When You Come to Me (2 page)

Her hearing got better as well, yet her vision still lacked, and she attempted to follow the sound of the voice with her eyes, the lids of which were heavily dimmed under the straining light hovering near the voice.

“Damn it, I’m—I’m sorry,” the voice stammered. “I didn’t see you coming…honest…I-I would’ve been more careful if I’d seen you...”

The voice was deep, richer than any one she’d heard before, even deeper than her father’s, though that was a voice she hadn’t heard in many years.

Natalie Chandler attempted to moan something indecipherable, and she rolled her head over in pain, regretting the moment that she ever set foot into the house.

“Damn it, I knew I was drinking too much—my—my girlfriend told me that this beer would be the one to do it for me…I hate it that she was right…I hate it that she’s always right.”

Natalie only moaned again. This time she could open her eyes a little, just enough to see the lofty figure, looming above her head.

His hair was black, almost to the point of where it appeared a deep-seated blue in the glaring light near his face, like the Superman in the comic books she’d read as a child.

His eyes were a salient, atypical blue.

They were certainly very hard to ignore, all big and round and alert like that. They dreamingly reminded her of a bay in the Caribbean, or a cloudless sky in midday.

He was a pretty boy, who garnered skin that wasn’t too pale, who possessed a body that wasn’t drastically muscular, but toned in all the right places. He was most certainly the kind of white bread, all-American, apple pie, Midwestern-mannered type of white boy. She assumed immediately that she’d seen so many of his kind before, becoming numb to the familiarity of his physical characteristics. Frankly, she was not impressed, as if that mattered at that moment, as if this pretty boy hadn’t just knocked her in the head with a beer bottle, as if she didn’t have a humongous knot on the side of her forehead.

She looked at this boy, examined his mature face, saw the redness of it that lacked any kind of sobriety, saw him sway slightly from side-to-side, as if it were a struggle to stand up straight.

“Are you okay?” this boy asked, over the thump of the bass-induced music, beating against the door of the room in which they were posted.

She sat up a little, he backed off from her slightly, and she continued to look at him.

He extended his hands in the direction of her face and she winced, knocking his hands out of the way.

Silence.

“I was—I was just trying to—“

“Don’t worry about it,” Natalie Chandler told the boy.

He’d laid her on the bed. The audacity! The nerve of this boy to have touched her! What the people outside must have thought! She managed to slide past him, managed to slide off of the bed, adjust her shirt, and brush down her coarse hair with her hands.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” the boy asks again.

“I’m fine…really…just fine.”

But she wasn’t. She was disheveled, wasn’t she? She couldn’t think straight, could barely stand up straight, and she couldn’t really breathe.

She was barely on her feet no more than a few seconds before she stumbled dizzily, feeling the Pretty Boy catch her swiftly and envelop her small frame in his arms. She shuddered deeply beneath his startling strength.

She couldn’t look at him and didn’t want to.

“Yeah you’re right, you’re okay,” the Pretty Boy teased.

He placed Natalie Chandler back on the bed.

He cautiously sat next to her. She didn’t like the proximity.

“My girlfriend is probably wondering where I am,” he told her in a low tone. “We had a fight earlier—over Christmas break. What a dumb fight, huh?”

She studied the boy’s face. Apparently he didn’t expect her to answer, because he continued following a heavy sigh.

“She wants me to go home with her, meet her entire family,” he told her. “What does she expect from me? I’m only a junior, barely twenty-one…I’m not ready…should I be ready?”

Natalie was scared. She chose not to answer. She only stared at the Pretty Boy.

“Her name is Sophia,” he whispered, eyes distant as if to reflect on her name. “That’s pretty, isn’t it?”

This time, Natalie nodded.

“She’s pretty too…beautiful…blond hair, green eyes, slim figure, athletic, smart, fantastic smile…my sunshine.”

“Oh.”

