The Promise Page 10

  This time, he barely moved, barely breathed as my mouth brushed his. We were suspended on the edge of chaos for one glorious moment, and then we tumbled into the abyss. With a groan, he reached for me: hands tangling in my hair, his body hard against mine. I backed into the wall, wild with the need I’d been controlling for so long. My hands were on him, still half in disbelief he was mine to touch at all. There. Now. More.

  Theo gripped tight around my waist, and he dragged his mouth from mine to kiss along my jaw, my neck, the delicate hollow of my collarbone—

  A clatter came from the far staircase, loud enough to intrude even on our reckless passion. Voices sounded, circling their way down towards us.

  “Here,” Theo said. He grabbed my hands and tugged me backwards, into his waiting office, shoving the door behind us with a crash. I barely had time to glimpse the small space, crammed with bookcases and a cluttered desk before I was up against the wall again with his mouth on mine.

  “You have . . . students . . .” I managed, shivering as his cool hands slid under my jacket, along the bare seam of skin beneath my shirt.

  “Study hours are over.” He dipped to kiss my neck again, hands sliding higher.

  “But . . .” I was dizzy, searching for a strand of logic in the midst of this whirlwind. But there was nothing to cling onto anymore. No distance or cool logic. Nothing but heat, and hands, and that reckless urge spiraling tighter, needing more.

  He kissed me again, and this time, I didn’t hold back.

  With hot mouths, we stumbled back, papers and folders crashing to the ground as he lifted me onto the desk, pushed my jacket off my body, and held me close to feel him burn. We both were blazing, an inferno beyond control. Hands followed lips followed hard heat and soft breaths. I’d wanted an infinity to explore his body inch by miraculous inch, but those plans were lost to something far more insistent, clawing, dark and deep with every slide of his body. His shirt followed mine to the floor, and then so much more, the metallic ring of his belt buckle lost under my moan as his hands took possession of me. Those steady, sure hands I’d drawn so many nights now, cupped around me, squeezing, roaming further, deeper past my last inhibitions until I was spread to him and gasping for more.

  Words still fail me to describe what alchemy passed between us that afternoon, spinning base elements into something golden and pure, but maybe that’s the point. Before that sweet December day, I’d always experienced life with an artist’s eye. There wasn’t a moment I couldn’t commit to paper; not a feeling I wouldn’t capture in the strokes of brush on canvas, a flare of color and shape. But those moments there with Theo still defy me. They passed not in scenes, frozen tableaus to be recreated, or even emotions I could abstract onto the page. No, it went beyond any language I’d learned to make sense of the world. Even now, I feel it in a rush: my hands closing around him, the hot slide of his tongue on taut, trembling flesh, the imprint of his fingertips clutched deep into my thighs. He paused there, braced above me, breath in ragged pants. There were no words left, only the look in his eyes as he silently asked the final question, and I pressed closer, answering the only way I knew how.

  He didn’t look away, not even for a moment. And the time that had folded in on itself, gone to the rush, now unraveled again in slow motion—each second strung shimmering with new sensation. It was liquid and sharp, white-hot; it was an infinity coming undone, and still, he didn’t look away. I saw the world break open in his eyes, and felt every breath as the gravity shuddered through us both, until we were left gasping and fused together and so brand new.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was dark by the time we walked home, the empty streets almost silent with snow. It had only taken hours for pale flakes to blanket the city, muffling the hum of traffic and sending people scurrying for the safe warmth inside. I didn’t feel the cold, not with Theo tucked so close beside me, and our footsteps matching, in synch in the snow. We barely spoke, but I didn’t need to; I was still trembling from the burning imprint of his touch, my mind tripping over itself to catch up with every breath we’d exchanged, gasping into the silence of the emptying study hall.

  “Are you . . .?” Theo finally asked, one hand steadily wheeling my bicycle alongside. “I mean, was that . . . OK?”

  Laughter escaped me. “OK?” I echoed, my smile splitting the world in two. “Yeah, I’d say it was OK.”

  Theo laughed too then, a sharp burst of relief. “I’m sorry, I just . . . I don’t want you to feel like I rushed you. We could have . . . waited.”

