If I Stay (13 page)

“It's Professor Lawson's,” I mumbled. “He lives close-by the apartment, in that giant gated mansion. My tire was flat, and he just so happened to be around. So he lent me his car until mine was patched up.”

“Well, Jesus.” Sacha muttered. “I guess that was nice of him.”

“Yep,” I smiled tightly, and we kept driving. From behind I could hear the music as it vibrated through Brandon's headphones, his eyes lazily staring out the window, still half-closed. I took that as a safe enough opening to speak.

“Last night...” I started, then stopped. “Sacha, you know you're my best friend.”

“It's really alright,” he said quickly, looking over at me. “We don't have to do this.”

“But do you really mean it, or are you just saying that so things will resume as normal?”

He shook his head a little, looking mildly upset.

“Does it really make a difference? What do you want from me, Gemma? The truth?”

We pulled into the parking lot, and I found the first open spot. I turned back to Brandon and told him that we'd meet him in class. When he was gone, I took the opportunity to grant myself a single heavy sigh.

“Yes,” I told him. “Sacha, I would always want you to tell me the truth.”

He shrugged his shoulders. Not in a passive way, but rather a defeatist one.

“I've had feelings for you ever since you were with Toby, Gems. I mean, listen. I'm not saying that guys can't just
be friends
with the opposite sex. It can happen. But in most cases, it's just...you spend enough time with someone, and feelings can develop. It's not like I asked for this.”

“I never said that you did,” I said quietly. He nodded, his eyes heavy.

“Gemma, I shouldn't have asked you to kiss me. That was wrong. I could say that it was the booze, but we both know that even when I'm totally hammered I can still reserve some ounce of self-control. Last night wasn't about acting on a buzz. I wanted to kiss you.”

I didn't say anything as he took a slow, deep, frustrated breath.

“I can't even tell what you're thinking right now,” he said. “Are you upset?”

“No,” I answered honestly. “Just torn.”

“Torn over what?”

“Over not knowing what I want right now,” I said. “I mean, I'm glad that things are over with Toby. I feel so much better, and lately, things have been going really well. I just didn't expect this bomb to drop. And honestly, Sacha? Do you want me to say that I
don't
care about you? That I've never felt a single bit of attraction towards you? That would be lying. But even so, I just don't think I could handle the whole relationship thing right now. Not at this very moment.”

It felt right. It sounded right. Because even if the words were slightly twisted, and not exactly the perfectly-woven truth, it wasn't a lie. I wasn't ready to jump the gun again. In fact, the thought of it scared me senseless. On top of this, I was confused. I was so confused. The only thing that made sense was my artwork. And if we were talking about people – the only person that really made sense, even if it killed me, was Ben.

But could I jump into something more with him, even if it's what I wanted? Desire and passionate play were so different than the real, committed thing. I knew that.

I looked at Sacha, shaking my head.

“Would you be okay if I simply told you that I'm going through a floating stage right now?”

He nodded. And, happily, it was sincere.

Groaning at the time, and knowing that we only had a few minutes before class started, the two of us ran into the building with our backpacks flying. I was floating, really floating. My sneakers barely touched the pavement, my mind all out of sorts and drifting elsewhere, only thinking of Ben. Ben, Ben, Ben and his words and his everything else.

And you know, that was truly an honest answer.

THIRTEEN

Ben's apparel was surprisingly casual that morning: Jeans, a plain white T-shirt, and a red hooded sweatshirt. He reminded me a little of James Dean, with the addition of his dorky glasses and mussed up hair. When I walked in, seating myself at the first open desk (and thankful for once that Sacha was forced to sit elsewhere) he was busied with reading some paper, yawning sporadically as the rest of us settled in. When it hit 9 o'clock sharp, he crumpled up the paper and tossed it into the trash bin, his dark eyes lighting up the room as he clapped his hands together – a few of us jumping in response.

“Alright, you crazy lot. How many of you got a solid eight hours last night? Hands raised!”

No hands shot up, most of the students nearly passed out on their desks. Ben looked at me, his eyes quickly falling to another spot in the room.

“That makes all of us, I suppose.”

We were instructed to write for the first five minutes, and it could be about anything. Ben had said at the start of class that sometimes it was good to just let the words flow, to warm yourself up for whatever you might be working on later. Or just for the sake of creativity.

Either way, it was a simple and rather nice way to start the mornings. The sound of pens on paper, scribbling away, everyone pouring themselves out across those thin blue lines. Ben sat quietly, watching us write. I couldn't help but wonder if he was ever one of us, sitting at a desk while being instructed to just let himself go. I imagine he was.

I imagine he must have been. He was a writer, after all.