“Three years,” the Pretty Boy stammered. “Three years I’ve been with her…loved her, dealt with her, made her cry, made her laugh…she wants to marry me…I don’t want to marry her…I don’t think I-I ever did…as much as I love her…I don’t want to marry her…I don’t want to marry my Sophia…”

The Pretty Boy sunk his head low, let out a low, grumbled belch, and ran his thick hand through his ravenous hair, and it fell back into his face, shielding those remarkable blue eyes.

And suddenly, without warning, the Pretty Boy jumped up from the bed, and his expression changed completely. There was a smile on his face as he stood in the middle of the room, looking at her. He startled her when he lunged out toward her, took her by the hand, and guided her off of the bed with him. He leaned in close to her face, his breath, hot, reeked of alcohol, and he mumbled, “Come with me…I don’t want her to see us.”

In a flash they were out of the house, the moisture of the night and the heat hit Natalie Chandler’s face coolly; he was still holding her hand.

She didn’t know his name! What was she thinking? Was she that stupid? Clearly, surely…

Hadn’t her mother warned her about this? Going off with strangers? Being alone with boys period? Clearly, surely…

And yet, there she was, allowing this white boy to pull her down the street, her head still throbbing wildly, the moon, full and luminous above their heads.

He was much taller than she originally thought; had to have been at least six-foot-three. And he certainly looked much older than twenty-one.

They ran down an incline towards another dead end road, an embankment blocked off by a fence of maples, dripping wet. He guided her through the trees; across a long expand of mushy ground, until they ended up at a small body of water. He stopped. He was still holding her hand.

They were both out of breath, he stared blankly before him, the small ripples of the pond, smeared in the moon’s glow, rolling forward against the balmy breeze.

He dropped her hand and he collapsed against the ground, slightly slanted into the water, and he leaned back against his arms.

“I come here all the time,” the Pretty Boy began, still trying to catch his breath. “To think, to breathe, to get away from Sophia.”

Natalie didn’t answer. She still stood in the spot in which he left her, still stood her distance.

Silence again.

He startled her when he reached for her hand again and pulled her down onto the ground, into the wetness.

This boy had lost his mind! Her butt was wet, she was cold, it was the middle of the night, and she had never felt further away from home than she did that night.

He didn’t look at her.

“Brandon Greene,” he said. “My name is Brandon Greene. Junior. My major is Business Administration. I’m from Saratoga Springs, New York. And it’s my birthday…”

“Happy Birthday…”

He looked at her. His eyes appeared amazing in the cool glow of the moon.

“You’re a freshman, right?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “You have that look in your eyes. That innocence. You’re beautiful…fucking beautiful. And I’m trying not to look at you. I’m trying to stay faithful. I cheated on Sophia once. Freshman year, right after we started dating. I don’t even remember that girl’s name.”

“Natalie Chandler,” she whispered, turning her round brown face away from his.

“What?”

“My name is Natalie…”

She turned back to him.

“Oh, so you do speak.”

“Of course I speak.”

He sloppily extended his hand to her. “Nat—Natalie…nice to meet you…sorry about the beer bottle…welcome to UGA…”

HER MAMA called her that morning and it made her late for her first class.

"How are your classes? Are you getting along with everyone? Grandma sent you some cookies...did you get them? Were they still fresh? Are you keeping your room clean? Hold on, Maya's here, she wants to talk to you a minute..."

Natalie figured that by choosing to go to school in Athens, she was just far enough away from home to get the sense of independence that she longed for. Moreover, the city possessed the security of remaining within a southern atmosphere. It wasn’t that she was afraid to venture toward a new society altogether, as Sidney had decided to do when she moved to New York for a couple of years; she was, simply put, too afraid to venture that far away from her family. She ultimately believed that, if something happened to them, they would be too far out of reach.

Set beneath the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, the college town featured a fully restored downtown, dotted with pretty baby magnolias and myrtles, and row beyond row of antebellum homes, hidden beneath graying Spanish moss.

The warm Georgian weather placed her outside, more often than she would be at home, sitting in a porch swing set beside her dormitory, swinging gently, reading a book.