  “Waiting is overrated,” I said softly. My arm was slipped around his waist, under the thick drape of his coat, and I squeezed him closer, tighter. Mine. “Besides, we did wait. Months. Too long.”

  Theo’s face clouded. “I’m sorry,” he said, the words landing so softly on the snow-powdered street. “I almost called you a hundred times. I just didn’t know what to say to you. How I could ever explain.”

  We’d reached my corner. Three floors up, across the street, the lights from my apartment glowed, an invitation. “So come up,” I said to him, taking his hand. “You don’t need to tell me everything if you don’t want to. But that doesn’t mean you can’t stay.”

  Theo looked to the apartment, and back at me. His lips curled in a teasing smile. “How am I supposed to say no to that?”

  “You’re not.” I tugged him onwards. “I’m not letting you go this time.”

  My words were playful, but beneath their teasing tone, I meant every last one. I’d made my choice, and I could do it again, a hundred times over, but the end result would never change.

  It was him, always him.

  Inside, I stashed my bike in the hall closet and headed upstairs, Theo chasing behind. “So this is the inner sanctum, huh?”

  “It’s nothing special,” I warned him, my mind tripping over itself to remember if I’d left dirty laundry lying around.

  “As long as there’s heat, and nobody playing Velvet Underground at two in the morning, you have me beat.” His arms were already locked around me, his lips claiming mine again as I fumbled with the lock and backed inside.

  “Hey, Claire.”

  We whirled around. Tessa laughed, over by the table stuffing books into her bag. “Don’t worry, I’m on my way out.”

  I flushed. “Umm, hi. This is Theo. Tessa.” I awkwardly gestured back and forth, but Theo snapped into action, polite. He strode over and shook her hand, asking about her course and making small talk about the snow while I fought to act normal. But how could I, when I felt the naked flame of my desire still burning, too bright in our small attic apartment? I busied myself unwrapping my scarf, stripping off my jacket, until Tessa’s phone sounded, and she grabbed her coat. “There’s my ride now. We’re having a snow break study weekend before finals,” she added. “So you’ve got the place to yourselves until Monday.”

  “Oh, thanks.” I swallowed.

  “Great meeting you, Theo.” She cheerfully hoisted her deadweight book bag and a duffel trailing clothing and a scarf. “See you again, I hope.”

  As Tessa headed for the door, she paused beside me, and lowered her voice. “Bathroom cabinet, top drawer.” She winked, and then was gone in a whirl of determination before I could find my tongue again.

  We were alone again. My stomach turned a slow arabesque, then settled, trembling beneath my ribs. All my earlier recklessness was long gone; now I felt naked in the too-bright lights, wondering what came next.

  Theo slowly removed his coat and looked around. “She seems nice.”

  “She is.” I went to the galley kitchen area and filled the kettle to busy my restless hands, setting it on the stove to boil. “She’s got so much energy, I wonder if she’s on speed sometimes. I wouldn’t be surprised if she took over the world one day. I can’t keep up.”

  Hands slid around my waist from behind. “World domination is overrated.” Theo’s voice rumbled in my ear. I relaxed back against him and he rested his chin on my shoulder, watching as
I set out two mugs, and pulled down a pack of cookies and a couple of tea bags.

  I wasn’t used to it yet, the gift of his body so casually against mine. And to tell the truth, I never learned to take it for granted. From the first time until the last, he made my pulse skip and stutter like fireworks bursting in the night sky.

  “It was the police.”

  Theo’s voice was steady, but his body tensed behind me, bracing for impact. “That night, on the roof when I had to leave. It was the police who called me, about my dad.”

  I turned then, twisting within his embrace so I was facing him, and could see every sleepless night and agonized day reflected back in the planes of his face. I took it in my hands, holding softly, waiting.

  “He’s a drunk,” Theo’s words came, bitter. “Has been my whole life. He doesn’t stop, doesn’t want to.” He looked away, but didn’t stop, as if this was a speech he’d been rehearsing, lines he knew by heart. “My mom, she put up with it as long as possible, but even she didn’t want to stick it out. I’ve tried to leave. College, and now this. I said, I won’t be around to pick him up again, but there’s always something. Always one more fucking thing.”

