The Professor (15 page)

‘Come then. Tell me what moves me to be like this,’ he says, and though he has managed to get control of his voice I think he honestly wants to know. I think the idea is in his head, and he just needs someone to underline it. To tell him that this is how things are and this is how things are going to be, just as I would have had him tell me.

God, how it felt when he told me.

‘The same thing that moves me, love: the terror of losing what you most want. Oh, how I am so terrified of losing everything I want – so terrified, in fact, that I would hardly dare to seize it, in case it went away. People say…they say that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, but they are wrong, they are wrong. I scarcely loved my parents at all, and yet when they were gone I somehow became a whole other person. Every bit of ambition, every desire, every hope for my future dissolved before my eyes, when I went on without them. Oh, what is to go on without them! Good God, what it must have been like for you. To not only lose something you did love, deeply and completely, but to feel that it was up to you to save her, and fail. I can hardly imagine.’

I have to stop for a second there. My voice was wrecked before; now it breaks in the middle. Raw emotion spills out from between every letter and every syllable, and it hurts him more to hear it. The words are bad enough, without the sound I make around them rubbing against his already wounded body.

Because he is wounded now.

He has a hand on his chest, as though he can keep his heart from bleeding out as long as he presses hard enough. He can stop his own unravelling – though, by God, it seems to be happening fast, now. And faster still, when I finish what I had to say.

‘No, no, I
can
imagine. I know what it is to tell yourself you don’t want something, just so you can be sure to never know the pain of losing it. To never have to wonder if your arms will be strong enough, or your feet quick enough, or your heart hardy enough to take it, if it all turns to dust. But know this: even if you are not, I am. You have saved me from a life where no light shines. And I will always be here to make the darkness bright for you too,’ I tell him, then have to hold my breath. I don’t know if it will be enough. I have no idea if he can even take it. I said a lot of things that scared
me
, once they were out.

They made me cry. My cheeks are wet again. And though I wanted to stay standing I find I need to sit down in the middle of those words. The idea of being so afraid to lose something cuts the tendons behind my knees, and telling him I want to be bright enough that he can see just swings the hammer. It gets me in the gut, and I go down.

So God knows what it could potentially do to him.

I expect him to leave the room, at least – but oh, he doesn’t, he doesn’t. Instead he stands, right when I am weakest. Right when I wonder if I should just take it all back. I am strong, and stronger still because of him. And I can extend that strength to him, if he needs me to. But I am not invulnerable. There remains a part of me that will always wonder if I am speaking the same emotional language everyone else does. If I spoke too clumsily or too keenly, and will not be answered in the same way.

Not even by him, my person from the same some place else altogether.

He might have moved to another dimension, I think, only then he just takes me into his arms. He scoops me up, in a way that somehow restores the mess my legs have become. And he holds me, he holds me, so tight and so good I can’t help thinking everything is now going to be OK. He has told me his deepest secret, and understands completely what it has done to him. All we have to do from this point on is overcome it.

And we can.

He tells me at the station that we can. ‘I will come to you as soon as I can’,
he says, and I believe him, I believe him, I believe with every fibre of my being.

But as I wind my way back to England, full of hope for a future I never thought I could have, I find amongst my things a page torn from his little leather book.

The light that leads the way out is the same one that burns away the world entire.

I write him three letters, before I understand fully that he will probably never reply. The strange thing though is that when I do – when I accept that I will most likely never see him again – my life does not dissolve. My foundations are not reduced to rubble from which I will never emerge. I have come this far; I have clawed my way free; I could go on now into the life I was always supposed to lead. 

And I do.

Slowly, at first, oh, so slowly. As though the parts that govern living are rusted over, and need oiling and loving and looking after before I can fully use them. I have to start by actually sitting down in the cafeteria, instead of fleeing to a stairwell or back to my flat. And once I have done that – once I manage to take a seat next to two girls in the middle of a conversation – I try smiling at one of them.

It doesn’t work the first time.

I’m not even sure if they see me do it, or if they care. But that’s OK, because I know now what I refused to accept before. The reward is worth the risk. The pleasure is worth the pain. I would pay what I feel now gladly, to get my time with Lukas all over again. And this…this doesn’t even ask as much of me. I sometimes get stung by the barest bit of humiliation. I feel awkward in the face of utter coolness and clumsy beside people with ten times more grace.

But after a while I find myself having conversations with people I barely know, and hear myself in their tone. They shake too, when they have to try new things. They see me with some of the same trepidation as I feel seeing them, and stumble when they mean to shake my hand. None of them know what they’re doing inside their glittery costumes – a fact I find out on the day before graduation, when a girl called Catherine asks me to come to a party on the hill.

‘Everyone will be there,’ she says.

And everyone is. All the people I spent three years dodging and dancing around, always marvelling at the things they did so effortlessly. They ran toboggans down the grassy slope in the dying summer light, like I do when Catherine says she will if I go first. And they wear flowers in their hair as they drink yeasty beer between dancing fireflies, the same way I do on that beautiful warm night. Some guy I was always afraid of trails them over us as he dances past, and when he does I see.

