Of course we went to his house after that, the little green duplex by the train depot. And he f*cked me in his apartment, on his very neat bed with the scratchy striped blankets he still has upstairs. He had no curtains on the windows and I remember the way the moonlight and the orange streetlight fell across our bodies and how embarrassed I was and kept trying to pull the sheets up, but William stopped me. “No,” he said. “Don’t do that, sweetie. Don’t hide from me. I want to see you.” I threw my fists down by my side and squinched my eyes closed like I was at the gynecologist. I felt William’s hand on my face. “Look at me,” he said, and I did. He was raised up aboveme like some god. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “Do you believe me?” He waited, holding himself in his hand, moving it slowly up and down, until I nodded. Then he said, “Good,” and drove himself into me. “Oh,” he said, “you feel even better than I thought you’d feel,” and “You are so juicy,” and, swiveling his hips, “I knew how avid you’d be,” because at that point I was making noises I didn’t know a human being could make, let alone myself.
I wasn’t a virgin before that night with William. There had been boys back in Aegina, the guy I worked the night shift with at the Kwik Trip and the guy I bought my car from and the ones who stuck their hands between my legs in the back row of the school bus or movies or in parking lots or at the quarry because they’d heard I was an easy lay. And I was. I was an easy lay. I let them push my bra up and grope me and push my head into their laps so I could suck them off and f*ck me with their fingers and then with their d*cks because I was hoping against hope that at some point I’d do something right and one of them would call me his girlfriend. Like the other girls. Wasn’t that how they got guys? The ones who waited for them by the lockers and held their hands in the hallways and drove them places in their cars and gave them their letter jackets and talked about getting married after school? It was all I wanted, to be somebody’s girlfriend, to get the f*ck out of my mother’s house, to be loved. I thought this was how you did it. Except I must have been doing something wrong, because after every hookup not one of those guys so much as acknowledged me or gave me a cigarette or stick of gum. They looked right past me. As if I did not exist.
I thought William was different. The way he f*cked certainly was. He wasn’t like three pumps and done. He was present. He was there. He actually seemed to care whether I was enjoying myself, was intent on me having orgasms, something I didn’t even know I could do with another person. Many times, in fact. This must be what lovemaking is, I remember thinking. And afterward he actually held me as we were going to sleep. He petted my hair. I felt his big body close around me like an oyster shell around a pearl and I felt so safe, and I tried as hard as I could to stay awake, staring at the stack of books on his dresser, because all I wanted was for this moment, thisnight, to last forever. If I had died then, I would have been perfectly happy.
But of course daylight came, and William was up with the dawn, as the birds were chirping in the trees. I woke and felt cold because he was no longer next to me and saw him dressing. “Good morning, lambchop,” he said when he saw my eyes open, and he used the long toes of his big foot to pick my panties up off the floor. He made little beeping noises like a truck reversing as he lifted them toward me. “You might need these,” he said with his sunshine grin. “I have to get to work. The page waits for no man.”
“Oh sure,” I said, “I’ll leave ASAP,” and he said, “Stay as long as you want,” and I said, hoping he’d talk me out of it and offer me breakfast, “No really, I should go, I need to write too,” and he said, “Romance?” and cocked his eyebrow at me, smiling, and I said, “No, actually, I’m working on a thriller.” I couldn’t believe I’d said that, it was like a frog had jumped out of my mouth, I hadn’t told anybody. Thrillers were almost as bad as romance in our program, the same mindless junk but with gore. “Not a thriller-thriller,” I hastened to add, since William was standing there with one leg in his pants and one not, gaping at me. I was so embarrassed. I cursed myself for having admitted this. “Much more literary,” I said, “likeThe Shining?”
William stared at me a minute longer, then said, “Godspeed.” He came to me and kissed me on the forehead, like a priest. “Thank you for that gift of a night,” he said, and walked out.
I don’t know where in the apartment he worked, tucked away in a study or at the kitchen table, because I lay there for about fifteen minutes and then got up and wrote my phone number andThanks, this was fun!!!!on a sheet of paper I ripped out of one of his notebooks. I considered adding a heart, at the end or over thei, but finally I decided against it and snuck out. The apartment was full of birdsong, sunshine, the smell of coffee.
