Triple Love Score (8 page)

The bartender, an older lady with her gray curls in the classic wash and set, slowly made her way over to them. “The usual?” she asked.

“Not tonight, Lucille,” he said. “Car bombs today.”

“You know I don’t make that crap,” she said.

“Let me.”

“It’s not even Irish,” Lucille said. “That’s just some American crap.”

“Yes, woman, I know. But that’s beside the point.”

“And the point is to get drunk, I suppose,” Lucille said.

“This is a bar, isn’t it?” Ronan asked, a smile broad on his face.

“If you weren’t cute, I wouldn’t let you in here. But you start singing, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I’ll kick you out again.”

“Again?” Miranda asked.

“Ssshhhh,” Ronan said. “Let’s not speak of it. Guinness, Jameson, and Baileys please.”

Lucille cocked her head at him.

He put a twenty up on the bar.

She still didn’t move.

Miranda reached into her purse and put another twenty on the bar.

“Oh, so it’s not a date,” Lucille said, swinging around to grab the whiskey bottles.

“Not a date,” Miranda said. “He’s my student.”

“Oh, so you’re one of the ones that teaches him those fancy words he uses. You watch out, he might just use them on you.” Lucille poured out two glasses of Guinness, put out two shot glasses, and walked away.

“She’s right,” Miranda said. “We really shouldn’t be doing this. You’re my student.”

“But we aren’t doing anything. We’re just drinking. Even the bloody poetry department serves wine at functions. This is just a small function.”

He poured the Baileys on top of the Guinness and then dropped the shot glass of Jameson on top. “Drink fast,” he said, sliding hers over. “It curdles.”

“Curdles?” she asked. “What kind of small function?”

“Yes, curdles, now drink. Any kind of small function. You’re a poet, be creative.”

She took two sips and then set it down. “You’re a poet, too. What’s your reason for this gathering?”

“I thought you were good with language,” he said. “Drink, woman, the whole thing.” He picked up his glass and downed the whole thing.

“All right,” she said, doing the same. She set down her glass, and then said, “Another?”

“I thought you’d never ask. Lucille—two more?”

“You still didn’t answer my question,” Miranda said. “Why did you ask me here tonight?”

“You said you could use a drink,” he said.

“That’s all?”

“Can’t a man just want to a drink, too?” he said. “Now do you want to talk or drink?”

Lucille brought over two more glasses of Guinness; he poured out the liquors and passed hers over. This time she didn’t need prompting.

There are certainly rules about being with students outside of class and probably a few about inviting them into your home along with a bottle of Baileys you bought on the walk home. But after three Irish car bombs, Miranda certainly couldn’t remember them.

“Don’t worry,” Ronan said. “I am a gentleman.”

“A gentleman, what good is that?” Miranda asked.

“That’s just the drink talking.”

“Funny, I don’t hear it talking,” she said.

Ronan chuckled. “You have clearly proven you’re not Irish.”

“WASP. We aren’t supposed to drink this much or at least not admit to it.”

She pulled out the Scrabble Board, not to show off her Internet meme-creating self, but to play.

“Who’s your favorite poet?” she asked him.

“You’ll laugh if I tell you,” he said. “They will take back my degree if they find out.”

“I doubt that. Spill it.”

“Shel Silverstein,” he said as he picked five more tiles out of the bag.

Every time she put down a word, he quickly put down an even better one.

“Shel Silverstein? Where the sidewalk ends, Silverstein?”

“Yes, well, not the whole thing. The Unicorn. This band my mum liked, The Irish Rovers, had an album, The Unicorn. She used to play it all the time. She’d get this dreamy look on her face and dance me and my sisters around the room. I found out the band took the lead track from Silverstein.

“But why that? There’re lots of songs in the world and not all of them come from a poem.”

“But not all of them made my mum dance like that. It was the first time I realized that words could be something that make people happy. I wanted to find that person and be just like him.”

Ronan handily doubled her score. Doing the poetry sculptures threw off her gift for two-letter Scrabble words with maximum score value placement. The drinks didn’t help. He kept pouring until she finally said, “Okay, I get it, you are Irish. I am not. The room is beginning to spin.”

“That was the answer I was looking for.” And he picked her up and carried her into her bedroom.

Whenever a scene like this played in her mind, she imagined a room in a bed and breakfast with a brass headboard and coordinating linens, gauzy curtains on the windows, a fire going.

She never imagined a man carrying her to her three-week-old sheets, rumpled and unmade, on the same mattress she has had she since was nineteen with no headboard at all, just a squeaky metal frame that came free with the purchase of a box spring.

In her fantasy, though, after being carried to the well-made bed, the man settled in, too, pressing himself against her, brushing aside her hair, kissing her gently as he unbuttoned her shirt or skirt or jeans. Her imagination always featured a lot of buttons and slow kissing. Kissing everywhere.

However, reality didn’t match the vision here, either. Instead, Ronan set her down, then stood upright, slipping both his hands into his pockets.

“Well, Prof,” he said. “Happy Thanksgiving. See you in class on Tuesday.” He placed a fist over his heart, thumped it twice with a bowed head and left her there.

She listened to the click of the lock and the door thudding shut. He locked it from the inside before leaving. Courteous. Gentlemanly. Gone.

