I don’t even haveto turn around to know that Dom’s watching me. I can feel it.
I turn the page in the book I’m reading; it’s a thriller. I can’t help but smile while I lie on the couch snuggled up with my book. I am struggling to focus on the words, though. That’s saying a lot since I am in the middle of a massive who-done-it plot twist.
But in my defense, Dom has been acting differently today than usual. Actually, he’s been acting differently all week. Ever since that night he stormed into my room, verbally ripped into me and then physically did the same, he’s been acting differently.
I catch him looking at me or watching me all the time. He doesn’t say much, but I can feel his eyes on me; checking me out. He is looking at me in a way he hasn’t before, and I don’t hate it.
“What’s your book about?” he asks. He’s standing over me now, staring down with a water bottle in his hand. His other hand rests on the back of the couch, right next to my head.
“A girl,” I answer. “And a guy.”
“Oh. A love story, then?” he asks, and his finger inches over ever so slightly, reaching for a couple strands of my hair.
My heart jackrabbits in my chest. “Not exactly,” I answer.
“No?” he asks, twirling the hair around his fingers.
“No. He’s planning on killing her,” I say.
“Oh,” he says, and I giggle.
“It’s a thriller. I don’t read books about love.”
“That surprises me,” Dom says as he rounds to the front of the couch, taking a seat close to me. Not close enough that we are touching, but close enough that we could if we wanted to.
“Why’s that?” I ask with intrigue.
“You always struck me as a romantic,” he says.
I swallow, my smile subtly tipping downward. “I haven’t experienced many happy endings in my life,” I say.
“You say that like your story isn’t still being written,” he says.
I say that because my parents died when I was in high school.
“I wish I had more time to read,” he tells me. He shifts on the couch to face me, and as he does, his knee brushes my thigh, pressing into it. Neither of us re-position.
I dog-ear the page I am on and set the book down. “What would you read? If you had the time, I mean.”
Dom settles deeper into the couch, resting his hands behind his head. “Whitman, I think,” he says, and I snort.
“Oh, come on,” I say.
Dom’s eyes dart to me. “You don’t believe that I like poetry?” he asks.
“I don’t believe that classical literature would be your go to,” I say.
“The rich coverlet of the grass, animals and birds, the private untrimmed bank, the primitive apples, the pebble- stones. Beautiful dripping fragments, the negligent list of one after another, as I happen to call them to me or think of them. The real poems, what we call poems, being merely pictures. The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me, this poem drooping shy and unseen that I always carry and that all men carry,” he recites, and my mouth drops.
“What did you go to school for?” I ask, and Dom smiles. Not a smirk. A real smile, lazy and amused.
“I think the real question is whatdidn’tI go to school for?” he asks. “If you can believe this, my father was a bit of a hardass and had no qualms dumping money into my education. It was not for my own personal benefit, but so he could say he had a son who went to Duke.”
“You went to Duke?” I ask, picking up all the little gems of information about him. He rarely shares, so when he does, I tuck the little tidbits away like sea glass on a beach.
“My father was born and raised in Charleston,” he says.
“I didn’t know that,” I say.
