Tap & Gown (13 page)

was someone I could have been friends with, had I gotten to know her earlier than a month and a half before commencement. Then again, I had just started dating a guy a month and a half before commencement.

But Jamie was different. He was a knight, he was in my society. We’d have plenty of time together, even after graduation.

Too bad I couldn’t tap Michelle.

1*At least, the confessor assumes that was the general gist behind a “snow”-themed initiation. After all, it was in May.

2*All times are Diggers-time.

3*The confessor is being somewhat less than fair, here, given as atmospheric change and greenhouse gas buildup is a serious issue that deserves attention from everyone, not just Geology majors. And no, she was not coerced into saying that.

Dark water, thick as syrup, closed over my head. I thrashed and thrashed, but my legs seemed to be bound to some great weight that pulled me ever downward. I couldn’t get free, I couldn’t get air, I couldn’t stop it from happening.

“Amy! Shhh, it’s a dream.”

I woke covered in a thin sheen of sweat and blinked up into Jamie’s concerned eyes. He was leaning on one elbow, his bare shoulders bathed in moonlight, his face half in shadow. “Drowning again?”

“Yes.” I slipped from between the sheets and yanked Jamie’s borrowed T-shirt down over the top of my thighs as I padded into his bathroom to splash some cold water on my face.

“Do you notice you only have those dreams here?” He followed me and leaned against the door. I
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stared, bleary-eyed, at his reflection in the mirror. “Concerned” had a tendency to look like “angry” on Jamie. It always took me a minute to recalibrate my understanding when I saw him like this. It was too easy to imagine he was mad at me.

“No, I have them at home, too,” I said, and then slurped a few handfuls of water from the sink. “Just not when you’re there.”

“We should fix that.”

We got back into bed, and I pulled the covers up to my waist. Boys are like little heat engines. I hardly ever need to use a blanket when I sleep with one.

And that was all we’d been doing. Sleeping. Well, that and some seriously heavy make-out sessions.

“Petting,” my mother would probably call it.

Somehow, without ever discussing it, we’d realized that a late night study-session-turned-sleepover was not the most momentous occasion during which to go all the way. At least, I think that was the reason. It just never seemed right to have first-time sex with Jamie on the couch of his apartment, our textbooks strewn across the coffee table or the floor. It never seemed good enough to do it after he’d brushed his teeth and pulled me into his arms in his bed (full-sized, but still using the dorm-room comforter designed to fit a single bed). It never seemed natural to do it in my bedroom in Prescott College, with Lydia and Josh only a thin wall away.

I wasn’t sure when the correct time would be, though. It wasn’t as if we could afford a weekend away at a hotel or some romantic upstate bed-and-breakfast. I didn’t have the time; Jamie didn’t have the money. Besides, I’d never felt the need to make an occasion out of the first time in any of my other relationships. Dorm rooms were always just fine. You’re talking to the girl who lost her virginity at an after-prom party in the bedroom of the kid sister of the party-giver.

Of course, that relationship hadn’t worked out. None of them had. So maybe it was time to change things up.

“Sleepy?” Jamie’s voice floated across the pillows in the darkness.

“No.”

“
Not
sleepy?” His hand brushed against my torso, an invitation.

I took a deep breath. “Darren called me last week.”

Jamie’s hand stilled on my skin. “Oh?”

“His father apparently made him. They chucked him in rehab.”

“They have rehab for sociopaths?”

“That’s what everyone else has been wondering, too.”

Jamie was very quiet for a moment. “Everyone else?”

Oh, crap.

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“Who?” he asked.

“My club.”

“I see.” More silence.

“They’re my club, Jamie. I took an oath to tell them everything.”

“I’m your boyfriend
and
a Digger. Where does that put me on the hierarchy of communication? For curiosity’s sake.”

Jenny had basically said the same thing. Considering their entirely mutual dislike, I bet they’d both hate the fact that they agreed with each other. And then they’d hate that agreement, too. “How do you feel right now?”

And Jamie, as always, was straightforward. “Trying hard to keep my anger directed at Darren and not you.”

“Exactly!” I cried and sat up. “I knew you’d get mad, so I didn’t tell you.”

“Extraordinary plan.” He rolled away from me, his shoulders and back hunched down around the pillow.

“You always do come up with the best ones.”

Oh, give me a break. What was the purpose of telling him? I knew this script already:
Step One:
Jamie would say that Darren should be brought up on charges.

Step Two:
I’d reluctantly agree.

Step Three:
Jamie would tell me, with the law-student caveat that it was not legal advice, that I could still press charges against Darren if I wanted.

Step Four:
I’d consider it, then remember I’d made Kurt Gehry a promise, and from what I could tell, he’d been keeping to his end of it. Darren wouldn’t be fixed in a week or two. Let him call me in a year, and we’d see what he’d learned.

Step Five:
Jamie would lose another smidgen of respect for me.

“He should be in jail,” Jamie grumbled, still facing away from me.

“I know.”

“You realize that you can still press charges, right?”

Here we go.

“I don’t want to talk about this with you.” I flopped back against the pillow.

“Believe me, I’m aware of that.” He rolled over. “Perhaps you should consider making a list of forbidden topics for me to reference at times like this.”

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“Great!” I snapped, facing him. “We can put your past relationships right at the top.”

“Are you kidding me with this?” He sat up. “Amy, you don’t really want to know.”