In the morning, only the headache and the bottle of Baileys in her recycling bin reminded her about the night before. She shrugged it off. A one-off. Something that could have been a mistake but wasn’t. She sighed heavily and looked through her medicine cabinet for aspirin. Maybe most of all she wanted a mistake, something to shake things up, make them different.

I
N THE LONG DAYS BETWEEN their night at the bar and her Tuesday class, Miranda found herself replaying the evening in her mind. She laughed again at his admiration of Shel Silverstein and winced at memory of her hangover. Sometimes, well, maybe even more than sometimes, she reimagined the end of the evening, letting it come much closer to her fantasy with the buttons. But modesty and good sense prevailed, making her cheeks burn if her thoughts went a little too far. Still, she kept returning to the image of him standing over her next to the bed and to the question of what if.

On Tuesday, she finally stood before the door to her classroom, and Miranda feared her body would similarly betray her. She didn’t want to think about Ronan that way. He was a student. Her student. But she couldn’t erase the images from her mind. And part of her didn’t want to—but she didn’t need anyone else to guess at that—most of all, Ronan.

The full group sat arrayed around the table. Everyone back to their usual, pre-holiday places, eyes glued down to their phones. Ronan caught her eye, nodded slightly, and then returned to whatever flickering image passed over his tiny cell phone screen. She sighed inside. It was indeed no big deal. She ran through class breezily, letting them spend too much time harping on Clementine’s latest poem, a villanelle about Justin Bieber. They were riffing about other words that could rhyme with Usher.

“What do you think?” Clementine wailed.

Miranda refused to join in, waving her hands in front of her. “This is a student-led space. Listen to your peers, listen to your heart.”

Clementine shrugged her shoulders and returned to taking notes of her classmates’ whimsical selections. The two hours chugged by, and Miranda barely needed to speak a word. Any awkwardness she feared between her and Ronan failed to materialize. Relief flooded Miranda. She smiled brightly at them as they gathered their things and left. She even waved, chorusing in a singsong voice, “See you all next week.”

A few turned back and looked at her with slight scowls on their faces.

Her fears were unfounded. It’s not like anything could come of her and Ronan. But still, she remembered the electricity that had passed through her as he guided her to the barstool. That little zap felt so good, so right that the rules didn’t matter. But they do matter, they lurk behind every small touch, every smile. Rare is the relationship unbound by some sort of custom. “Wait until she’s at least twenty-one indeed,” Miranda startled herself by saying aloud.

She took out her phone and emailed herself the word electricity. If someone put down city, first, you could get electricity down in a Scrabble game. She liked her sculptures to follow the rules—everything must make a word, and you can’t use more than seven letters at a time. At least she would do that. It would give her something to do tonight. Something that would make someone out there in the in the world of the Internet notice her. Like her. Even if only through a click on a little thumbs up.

Her mind toyed with possible combinations for electricity or maybe just electric. Did the board have two “y” tiles? Could she somehow get body on the board? She walked with her eyes fixed upward; not on the sky, but inward, the way a person does when trying to do multiplication with carrying over in their heads. She pictured the Scrabble board just above eye-level as if space and time had another dimension hovering right above her. She walked on autopilot to her regular parking spot, nearly tripping over the last curb, rearranging the tiles in her head the whole time.

“Be careful, mind you,” Ronan said.

Miranda snap-ped from her reverie. He stood leaning against the hood of her car.

“I was just about to give up.”

“Give up what?” Miranda asked.

“Waiting on you. I just wanted to make sure we were okay.”

“We?”

“You know, you. Me. After the other night. I left you in a state,” he said.

“Oh, yeah. Well. Thanks. I’m all good. It was nice of you to lock up and all.”

“I didn’t trust myself not to.”

“Not to what?” she asked.

“Let myself back in. Leaving was hard enough.” He stood up and took two steps to cover the space between them. “Can I come over?” he whispered into her ear.

This time the electricity passed from his voice to her neck and down her arms and up her spine in the most delicious shiver. Suddenly, she couldn’t imagine why anything that felt like that would be wrong. She handed him the keys to her car. She didn’t trust herself to drive.

He knew the way to her apartment without even asking for directions. The snow still hadn’t melted, and many streets still lay under a coat of dirty, packed-down snow. He kept both hands on the wheel, his eyes straight ahead. They did not speak. She listened to his breath between gasps of the engine; she watched it escape his mouth in little puffs of cold smoke. The car heater wasn’t on. She didn’t feel the cold, though; her skin burned.

He pulled the car into her neighbor’s spot. For a moment, she thought about correcting him, then just hopped from the car and walked to the door. He passed her the keys, and in a miracle, she found the key on the first try and popped the door open. He followed her quickly inside, pulling the door shut with such force that it rattled the framed Matisse print that hung next to the front door.

“Have you been drinking today?” he asked.

“No. Why?”

“I wanted to make sure this is all free will.” He put a hand behind her neck and pulled her in close for the longest and deepest kiss of her life. He tasted like cinnamon and coffee. He tilted his head in just the right way and moved his fingers up through her hair. She placed her hands on either side of his waist, pulling him closer to her. She felt his need stiffen against her.

He pulled his lips away from hers, bringing his mouth to her ear. “I want to go slow,” he said. He picked up her hand and led her to the couch, her own couch, as if this wasn’t her place but his. He sat and motioned for her to sit next to him. She pressed against him, leaning her head up to kiss him again. He returned her kiss lightly. “Tell me something,” he said. “Tell me your middle name.”