This is all the things that my life could really be.

Not just supposed to be, but 
can
 be. I can be friends with a girl called Catherine, who will probably make mistakes and do the wrong things and let me down. Maybe I will make the mistakes and do the wrong things and let
her
down. But it won’t matter, because this is living. I can hit
send
on a story in the morning, and maybe by Tuesday I will have my first rejection. Maybe I will get ten rejections, a hundred, a million.

But it won’t matter.

Because
this
is living.

And I can walk to graduation in my ridiculous robes, thinking of the parents I no longer have being proud in a way they never were. I can be proud of me, completely separate from them, because I did all of this on my own and made it through anyway. I can be all of these things: strong and brave and completely sure of myself, without any need for anyone or anything…

Then I see him standing in the archway between the buildings, and still, oh, still feel my heart sing. God in heaven, how my heart sings. I am not ashamed to admit that I want to run to him – though I manage to resist. I stay cool and collected, counting all those weeks in my head. Five in total, without a word from him. Five weeks in which I learned to be myself without him. He has to know I can get by without him.

I think he does.

And I also think he doesn’t care. That’s what really gets me. He doesn’t care that I might not need him. In that moment, he lets me see that even if I never want anything to do with him ever again, he still wants something to do with me. He smiles with all of his face, in a way he never did before.

Like the sun coming out on a gloomy day.

Then when I get close he reaches for my hand. He knows – he must know that I can’t quite take it. But he does it all the same. He doesn’t even seem to regret it, when he sees my hands still by my sides. When he sees my face, as hard as I can make it without completely coming apart.

And so I come apart.

‘Hello, Professor,’ I say.

Then we both pretend my voice isn’t wavering. That I don’t sound as full of longing as anyone on earth has ever been.

‘Hello, Miss Hayridge,’ he replies. And maybe it would have gone on like that, for ever. We could have stood there exchanging dull sentiments, like two complete strangers. Me not willing to bend and him not willing to push.

I even ask him if he has come for the festivities – though I am glad I do.

It means he answers me like this:

‘I came to see if your feelings are still what they were.’

After which, the illusion of formality is shattered.

I shatter it, by laughing and crying at the same time.

And by saying something equally as good, and equally as ridiculous.

‘Oh, Mr Darcy, that the shades of Pemberley are to be thus polluted.’

‘I am fairly certain that is not what you are supposed to say,’ he tells me.

But it is, it is, oh, it is. In our love story, it is.

‘No, I am supposed to be furious with you.’

‘Absolutely maddened beyond all reckoning.’

‘I should hate you to the ends of the earth. I do, I do.’

‘I would not blame you one jot, for seeing me as I am: a fool.’

‘You are. Oh. You are. But, by God, I love you too. I love, I love, I love you, and I never wish to be parted from you from this day on,’ I say.

And then it’s his turn to laugh. His turn to look at me with eyes as bright as new stars, until I can no longer help it. I don’t just take his hand. I let him sweep me into his arms. Oh, I had forgotten how good he is at sweeping me into his arms.

Though better yet, as always, are things he says.

The ones that come as he kisses me, and kisses me, and refuses to ever let me go.

‘Forgive me, darling. Forgive me for not knowing the truth: I do not fear the fire, if I am to burn with you. Lord, I would give up my whole life, if it meant I could burn with you.’

I try not to expect too much, when we get back to my flat. It feels like enough just to have him there, suddenly in my space. Seeing him be the way I was in his, three times over. I explored his office, and his home, and the place in Bruges. Now he does the same for me, in a way that makes me giddy. He mentions the candy smell on the stairs, from the shop below – the one I had almost tuned out until he says something about it. And once through the door he notes my books, arranged in rows on the floor by the skirting boards.

‘No shelves?’ he asks, but I can hear a kind of strange delight in his voice. 

I imagine it is similar to the delight I would have let leak out, if I had told him his office was a book labyrinth. In fact I know it is, because I make a point of saying. I tell him about how often I imagined getting lost between his stacks of books, and this contentment falls over his face. As though he just settled down on his favourite chair, after months of walking some crumbling, swelteringly hot road.

‘I can understand that,’ he says, after a moment. ‘All I want to do now is swim around for ever in your seventeen copies of
Little Dorrit
.’

‘There are not seventeen copies.’

‘I can see three from here and am scarcely in the room.’

‘I think five of them are used editions of
Dombey and Son
.’

‘Even better – here, hold my jacket,’ he says.

Though I don’t really believe he’s going to take it off. He already made it all the way to me. He said that thing about burning. God, what it must have cost him to say that about burning. And he is here in my flat looking over all of my things, as though I am as important as he was to me. As he
is
to me, as he will always be to me, and especially when he hands me that first piece of clothing. Just like it’s nothing, really.

