were both Southern and struggling to fit in here in New York. I had sensed this about her immediately, and I had liked her a whole lot until she dragged me out into the hall and threatened to blow my cover. I was just about to jab my elbow into her ribs to get her off me—I had to hide that designer T-shirt label at all costs—when a voice beside us purred, “Good afternoon, ladies.”
Summer and I jumped away from each other. Gabe Murphy was our writing teacher, a stubby man with a bulbous nose and lots of snow white hair. He would have looked jolly, like Santa Claus, except he dressed in a hoodie and cargo shorts and flip-flops like most of the class. I figured he’d been a surfer in California until one day he glanced in the mirror and realized he was forty pounds overweight and nearing retirement age, and he thought he’d better come to New York to pursue the writing career he’d always thought he would have plenty of time for later.
I called him our writing teacher rather than our writing professor because I wasn’t sure he was a professor. That was a special designation the university gave to personages with fancy degrees. I doubted it applied to Gabe. I wasn’t sure whether to call him Dr. Murphy or Mr. Murphy or just plain Gabe. He hadn’t introduced himself, and the syllabus was labeled GABE MURPHY. No clue there. None of the other students had taken a stand on the issue, so I coped by calling him Excuse me, or—
“Hello,” I said noncommittally. “Summer was just straightening my shirt before class. I want to look professional when we discuss my story.”
“We’re writers,” he said. “We’re prone to eccentricity.” He tilted his head toward the classroom, indicating that we should follow him inside.