Even though my sentences ran jagged like mountains, words scribbled out here and there and replaced with other words, the overall message and tone remained the same: I was torn. I was head over heels for this man who was so close and yet oceans away, who sat with an expression on his face that even I, in all my skill at over-reading and hyper analyzing everything, could not read. He rolled himself around like teenager, spinning like a top on the office chair where he was seated. A few students looked up, laughing under their breath. A few of the girls I could practically hear sighing, the sounds of their desks creaking as they craned forward, their eyes forced on the paper and not on the attractive guy that sat on his invisible pedestal before us all, a spectacle of purely flawed perfection on display.

And that was another thing. As my pen flew, scraping and scribbling and working like it had a mind of its own, I considered the fact that as my eyes quickly darted from my notebook to Ben, to Ben and back to my notebook, he
was
perfect. I could see the little flaws, sure. Maybe his eyes were a little too wide. Sometimes he appeared startled, even when he was perfectly composed. His mouth was big, his lips full and pouty. His two front teeth overlapped with such a subtlety that at first glance you'd never notice it. You had to look, really look in order to see it.

There was the height situation, of course. When my waves were tamed, the top of my head nearly touched his shoulder, which granted him a solid staggering foot against my small, Mobbit frame.

Still. I was entirely, totally, completely smitten. And flaws aside, he was ink to my paper. The rain that sputtered from the clouds. Despite the cynicism in his beloved work, he assumed a place of pure and almost untouched hope amidst the sea of goddamn phonies.

That, to me, was beautiful.

“Alright. Pens down, everyone.”

Ben stopped spinning around on the office chair, finally deciding to fall back into a suitably professor-like demeanor. “Who wants to share?”

Darcy's hand raised heavily, the sound of her throat clearing making me want to barf and also shoot her the middle finger for no reason other than my bubbling bouts of inevitable immaturity. I hated her guts. And her bleached blonde hair, too.

“Oh, Darcy wants to read?” Brandon mumbled, a loud enough mumble that the rest of us could still hear with perfect clarity. Darcy's eyes narrowed. “Shocking.”

“Brandon,” Ben tapped his fingers with a steady
tap tap tap
against his desk, and I could even tell that he was suppressing a smirk. “That's enough. Darcy, go ahead.”

Darcy flashed Brandon a look of total hatred, to which he responded with his most polite and proper smile possible. After which she cleared her throat again, and proceeded to read.

“I was listening to NPR the other day...” She started. Brandon, at this point, had his head on the desk-top and was nearly trembling with NPR-mentioned-induced laughter. “And anyway, I was just thinking about how young I am, and how messed up the world is.”

“Undoubtedly so,” Ben agreed, giving a small nod. I couldn't take my eyes off of him, watching for the smallest softening of his expression as he watched Darcy read, hoping that he might look at me again, hoping for something even if it was totally foolish given the current set of circumstances: sitting in a classroom, reading aloud our writing. What more could I really want?

At that moment, he looked at me. Quick and passing, lasting less than a second. It was then that I acknowledged, somberly, that humans are never satisfied. Constantly craving, never satiated. We always want more.

When Darcy had finished, the sound her seat scraping against the linoleum, I realized that I hadn't been paying attention to a word that she'd spoken. That tiny blip on the screen that stretched across the classroom walls, on display for my eyes only, had been entirely muted.

But who was I kidding? I really didn't care. Nobody misses not having to hear what the people they dislike want to talk about. Nobody.

Ben twirled the laces of his sweatshirt around the finger of his left hand. Another thing I'd noticed: he was left-handed.

“Great job, Darcy. You have a terrifically strong voice,” he said. She waited, I could tell, perhaps wishing that there might be something more, some other compliment that he would give her. But he didn't, and instead turned to the rest of the class. “Who else would like to share?”

No takers. That is, except me. I raised my hand, feeling skittish and yet brave. Sick and yet strong. When he glanced at me, his eyes locked on the small of my wrist, falling to my face. He smiled, beautiful and sly.

“Gemma,” he said. “Go ahead.”

I took a deep breath, scooting back my chair and standing even though I felt a certain wobbliness that came along with the anxiety of standing in front of your professor that was also, in some way or another, a lover of sorts.

“I know that I'm young,” I said. “Twenty-two. That's twenty-two years, and approximately eight-thousand and thirty-five days. I have lived nearly one-hundred and ninety-two thousand, eight-hundred and ninety-eight days...”

I stopped, hoping that my math was correct, or more-so hoping that the internet had not failed me terribly.

“That's not so much time, but it's enough,” I continued. “For me to understand a thing or two about what it means to care, and to love, and to be lost in complete infatuation. Not so much like Romeo and Juliet, you see, because theirs was a quick and tragic tale. Some argue that it wasn't really so much about love at all, and sure, there is that whole thing about them both being teenagers and all. But I digress, so here is what I where my thoughts and feelings and every fiber collide into a combustion of desire and distress: this has been a slow, painful burning. I believe that it's been rising and growing even before the demise that was my last exploration into the depths of love and anger and loss. You might wonder what exactly
this
is. A definition of what is plaguing and haunting me, pricking at my skin like needles or those terrible prickly plants that everyone likes to look at but nobody likes to touch. An explanation to render this bunch of scribbles something more than just a ramble. Well, it started in a normal place. Smoke and alcohol and typical banter, which gradually shifted into the implausible when my sights fell upon someone who has since failed to leave my head. It's disgusting, really.”

