The Dark Space (7 page)

Yeah, I know, dude
, is how I answered him. I knew because after class that day Winnie had been glowing, and I asked why. She leaned up and whispered in my ear, her mouth brushing against me,
Jason and Finn. It was so pretty.

My fairy matchmaker.

After our first essays were due, about contact improvisational dance and the use of movement to make meaning on stage, Maggie put us into pairs for an authentic movement workshop.

My partner was Beth Odegaard. I had actually asked her out freshman year, but this weird drama happened where she was convinced that my interest in her was actually me making fun of her, and her friends had spent the spring giving me the cut direct. Like quite a few women, she was taller than I was, built on a bigger scale in general, but I had long since let go of this fact of my life as a disqualifier.

Folks are just a size, is the deal.

Beth and I had come to some truce, necessary on a small campus, but she still belonged to a minority of people for whom Cal Darling was just a skinny little prick.

We started the exercise, and we sucked. It was supposed to be play, loose, improvised. We were supposed to trust each other, to move only in ways that felt authentic, but every movement I made felt like a plea, like I was asking her for something she didn’t want to give.

Like me.

Accept me.

Take me.

At one point we were back to back, elbows linked, and when I lifted my feet off the floor she made a disgusted noise and I got angry. Stomped down hard when I landed.

She let go of me so abruptly, I dropped to my knees.

I saw Maggie watching us from the stage apron, and I struggled to my feet, rounding on Beth, wishing she were Winnie. I was pissed because I’d been getting such a buzz from this class, I
expected
the buzz, expected everything to come to me with ease, expected everything good in life to be handed to me on a platter.

Fuck her
, I thought.
If she’s not going to do this the way it’s supposed to be done, she can fucking find another partner, because I’m—

That’s when I heard her. Beth. The quiet rasp of her breath and the beat of her heart, a dizzying magnification of the sounds of her body, her life moving through her.

That’s when I saw her.

The hot yellow glow at her throat and in her ears.

I noticed that her eyes were deep liquid pools of brown, and her cheeks were chapped from the cold, ruddy pink with cracked and broken threads of red.

You
, I thought.

You, not me.

You.

I looked at her bare feet. Her sturdy legs in yoga pants, her loose sweatshirt falling off one shoulder.

How do you want to move?

Beth crumpled to the ground and put her arms around the back of her head. She was curved into a ball, an egg, really. I could see the knob at the base of her neck where it was exposed when her white-blond curtain of stick-straight hair fell away.

I put my hand over that knob of bone, because I
had
to, because the skin over her nape was so fine and clean, because the stage lights had caught the translucent down that covered it, and her nape was haloed.

I touched her because as soon as Beth fell to the floor and
protected
herself from me, all that sunshine-colored light inside her spilled onto the black-painted floor and puddled around her. Grew dull.

I knew, I just fucking
knew
, that if I put my hand on her, all that light would come back inside her. So I put my hand there, and I bent over Beth, and she started to uncurl her body. I drew her up just with my hand, and the weight of her, to lift her like that, was heavy, so I braced my legs apart and heaved back, and I just kept lifting.

Until she was alongside me, both of us standing, my chin at her throat.

We were breathing hard, and I wanted her heart to slow down, her breathing to quiet, so I slid my hand from the back of her neck where I had lifted her, and I let it follow over her bare shoulder and onto her breast, over her heart.

She put her palm between my shoulder blades, and I put a palm between hers.

I breathed her back. She breathed me forward.

I don’t know how else to say that.

I held her heart in my hand, and we each breathed for the other, and in my mind we were like a wash of gray-green sea grass on a dune, shining bright when the wind hit one way, going dull when the wind came back.

I remembered, from far off, that Beth was from Nova Scotia, by the sea.

I felt her mouth at my temple first, then over my forehead. I smelled the sea, heard the screams of gulls and the crash of waves hitting the shore. The sun was in my eyes, so I kept them closed.