And neither is the next thing.

He tells me he feels rather warm, so I go to open a window. But when I turn he has already loosened and removed his tie. I watch him toss it on the bed with my heart slowly winding up into something like a wild thumping. In all honesty, by the time he comes and stands next to me in the kitchen while I make cups of tea, it
is
wildly thumping. Mostly because, when he does, he leans against the counter with his hands in his pockets. He is as casual as he was restrained through every other second we spent together.

But the fact that his shirt is actually untucked might also have something to do with it.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in such a state of undress. The closest I’ve ever come was when he rolled his sleeves up that one time – though even then he kept his tie on. He never undid the top button of his shirt. He looks suddenly rumpled, like he just came from a picnic in the park, or a long day at the beach, or some other thing I can hardly name because even when he
did
actually do that stuff, he rarely seemed the way he does now. I feel as though I would smell summer on his skin, if I were to lean in close. 

Though obviously I do my best not to. Just because he is a little more relaxed now doesn’t mean I can suddenly jump all over him. And if I catch his scent, I might actually do that. I have been too long without him, and that hunger I had has grown keen in his absence. It makes my hands shake, just to see the hint of his chest hair and the tails of his shirt. God knows where those tails have been. At the very least they probably touched his underwear – a fact that it seems silly to be excited over.

But then I realise with a start:

I have never seen it. I have had his cock in my mouth and my pussy. Felt it trail over the curve of my arse, held it in my hand and known its exact weight and shape. If you asked me to draw it from memory I probably could. Yet what he usually wears over it is a total mystery to me. Even the thing he usually has on beneath his shirt is a mystery.

Though it seems that will have to remain so.

He doesn’t have
anything
on under that crisp white cotton. I know he doesn’t – I see it like heavenly light breaking through the clouds, when he sits down on the end of my bed. The material pulls taut across his chest, and I catch a glimpse of skin beneath. I catch more than a glimpse of skin. That is the dark shadow of hair, all the way down to his belly. He leans back on his elbows and I can make out just about everything, up to and including the trail that disappears under the waistband of his trousers.

He has a trail
, I think, but still don’t quite get it.

Not even when he says, ‘Will you not come and sit by me?’ Instead I think of being too quick with him, too inappropriate, too much like no time has passed, and take the chair in front of my desk. I sit with my mug of tea in my hands and try to think of something other than that shirt, God, that shirt, why did he have to untuck the shirt? There is just something so tempting about it – like a woman letting her skirt slide off her thigh right up to the tops of her stockings. It would be so easy to just slip my hand inside and up, over that thick dark hair. Because it is thick, and it is dark.

Far darker than the hair on his head, in a way that makes me think of Vikings. I always thought he had something Nordic about him, with those stormy blue eyes and the heavy set of his face and the height and the burliness. Lord, that burliness. It’s even more obvious here with him laid across my bed like that – it makes everything jut forward and sprawl back at the same time.

But still I don’t understand what’s happening.

How could I possibly, after months and months of always being the instigator? I never knew it before, never fully processed it, but I was. Every step of the way I pushed, I encouraged, I came to him. I was the one who followed him. The one who suggested we go to the bathroom and the one who took my clothes off in his office. I can hardly be faulted for not recognising the opposite. For not seeing it until I am trying desperately to look at anything but him, and to talk about whatever seems the most innocent, words running together in a kind of nervous babble that barely makes sense.

While he just slowly, oh, so slowly unbuttons his cuffs.

‘It really is very warm in here, Hetty. You must be sweltering in those robes.’

He says it casually, of course. Almost absentmindedly, like something that only just occurred to him and barely matters anyway. But I know it does matter, because those words absolutely do not go with his actions. His gaze stays on me the whole way through, as heavy as syrup sinking through the centre of my body. And when he is done with the cuffs, he starts on his shirt. I can never in a million years make this about heat, after he starts on the shirt.

Unless you mean the sort of heat that makes me want to tear off everything else he’s wearing. It seems like it might be really OK to do it, too. He just got to the bottom button. There isn’t that much else to undo, after that. His trousers only have two things holding them together. I could probably do it with a flick of my hand – if he didn’t get there first.

Did he just get there first?

I think so. I think so.

But it’s hard to tell when my heart is hammering in my head. All I can hear is the blood rushing into strange places, and it only gets worse the longer I sit here. He unbuttons his fly and suddenly I can hardly keep still.

Not that it matters,
because he comes to me.
 

He comes to me.

He waits until I am just on the edge of not being able to take it any more – half-sure I might be able to do something stupid and ruin this wonderfully romantic thing – and then he just stands and walks over to me. Even with his clothes nearly falling off, he strolls right up, and leans down over me, and does what I used to dream about him doing after hours of careful persuasion. He takes my face in his hands, and kisses me. Not sweetly, not tenderly, but with every bit of passion I can imagine him mustering.