That whole day I was in a daze, sore and sleep-deprived, replaying the night over and over in my head, trying to decide whether I’d said anything so stupid that he wouldn’t call, remembering how he’d touched me, talked to me, how he’d actually kissed me—no man could do that and not call you, right? It was so different from before, any of the guys I’d known. I thought of that kiss on my forehead. That was tenderness. That was love. I checkedmy flip phone so much I practically sprained my wrist taking it in and out of my pocket. I skipped my seventeenth-century poetry class, which believe me was no sacrifice, and stayed in my sh*thole to writeMr. and Mrs. Corwynhundreds of times in my notebook, his name and mine together. I kept looking out the window in case William was standing out there like Romeo, had looked up my address in the student directory. I was on fire with impatience to see him again, which was why I was so glad to hear his voice that night when I went to work at the Castle. He had come to see me! I was in the kitchen loading a tray of pint glasses into the dishwasher when I heard him at the bar, and I was taking off my hairnet and rehearsing what I’d do when I came out, would I play it casual and say Hey Hemingway, buy you a drink? or just lean over the bar and kiss him?, when I heard other voices and realized William was not alone, he was with Matt and Thom from our program. They were laughing about something, that goatish boy laughter I’d learned to dread because it was usually targeted at me or some other woman but was always bad.
I went and stood by the door to listen. Thom said, “It wasn’t terrible, a little like f*cking a bag of mayo but any port in the storm, am I right?” and Matt said, “Speaking of which, Corwyn, someone said they saw you leaving here last night with the Rabbit.”
“Who said that?” said William.
“Is it true?” said Matt.
“Maybe,” said William, and Matt and Thom groaned.
“Jesus Christ, what the f*ck, man, are you desperate?” said Thom, and Matt said, “Did you finally f*ck your way through all the other p*ssy on campus?”
“Maybe,” said William again, and they all laughed. “But seriously, what makes you think I f*cked her? Maybe I was just trying to help her.”
“Yeah, trying to help her off with her size one hundred granny panties,” said Matt, and my face burned, because I actually had been wearing bad underwear last night, waist-high and possibly with period stains, and how had he known this, had William taken photos or something? And Thom said, “Trying to help her finally lose her virginity.”
“You have such a low opinion of me,” said William. “What if I was trying to help her with her writing?” and one of them made a WAH sound like an airhorn and said, “Nice try, Corwyn.”
“Oh all right,” said William, “I might have thrown her a mercy f*ck,” and they jeered.
“So kind of you,” said Thom, and William said, “It was no big deal. I like f*cking ugly girls. They work harder.”
“To Saint William,” said Matt, “patron saint of ugly women.”
“To Saint William!” and they clinked glasses.
“Thanks, boys,” said William. “That’s me. I’m a giver!”
I couldn’t listen anymore then. I had been standing with my hand over my mouth but I took off my apron and hung it up and walked out the rear door of the Castle and never went back, and I never returned to my classes, either, especially our workshop, because how could I face William and those guys after something like that? That was the last time I ever wrote anything, too, thriller or stories or otherwise. The next day I packed up my things in my student housing sh*thole and drove away from Harrington and never looked back. I shoved it all into the back of my mind and tried my very best never to think about it, writing or William or Harrington, ever again.
Until a few years later, when something happened I knew would change everything.
Chapter 35
The Blizzard
“I think the forecast’s wrong,” William said. “The blizzard’s going to move in sooner than predicted.”
On one hand, Sam wanted to know why William thought he knew more than professional meteorologists; on the other, she thought he was probably right. They were eating breakfast at the kitchen island, William spooning up oatmeal and squinting at the sky through the window wall. It was the color of lead above the tree line. Wind squalled from the north, stirring up powdery ghosts from the vast expanse of snow-covered ice.
“If you don’t mind, sweetheart,” said William, “I’m going to skip our morning walk. We won’t make Augusta, but there’s time to run to East Fork to grab a few provisions. Want to come?”
“No, I’m good, thanks,” said Sam.
“Sure? We’re likely to be housebound for a few days.”
