Rites of Spring (8 page)

The room was still dark when I opened my eyes the next morning. It might have been the sound of the wind that woke me. New Haven was in for a rotten day, to judge by the wet, angry howling on the other side of the glass. So much better just to snuggle back under the covers, which I did.

And jostled the body lying next to me.

“Hi,” he said, and put his hand on my T-shirt-covered shoulder. “You’re awake.”

“How long have you been?” I whispered.

He shrugged, his arms brushing my torso beneath the covers. “A while.”

“Doin’ what?”

“Watchin’ you.”

I felt heat in my cheeks, and wondered if there was enough light for him to see me blush. The silence that followed his announcement was one in which, under normal circumstances, the girl would kiss the boy who’d wanted to watch her sleep, but these weren’t normal circumstances, and even though the rules were only a few hours old, I understood them.

1)
Look, but don’t touch.

2)
Talk, but don’t taste.

3)
Sleep together, as long as you aren’t
sleeping together
.

Brandon wore the sweatpants and T-shirt I never had gotten around to returning to him. He shouldn’t have stayed, and we both knew it. But our conversation had gone on so late, ending just as the weather had been at its worst, that the very idea of sending him out in it had seemed unconscionable. Why the perfectly serviceable couch in the common room hadn’t been a viable option was a bit harder to explain away.

You know, if we planned to explain it to anyone. And I didn’t know if we did. It hadn’t once occurred to either of us to say
What are we doing?
or
What does this mean?

And I didn’t want to be the one to break that spell. Not on this dreadful, bleak morning, cocooned inside my comforter, lost in the dreamtime of February. I didn’t want to know the answer to those questions. Didn’t even want to think the word
Felicity,
in case it was enough to crack this moment like thin ice.

But as I looked into Brandon’s eyes, I ran out of synonyms for happiness.

“You aren’t hungry, are you?” he asked me.

I rolled my eyes. Being hungry would mean getting up and going into public. And I never wanted to do that again. I wondered, idly, how long we could live on the Tic Tacs in my purse.

“Do you want to sleep more?”

I shook my head against the pillow, still not willing to speak. And now he was smiling. What a great smile he has. How in the world had I survived the last eight months without seeing it?

“Neither do I.” And then he snuggled back under the covers as well. His hand slipped from my shoulder down my arm and past my wrist, and he laced his fingers with mine.

I shifted my face up again and met his eyes. We stared at each other as his thumb softly traced that sensitive bit of skin at the base of my thumb and forefinger. It was another moment where normal circumstances would prompt us to kiss, and again, we didn’t. We didn’t kiss, because that would cheapen the whole experience, turn it into some kind of rebound fling. It would be wrong.

And what we were doing felt so right.

The story came together courtesy of my various friends, each of which had their own version—not to mention their own take on the matter.

Of course, I’d heard Brandon’s first, that night:

“I didn’t even realize I’d been doing it until she started pointing it out after that day when you were in my room. But the more she kept bringing it up, the more she kept talking about you, the harder it was to overlook. And it doesn’t make sense that…”

I didn’t need him to finish the sentence. It didn’t make sense that he’d be dating Felicity and thinking about me.

“The dance was the last straw…for both of us. She wouldn’t stop talking about you. It wasn’t even me, I swear. And when she started
screaming
at me…”

Poor Brandon. He looked so lost. No one could blame me for being a shoulder for him to cry on.

Lydia, of course, had her own perspective. As soon as Brandon left the next morning, she pounced:

“Amy, don’t you think it’s a
little
odd that after having a huge screaming match with his
current
girlfriend, in front of the
entire
senior class, about how he wasn’t over his
ex
-girlfriend, the first thing he did was go to said ex-girlfriend’s room?”

I also thought it was a little odd to be spoken to like I was a six-year-old.

“To be fair,” Josh said without looking up from his
Wall Street Journal,
“it wasn’t the first thing. We saw them fight at the dance, and judging from the state of his coat, he’d been walking around outside for at least an hour.”

“Thank you,
CSI.
” Lydia rolled her eyes. “The point is, I practically bruised my jaw on the floor when I saw him standing outside. I wouldn’t even have let him in if it hadn’t been for Josh making me.”

“Making you?” I looked from one half of the couple to the other.

“He looked cold,” said my fellow knight, with a shrug.

“But,” Lydia pronounced, like a judge, “in the light of day, it doesn’t look good.”

“It looks like Felicity had a point,” Josh said from behind his newspaper.

Yeah, she won the fight, but lost the boy. Some victory.

Lydia snarled at her boyfriend. “Someone’s going to get hurt. It’s too soon for…whatever they’re doing.”

“We’re not doing anything!” I insisted.

Lydia rolled her eyes. “Well, that’s good. Did he officially break up with her?”

I hesitated. We hadn’t actually discussed that. Just as we hadn’t discussed what
we
were doing. Everything else, sure. But not that. How had we spent so many hours together without it coming up?

Lydia knew me well enough to read my expression. “Just as I thought.”

Josh looked up now. “Say what you will, Lydia. I think it’s over. No man should have to put up with that kind of public humiliation. That girl is a harpy.”

The harpy’s childhood friend Clarissa had a decidedly different take on the matter. She breezed into the tomb at dinner that night, filled with stories about the recent scandal:

“So then, just as they are dancing to the new Bublé—”

“Oh, I love that song,” said Lil’ Demon.