  For a moment, Theo’s resolute expression cracked. In front of me was a boy again: hopeful, vulnerable, trodden down but still believing, the way we all do when it comes to our parents. We want to believe they’ll be superhuman. We want to believe they’ll put us first.

  Theo exhaled, and in that simple motion, I understood the weight he’d been carrying all this time, and what it meant to lay those few precious words between us. I rested my head against his chest, my hand covering the steady beating of his heart. I didn’t say anything; there was nothing too say, I only held him until the whistle from the kettle pierced the heavy calm, and I turned back to the flame, knowing so much more than I did before. Guilt pricked me, a splash of boiling water against my skin. He’d given me something, offered a window into his world. I should have responded in kind then, the moment was wide open and waiting for me, but instead, I just poured our tea and passed him a mug.

  “Show me your kitties?” he read aloud from the cup.

  I smiled, relieved he’d steered the moment on. “It’s Tessa’s.”

  “Sure it is.” He took a sip, quirking his eyebrow at me over the rim, his old self again.

  “I’m more a dog person myself,” I told him, leading him out into the living area again. “We had a golden lab growing up, Betsy. She wouldn’t fetch to save her life. I would toss a dozen tennis balls around, but she’d just sit there, waiting for a treat.”

  “Smart girl.”

  Theo drifted over to the canvases I still had drying by the radiator. I paused, realizing too late the artwork that was out in the open for him to see. It was different with Tessa: she’d barely glanced at the paintings, seeming to understand that although they were draped over chairs and hanging from the easels, they were still private to me. But Theo stood in front of them, his quick gaze absorbing every line and splash of color.

  I gripped my mug tighter. “That’s Hope,” I said, feeling painfully exposed. The canvas was one of the bigger ones, her face stretching almost six feet tall, shaded in an inky purple paint that had stained my hands for days.

  He turned back to me. “They’re beautiful. You can see the anger, she looks so . . .”

  “Afraid,” I finished for him. “It was the end, or very near it, anyway. I haven’t been able to paint her like this until now,” I admitted. “After she died, all I wanted to do was remember her in the good days, before.”

  I stepped into my bedroom and nodded to the pages papering the far wall. It was a constellation of my sketchpad tears, a year’s worth of hurried portraits and idle shading. Hope, in her best days, kicked back in the passenger seat or lost to a song on the radio. Customers in the café, passers-by on a busy street. The bridge and Boston skyline, my parents, and yes, Theo too. Over and again, his face, the form, his hands wrapped around their coffee cup. Theo drew closer, reaching to run his fingertips over the patchwork layers, pinned and peeling, a testament of my restless mind. He paused by one sketch, that drawing I’d done so many months ago after our false-start kiss. “October,” he read quietly, from the scribbled date in the corner. He turned back to me, quizzical. “Even then?”

  I looked at him. “Even always,” I said simply. We were past coy now. Coy lay scattered on his office floor across town, a lifetime ago. “I drew you the first day we met. Tore it all up, but I could never stop.”

  He looked back at the sketches, transfixed. “This is how you see me?”

  I stepped closer, heart full and bright. “This is who you are to me.”

  Our tea sat cold, abandoned on my bedside table. We had better things to do with our hands, our hungry mouths. We surfaced again late at night, sprawled and lazy in the tangle of blankets and sheets.

  “Remind me to thank your roommate for her supplies.” Theo traced along my bare arms. I was nestled against his side, listening to the slowing heartbeat drum against his chest.

  I smiled into his side. “She’s a regular Girl Scout.”

  “Prepared for anything.”

  I could feel the smile in every word. The room was dark, but the streetlights outside bathed the room in a pale yellow glow, casting shadows over every corner. I dropped a kiss against his rib cage, slipped my hands across his naked stomach. I was still learning his body by heart, making a note of every flinch and sharp inhale of breath. It still amazed me, then, what power I had over him, after all. The power to bring him to the brink and back, to make that steady pulse race like mine, or send him hurtling over the edge.

  Theo brought my face up to his and kissed me, a lazy, breathless kiss. He held my jaw, tracing over my lips with the same wonder I held in my heart. “Who are you?” he whispered, watching me. “Where did you come from?”