She’d chosen Biochemistry at UGA because they’d given her the most money; a point she spent many days arguing with her mother about.

"There are plenty of good schools in Atlanta, Nattie,"
she'd said.
"You can commute back and forth and you won't have to worry about staying in one of those God-awful dorms...just consider it..."

She'd desperately attempted to finesse the conversation. She told her mother that although the potential of her being out of her element would be great, the university provided an excellent change of pace for her. She argued that the student population, predominantly white, predominantly conservative, predominantly southern Baptist, would provide her with an open-mind, would force her to step outside of herself. She rarely saw white people in Decatur. There was an understood separation between her world and theirs.

She was excited about the library job she’d found in early September, working as a page three times a week. Working in this venue allowed her to maintain the focus needed for her rigorous workload as a biochemistry major, and with its convenient location on campus (just a few paces down from her dormitory), it allowed her, one without a car, to get away from her loud roommate and her pompous boyfriend. It was a quiet place of refuge, giving her just enough money to feel comfortable buying groceries each week, and just enough to where she could buy that new shirt that she wanted a the mall or that missing piece to fix her computer.

She was given the duty of maintaining the business books on the eighth floor, a subject that disinterested her incredulously. She couldn’t fathom anyone on earth being interested in reading about marketing ethics, research and development and financing basics, for pleasure. Yet, much to her own surprise, within the short span of the three weeks she’d started working there, Natalie Chandler was slowly learning the database by heart, and when, by some unlucky chance, a student came up to her and asked about a book’s location, she was able without hesitation to point them in the right direction.

She experienced her first midterm crisis in early October, just two days following her eighteenth birthday, with three exams in the span of three days, and by her Friday afternoon shift, one cold day, she discovered a quaint corner on the other end of the advertising shelf, curled her slender brown body into a ball, and fell asleep on the floor.

She was awakened suddenly, completely unaware of how long she’d slept. She aimlessly reached up and lunged out at the figure tapping her on the shoulder. She felt two hands grabbing at her arms as if to stop her flailing, amidst her hazy vision. She blinked her eyes twice, felt breath on her face, and caught eyes with the same blue-eyed Pretty Boy from the party. She sat up slowly, he removed his hands, and she heard him sigh, and with one swift movement, he helped them both get to their feet.

“Of all places,” he said, clearing his throat, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his light-washed jeans. She’d forgotten how tall he was; a spectacle, surely, with his t-shaped body structure, immediately suggesting to her that he was an athlete at some point in his life.

“I’d tell you the same thing,” she replied.

Natalie dusted herself off, cleared her throat, finger-combed her long, coarse hair, and moved past him. She walked toward the small, tan cart of accounting books, and began shuffling through them.

“Brandon,” he called after her.

She looked in his direction, found his preppie attire amusing, and said, “What?”

“Brandon Greene is my name,” he began. “Just in case you forgot…”

She internally admitted that she hadn’t, and had surprised herself at how many times she sat in lab and thought about her funny interaction with the drunken white boy celebrating his twenty-first birthday, how often she thought about those eyes of his. He consequently became the most interesting thing she’d seen at eighteen thus far.

He said his name in a way that brought forth the idea that he was placing himself, slowly, subtly sure, in her life, quietly establishing that this would not be the last time that she’d see him, as if such a random thought existed. She wished, examining his casual stance from top to bottom, that he didn’t smile at her in such a friendly manner, and she wished that she had something clever to say, that would serve as a blockade to keep him from entering her life, learning more about her. Her only hope was that he’d simply grab a book and walk away.

“Natalie,” she told him with a heavy sigh, returning her focus to the books.

“I didn’t forget,” he laughed.

Funny he said that, considering how long it’d been since they met, considering his level of intoxication that night. But then she thought about how long they sat by the pond that night, how they sat in silence, watching the moon, how, with some strange feeling accompanying her thought, she felt that he understood her, asked nothing more of her than just her company.