I stopped. I felt ill, but not enough to vomit or anything. It was more the stillness in the room, and the way I could feel Ben watching me. The way I could feel Brandon watching me, and Sacha. Only here was the place where only I, Ben, and Brandon knew.

The rest had no idea.

I looked at Ben, and his lips were parted in a way that almost looked like he was in pain.

“It's disarming how a single kiss can imprint in such an infinite, forever sort of way. I know, I know that memories blur things whether we want them to or not. And I know that the forever sort of way that I'm talking about now will be void of meaning in twenty years time, when I'm likely with someone else who has been granted my forever-sort-of-
something
in the form of a wedding ceremony and a few kids. Maybe a mortgage. And right now, I'm twenty-two. I'm, at a rough estimate, eight thousand and thirty-five days old – and I'm thinking about you. You, you, you. Forever you, even if it's stupid and foolish and futile and we're all going to die in a hundred years. Unless, of course, we develop some sort of fantastic elixir that renders death optional.”

I took one last, small breath.

“I just wish I knew what to do about you. I wish that I could understand any of this.”

From a distance, the pen that Sacha had been tapping against his desk fell and rolled across the floor, only stopping when it hit a trash bin. I glanced at him, my face burning. There was no doubt, I knew, that he probably thought that I had been writing about him. That's the thing about being vaguely vague, and also in love: you interpret things differently than people who are scrutinizing things from a less clouded and more clearer state. Sacha likely thought that our kiss shared in the darkness of my coat closet had left me totally confused, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, there was Ben who still remained silent. Seated at his desk, watching me as I stared down at my paper, waiting for a sound to break the unbearable silence.

“Professor Lawson,” Brandon finally spoke. “I think you should keep all of this writing that we've been doing and compile it into a book or something. Let's face it, we're all pretty damn brilliant when it comes to this creative writing thing.”

“I would have to agree,” Ben remarked, smiling lightly.

Scrawling my name in the corner and ripping the paper free from its notebook binding, all of us handed our exercise work to the front of the class, where Ben collected it in a neat little stack which he stored in a manilla folder. The manilla folder that was stored in the suitcase that I'd locked myself in a hotel bathroom with. That also stored, I knew, some of Ben's work. Unless he'd found somewhere else to put it.

We spent the rest of class talking about the importance of voice, and also grammar – which Ben exemplified in a few choice samples of writing that he'd pulled out from his bag of tricks. He also suggested that if we were interested enough to pick up a copy of Hubert Selby Jr's
Requiem for a Dream
, where he explained that there was no real punctuation used in the character dialogue, so it was up to the reader to pay attention and discern who was talking throughout the novel. I didn't raise my hand, but gave a delightful inner-smirk when silently mumbling aloud that I'd already read the book. Twice, actually.

And I owned the DVD.

“Professor Lawson,” Darcy chimed. “Why don't you ever share some of your work with the class?”

Ben appeared startled. Flattered, but startled. He slowly seated himself on the edge of his desk, arms crossed.

“That's an appropriate question given the nature of this course, I suppose,” he said. “But I figured we'd make this more about you and less about me. Why? Would you all be interested in hearing something that I've written?”

“Yeah!”

Several students piped up, mostly girls. All girls, actually.

And Brandon.

“Well, shucks,” he grinned, and I grinned at the fact that he'd said
shucks
. Opening his suitcase, he sifted through a few folders from which he withdrew several pieces of paper. One by one, he tossed them aside like they were nothing, and they scattered on the floor.

The last piece he skimmed over carefully, his expression gentle and eyes suddenly soft. When he opened his mouth to start reading, I recognized the short poem immediately.

It was the same one he'd pulled out of the air for me during the night I'd spent at his hotel. The same exact poem.

My heart dropped, pounding and rattling and thrashing around within the small confines of my rib cage. I stared at him, feeling completely naked and nervous and worried that everyone around me was now aware of – well,
us
.

I kept my eyes glued to my terribly bitten-down fingernails. Nobody stirred, or stared, or even cast me a questioning look. They kept their eyes on him until he folded the paper up again, tucking it away in the folder that he slid back into his suitcase.

“Something near and dear to my heart,” he explained briefly. Cutting me a quick glance, he looked down at his watch. “But I think I'll dismiss you early. For Friday I'd like you to write at least five pages, but no more than ten...”

The class groaned, Ben rolled his eyes.

“Five pages isn't so terrible, stop complaining. You can double-space. Either way, I want you to write a brief, contemporary fairy tale.”