  I swallowed. “I’m nobody.”

  He shook his head. “You’re somebody.”

  I tried to play it off cool, to smile and roll my eyes and look away, but Theo didn’t let me. His kiss was different then, whisper-soft and deliberate, until I could only melt towards his touch, unfurling in the rays of something certain and sweet.

  It was perfect. So fucking perfect.

  Sadness swept through me as fast as desire, cold and clawing in my chest. I sat up so fast the room spun.

  “Hey, get back here.” Theo grinned, reaching for me again. “You need to tell me all about that tattoo.”

  “Bathroom,” I said, tugging my underwear and a sweatshirt on, and flinching as my feet hit the cold bare floorboards. “Be right back!”

  I was at the door when my legs gave way. I grabbed for the frame, gasping quick as the lights burst, hard behind my eyes.

  “Claire?” Theo was halfway out of bed towards me, but I waved him away.

  “I got up too fast.” I forced a smile and stood straight again. “Head-rush. Stay.”

  Those dozen steps were an eternity, every last one a labor beyond words. I walked so carefully through the living room, willing my body not to fail me now. The lights in the bathroom blared brightly, piercing my skull and slicing a blade straight down my spine.

  Fuck.

  I tugged open the cabinet, my hand shaking. It took half a dozen tries to get past the childproof fastening on my prescription, and as I gulped down two pills with a mouthful of cold water from the faucet, I saw my own reflection in the mirror, the desperate plea in my gaze.

  Not now, please, not now.

  The pain beat on, a thousand shooting stars roaring through my brain until they drowned everything in red-hot fury. I’d never felt anything like that before, not the supernova, dizzying and wide with an endless shore. I would get used to it soon enough, as used to agony as you could be. It was strange how normal such blunt force trauma could become. I guess if you beat your head against a brick wall long enough, even that can become simple as breathing in the end.

  But that night, the pain unmanned me, made an ec
ho of my body, and a shadow of my mind. It was all I could do to cling to that bathroom sink and wait for the end to come, whatever that end would be.

  “You want anything to eat?” Theo’s voice came from outside the door, mockingly normal. I could hear him open the fridge and rifle through. “Wait, I take it back. What is this stuff? Tofu? Tell me this is all your roommate’s doing.”

  I focused on the tiny crack in the porcelain, winding down to the drain. I was still breathing, wasn’t I? I had to remember to breathe.

  “Claire? Claire, are you sure you’re OK?”

  “Fine,” I managed to call back through the quicksand. I counted to ten, grasping for each second like handholds on a sheer rock face, all that was keeping me from tumbling into the red. Please, I whispered into the neon glare, pleasenopleasenopleaseno.

  Finally, the chemicals burst to life in my bloodstream. My heartbeat slowed. The knife blade dulled.

  OhthankyouLord.

  I gulped down air and rinsed my hands, cold under the faucet. I would have stayed there forever, curled down on the floor, but I couldn’t wait so long this time. When I opened the door again, Theo was standing in the kitchen with a pan in one hand, bare-chested with an apron around his waist.

  “I found eggs,” he declared, like a returning warrior. He had a halo, radiant and gold, undulating around his body in the shadows of the night. “And for you, I’ll make them any which way. What’ll it be: scrambled, poached, fried?”

  “Isn’t it kind of late for breakfast?” I asked, still gripping the doorframe tight. I squinted, the colors blurring. “Or early. One of those.”

  Theo wasn’t fooled by my jokes. He frowned. “You look pale. Here, come sit down.” He abandoned the pan and moved towards me, just as I took my own faltering steps into the room.

  “It’s just a headache,” I insisted, as if those syllables had anything in common with the canon-fire raging behind my skull. “Just a little head—”

  The world imploded.

  Blood roared, and then suddenly all that existed was the pain, blossoming, blooming, until it devoured me whole. I didn’t hear him yell, although he swore later that he did. I didn’t hear the water glass go crashing to the ground as I flailed, or the sharp crack of my head against the floor as the room flipped sideways on me. I didn’t hear anything at all, just the roar of metal, hot in my mouth as the scarlet sky opened to swallow me up into oblivion.