I lifted my face to feel the light on it, just a little better, and then Beth’s mouth was over mine. Her lips were salty from the sea air, her tongue warm as it met mine. The kiss took over where the contact of our palms had been breathing for us, and the kiss was our breathing.

We breathed like that for a long time, growing warm in the sun. Her heart was a slow pulse under my hand, between our legs.

Then, there was a cool breeze over my shoulders. At first I thought a cloud had passed over the sun at our shore.

I felt my own breath in my body again, sharp and dusty.

The overbright stage lights came through next, and the chemical smell of the detergent in Beth’s sweatshirt. When I opened my eyes, it was Maggie I was looking at, who had a hand on Beth’s arm, another on my shoulder.

“Beautiful,” she said. Then, “but that’s enough now.”

Beth and I broke apart, and when she stepped away, I saw Winnie, sitting in her spot in the share circle where everyone was gathering.

I reached out to her, but I couldn’t find her gold-pinkness. I kept catching onto Beth’s pollen-colored tendrils as she walked away.

When Winnie smiled at me, for the first time in weeks it was just a smile from a girl, pretty and inscrutable. Glowing for all the ordinary reasons a girl’s smile glows.

That’s when I understood that magic wasn’t destiny. When I knew that our being human, as usual, was most important.

It was when I knew that the hardest part of all of this was going to be our love story, just like it is for anyone else.

I grinned back. Ready.

Late that night, after I’d worked at the library on a research paper and Cal had put in a few hours reading for Spanish, I lay on the bed in my dorm room. He stretched out on the floor next to me.

Our energy was a globe in the air over my head, shifting colors, pink and gold and mossy green. I pushed it away, and it floated over him, pulsed and brightened when he reached out to touch it.

We passed it back and forth. For the sizzle of it. For the novelty.

“What was the best place you lived?” he asked, and I told him about Northfield. My babysitter.

He shaped the ball of energy with his hand, petting it idly when I remembered about the Christmas I got moccasins and a pair of overalls.

“I’m trying to imagine you in braids,” he said and pushed our energy toward me, setting it on a slow rolling tumble through the air that bumped into my breast.

He did it on purpose, because he liked to watch me react to the molten caress of it. Liked to watch my mouth gape, my concentration break. Liked to watch me catch at the energy, draw it back out, shape it carefully with my fingers into a heart, or a star, a rabbit once — whatever I made as ephemeral as we are, its edges always blurring, its colors blending back into the mass that makes us up.

“Where will you go for spring break?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I usually figure it out at the last possible minute. Tag along with whoever, headed wherever. What about you? What do you do over break, go home?”

“This is home,” I told him. “My dad’s in . . .” I had to think for a minute. “Fayetteville. North Carolina. I’ve never been there.”

I lobbed the ball at his head, and he let it hit him, smiling as it lapped at his face. I turned on my side to appreciate the sight of him flat on my grotty carpet — green-and-white-striped wool socks and skinny hips in dark jeans, navy short-sleeved shirt over white long-sleeved shirt, a pale stripe of stomach showing because he’d put his hands behind his head, closed his eyes, lifted his hips, the ever-present bulge of his erection pumping into nothing.

I thought about straddling him, settling myself over that hard line of heat and rubbing myself on it, rubbing into him, feeling his restless palms sliding up and down my thighs, watching his face change.

You love to torture me
, he thought, and I smiled.

I love to torture both of us.

The light started to sink into him, and he blew it back out, set it spinning in a slow revolution as it drifted up toward the soft spikes in the plaster ceiling.

I showed him a picture of what he’d looked like on the stage with Beth, his hands framing her body, her hands framing his, kissing as though kissing were the only thing keeping them alive.

The stark beauty of that kiss, the human need in it, had floored me. Beth’s longing for home was in both of their bodies, their shared ache a hollow hurt I’d felt in my shoulders and as a frog in my throat.

Everyone on the stage had seen it. Felt it. Shared it.

Cal exhaled. The ball stayed where it was, spinning, until I drew it down toward me.

“Weird that all I’ve ever wanted was to get out of this place,” he said. “And all the while you wanted to get here.”