“I do,” I said. “You just don’t want me to.”

“It’s incredibly morbid.”

“I thought you were into the morbid topics,
Poe
.”

He didn’t bother to dignify that with a fine. “Not that morbid.”

“Says the man who tried to sit in on my C.B. last fall.” Oops, perhaps it was a bad move to bring up that occasion.

His tone was tight when he replied. Yeah, I’d messed up. “That was different.”

“How?”

“Because you weren’t my girlfriend then.”

“So you didn’t care what I did until you decided I was your property? That’s nice and healthy.”

“You used the word ‘property.’ I used ‘girlfriend,’” Jamie clarified. “And though I’m sure you’d love to hang any misogynistic label you can on me, you’re wrong. I don’t care that you had sex with other guys, I just don’t want to know.”

I caught my breath. His voice had dropped, turned husky. His face was shadowed in the orange light filtering in from the street lamps. And what’s more, he was telling the truth, about both of us. He didn’t have a used-goods complex at all, and I—well, I couldn’t stop acting as if he did. Even half in jest, I still treated him like the man I’d thought he was last year. I didn’t stand up for him to the other knights in my club—even they had noticed it.

I reached for him in the darkness. “Jamie, I—”

He leaned over me. “I don’t want to hear about some other guy who touched you. I don’t want to think about how, and where, and whether or not you liked it. And because I’m so sure
I
don’t want to hear about
you
, I am positive you don’t want to hear about me.” He lowered himself over my body as he spoke, and his voice became a whisper against my skin. “You don’t want to know if I kissed her neck, like this.”

Oh, God. His mouth was hot and moist, and moved over my throat with the most precise, most intoxicating combination of pressure and suction. My hands slid over his arms and across his back, pulling him in closer. My legs parted and his hips fell between them. Through layers of sheets and shorts, I could feel his pelvis pressing the inside of my thighs.

“You don’t want to know if we only had sex in the dark, so that I could feel her body, but not see it.”

His hands slipped beneath my T-shirt and slid it up to my armpits. “You don’t want to know how much hotter that made it.” His thumbs traced the undersides of my breasts. My lips parted on a gasp. “You don’t want to hear if we made love in this bed—”

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“
Made love?
” I giggled. “You’re right, I don’t want to know that you’re secretly fifty.”

He collapsed on top of me and laughed into my neck. “Amy, Amy …”

“Jamie, Jamie,” I replied. But then, involuntarily, a picture arose in my mind of him having sex with another girl right here, just like this, and I shuddered. He was right; I didn’t want to know any of it. And despite the way he was touching me, I didn’t want to have sex with him at this moment, my head crowded with
her
—her little moans and breaths and her incredibly infuriating way of staring into his gray eyes just so …

The sour sting of jealousy washed over me, filled my sinuses, clogged in my throat. “Wait.”

“Wait?” He lifted his head.

What was wrong with me? I’d managed to sleep with George Prescott without forcing him to enumerate his legions of lovers. Without ever picturing him with any of them while we were in bed (or in the tomb, or in the Buttery, or any of the other places where we were concurrently in flagrante delicto). I’d never been like this before. I wriggled out from beneath Jamie and stood up.

“I—I need to go.”

“You what?” He caught my arm as I went for my jeans. “Go? Absolutely not.”

I yanked out of his grip. “Excuse me?”

“I’m not letting you walk through this neighborhood at 4A.M .”

Oh. Good point. I sat down on the bed, jeans in hand. Jamie sat a decent distance away. “I’m sorry,” I said, and swallowed. “I think you’re right—about not knowing.”

“I’d tell you if I thought it would end this …” He shook his head, placed his hands on his knees. “I wish you …”

“What?”

He said nothing.

“What?” I coaxed. What did he want from me?

“I wish you trusted me.”

“I do.”

He snorted. “I wish you loved me.”

I bit my lip. That’s what he meant. In the stillness that followed, I thought I could hear the soil erosion in the front yard. Now would be the perfect time to brave the rough streets and leave. Muggers would be better than this.

“Forget I said that.” His words fell into the silence.

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“Do you?”

“Forget? Yes.”

No. Did he love me? But I was as likely to get an answer out of him about that as I was about his ex-girlfriends.

“You should go to sleep,” he said at last. “You have a big week. The party. The interviews.” He scooted back over to his side of the bed.

I left my jeans on the floor and scooted, too. Maybe we didn’t love each other—maybe we weren’t willing to admit that—but we did care for each other. And I did like the way I fit into the crook of his arm. I liked the way the sheets in his house smelled like him. I liked to hear him breathe while he slept.

“Still feeling good about Kalani?”

Way to change the subject. I traced his arm with my fingertips. “Yeah. She’s perfect. Everyone’s going to love her.”

“What are you going to do about Lionel Drake?”

I kissed Jamie’s collarbone, then shrugged. “He’ll survive.”

“Pissing off the patriarchs is a cornerstone of your club’s strategy, then.”

“I’d rather piss them off than bring Topher Cox into Rose & Grave. I don’t want that guy playing in my sandbox.” Let’s not even get into the fact that he’s fond of likening himself to a serial killer. Talk about morbid.

“So you’re not even inviting him to the party?”

I looked up at him. “What would be the benefit of that?”

Jamie shifted so I was lying more fully in his arms. “It could go either way. On one hand, inviting him would send a signal to Drake that you are at least considering his grandson as a prospect.”