“He makes some comment about Valentine’s Days of yore—” at which, she flicks a hand in my direction. “I mean, can you believe it? Most romantic moment ever, and he’s
still
talking about his ex. What do you expect a girl to do in a situation like that?”

Even I couldn’t come up with a good response.

“So they broke up on the dance floor?” Lil’ Demon asked. “Harsh!”

“Oh, no,” Angel said. “They didn’t break up. I mean, they may, but…”

But what? I bit my lip from bursting out—
But he spent last night with me!
—though I knew Angel would be obligated to keep my secrets, considering her oath. Soze glanced at me.

“No,” Angel said. “In fact, I think they’re supposed to meet for coffee later.”

Damn these Sunday society meetings! If it weren’t for Rose & Grave, I’d be able to stop him from keeping that coffee date. Unless he was using it to stage their official breakup. Yeah, that was it.

Juno groaned in frustration. “If we’re all done talking about our love lives, can we get onto more serious topics?”

“What could possibly be more serious?” Angel asked.

Juno grabbed her bag and pulled out her laptop, opening the screen to reveal a news ticker. “World stage, people. Political upheavals. Empires collapsing. Citizens dying…”

Thorndike read the headline. “‘UPSET IN WHITE HOUSE STAFF ROCKS CAPITOL HILL.’”

The politically minded Diggers surrounded the laptop and started reading, but I couldn’t muster up the interest. There was a new political scandal every day. I’d catch tomorrow’s. Right now, I just wanted to figure out my love life.

“Look alive, Bugaboo, do you know who this is about?” Soze waved a hand in front of my face. I glanced down, halfheartedly, at the article on the screen.

Kurt Gehry.

What?

All thoughts of Brandon fled, and the entire tomb was in an uproar for the next few hours. Our planned program went right out the window as we researched, discussed, and debated the various details of the case. Seems that the White House Chief of Staff had quietly resigned last week, without a formal announcement to the press, without any fanfare at all. No one knew the reason. Nobody on the President’s staff was talking about it, and Kurt Gehry himself was “unavailable for interview.”

I almost felt sorry for Gehry, who was known to the Diggers at large as “Barebones.” (His name in my club was mud, though, since he’d not once, but twice attempted to sabotage the entire class of knights in an attempt to reform the society in the image he found most suitable—one with no women in it.)

Speculation both in the capital and in the tomb on High Street ran rampant, and with it came an abandonment of any other topic. The job and thesis talk, which had made up the bulk of tomb discussions since consultancy and banking interviews had commenced in January, gave way to endless back-and-forths about why Gehry had really left his job and whether or not the President would tell Rose & Grave (if not the country) what was really going on.

One theory, popular among a certain breed of paranoid conspiracy theorists (but hey, they’ve been right before), promoted the idea that Gehry and the President had quarreled over Gehry’s intervention in society matters last semester. In response to his attempts to undermine the society by siphoning off funds from the Trust to create a secret, males-only inner circle known as Elysion, my fellow knights and I had disavowed him as our patriarch, retroactively kicking him out of Rose & Grave for our year and any we tapped afterward.

According to the conspiracy theorists, the President of the United States, good Knight of Persephone that he was, could not bear to have on his staff anyone who was running afoul of Rose & Grave. Who knew a bunch of college kids had that much clout?

No one in my club, that was for sure.

“This is ridiculous,” Josh said during a study session the following afternoon. He was showing a marvelous amount of aggravation for a man who’d just been accepted to Stanford Law School. (Lydia, also, had received a thumbs-up from our cousins on the Pacific, and I was positive she’d indulged in a couple of fantasies about the two of them becoming a power couple every bit as pedigreed as they were passionate.)

As for my couple status, it remained, much like my future, undecided. After the meeting last night, I’d waited up for Brandon, but he hadn’t called. Who knew how long his conversation had gone on with Felicity? Maybe he hadn’t felt up to seeing me directly after breaking up with her. His latest e-mail to me hadn’t even mentioned the coffee date with Felicity that Clarissa had reported. He’d just asked if he could meet me in my suite after his afternoon lab. Of course I agreed.

“It’s flatly impossible that no one knows anything,” Josh went on. “I’ve shaken down every patriarch I can, and they are either stupid or playing so.”

“I’d guess the latter, considering they’re Eli alums,” Demetria said. She and Jenny had spent the evening finalizing plans for the second half of Spring Break. Though we wouldn’t all be visiting Cavador Key, the knights who were going to the island would be spending a week there, then renting a van, driving up the coast, and spending a week volunteering with Habitat for Humanity.
^*1

“I’d guess the former,” said George, turning a page in his textbook, “considering most of them are inbred legacies with more money than sense.” He looked up, an innocent expression pinned in place. “Wait. I meant, other than me, of course.”

I rolled my eyes and went back to my work. Brandon got out of lab in forty-five minutes, and I wanted to make sure I had all my homework done well in advance. So far, I had three fellowship applications in, and four more in the works. I’d submitted one of my best term papers to two scholarly publications and a couple of conference listings besides, though I knew it would be a long shot. Still, anything would help beef up my grad school applications. So far the rolling admissions hadn’t trundled in my direction, and I was hoping some last-minute additions to the package would help grease the skids.