“Somewhere like this.”

But it was never the place. It was the chance I wanted — the knowledge that four years might be long enough to give me a shot at this moment.

What I’d wanted was an opportunity to know and be known beyond first and second and third impressions and into the realm where assumptions turn into questions that turn into answers and finally into knowledge.

I wanted to be able to look at someone like Cal and know what he had for lunch, know how his forehead would wrinkle as he contemplated my home situation, to be aware of how my situation made him think of what was happening to him at home, how he’d found his parents again, found his need and their love where he’d set it aside years ago.

Beneath that, how he was still yearning toward Beth, hours later, and how he hoped I wouldn’t see that because he didn’t want me to be hurt.

Beneath that, how he knew that I
did
see it, and his relief in understanding that the hurt I felt was clean and simple, the kind of pain that comes with breathing and should never be avoided.

My Cal. So exactly the sort of boy I’d hoped to be courted by in the Northfield of my imagination.

A beautiful babysitter is a gift handed to you by your parents. They pay her to spend time with you, to ask you questions and be interested. It’s easy to fall in love with her because everything between you and her is for
you
.

I’d thought college would be like that, too. Gift-wrapped. Like it would be the home I wanted, the reward I deserved after so many years of wandering.

No wonder I’d disliked Cal at first. I’d piled him with all the resentment of a girl forced to learn she has to earn her own rewards.

I was telling Cal this — some of it out loud, some of it with light and pictures in my head. He laughed, the brightness of his smile in my teeth, shivering over my stomach.

“Did you ever read
The Odyssey
?” he asked.

“I took Humanities 101 with your dad.”

That made his smile widen. “So you know the part, after Odysseus comes home — he’s been gone ten years, right? And you think, Christ, finally he’s going to get something good to eat, get laid by his fine-looking wife, kill some goats and have a party. But instead he’s got to sneak in, because Penelope has all these suitors living at their place, she’s spent a decade dealing with nonstop houseguests who want to bone her, and she’s fucking
tired
.”

While he talked, I pulled our light inside me, fulling-filling-spreadness, the goodness of his words, of Cal, the leaden throb of lust located again between my thighs, the tissue of my breasts, breath.

“Odysseus shows up in disguise, one more suitor to deal with, and he has to win her back — kick ass at the archery competition, kill off all twelve dozen of her suitors or whoever, just slay them in the most gory possible way in the middle of the night so his wife will fall weeping into his arms and then presumably they can spend the next few hours before dawn fucking in every single position he’s been fantasizing about since he left for the war a zillion years ago.”

God, I loved the way he talked.

“And even then, he’s got his wife back, he’s got to go out to his dad’s house and convince
him
, too, that he’s really home and not a corpse or a trick or whatever, because nobody can believe it’s possible Odysseus has survived, and if he
has
survived, then the locals want him dead, because he’s responsible for the wholesale slaughter of two generations of blooming manhood. Athena’s got to pull his ass out of the fire. That’s Homer’s idea of a happy ending — not once does Odysseus figure out how to take care of his own shit.”

“You’ve got a point?”

I asked, but I was thinking about the purplish head of his cock, rubbing over my slick clit. I was thinking about what it would be like when he pushed inside me the first time. How I would sweat and shake. How he would groan.

“It’s always an odyssey,” he said. “Even when you think you’re home. Home’s a process.”

“Sleep over,” I said.

“With you?”

I wiggled a little, too excited to be still. “Sleep over. With me. Here.”

“You know we won’t sleep, right? There’s hardly room in that bed for our skeletons, much less the rest of us.”

“You’re not very big.”

“You should talk, teeny girl.”

He got up, kneeled on the bed. Reached for the hem of his shirt. Stopped. “Is this all right? I can undress?”

“What do you wear to bed?”

That flashing grin. “In girls’ rooms, as little as possible.”

I undressed him down to boxers and stripey socks. I loaned him my toothbrush. Turned out the light and got in beside him, his naked back, his naked breath. Curled around him.