I gazed at him for another minute, taking in his tortoiseshell glasses and the Red Sox T-shirt peeking out from underneath the collar of his flannel, the beat-up leather band of his Swiss Army watch around one wrist. “Not really,” I admitted.
He grinned then, holding his hand out. “I didn’t think so,” he said with a shrug. “I’m Ian.”
“I’m Molly,” I said, and we shook.
After that I fell into a routine of Saturday mornings at the library: textbooks stacked neatly on the table, water bottletucked safely away inside my bag. The following week, Ian smiled and waved when he saw me. The week after that, he recommended a Barbara Kingsolver book he thought I might like. The week afterthat, it occurred to me that I was looking forward to seeing him, glancing up from my notes every couple of minutes and scanning the stacks for his kind, serious face.
Still, after everything that had happened back in Star Lake and after, I definitely wasn’t looking for anything romantic, on top of which I couldn’t imagine who in their right mind would possibly want to date me if they knew the kind of skeletons I had rattling around in my dorm room closet. Which is why I was so surprised, right before Thanksgiving, when Ian came over to the carrel I’d started to think of as mine and asked, so haltingly it sort of broke my heart, if I wanted to go see a Springsteen cover band at the Paradise that night.
“Um,” I said, taken aback and caught off guard and so deeply pleased I physically couldn’t keep from smiling, like the Boss himself had shown up in the reference section, climbed up onto one of the study tables, and launched into “Born to Run.” It occurred to me, somewhere at the very back of my secret heart, that I hadn’t felt anything like that since Gabe. “Hm.” I put a hand against the side of my face, felt the blood rushing there. “So here’s the thing. It sounds really fun and I promise I’m not just saying that. But I’m—” I broke off. “Just... not really in a place to bedating anybody right now.”
Ian raised his eyebrows. “What makes you think I’m trying to date you?” he asked. When I blanched, he grinned.
“I mean, I’m definitely trying to date you,” he admitted, jamming his hands into the pockets of his olive-green khakis and rocking backward on the heels of his boots. “But if it’s not on the table, I can respect that. Honestly, no pressure. I’d also really like to just be your friend.”
I squinted at him, looking for the catch but not finding one. “Really?” I asked.
Ian nodded and held his hands out like one of the street magicians posted up by the T station in Harvard Square,nothing here. “Really.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding slowly. “Then let’s be friends.”
And that’s how it started, as a friendship: turkey-melt lunches in the dining hall where he asked about my business classes and told me about the books he was reading for his Irish-American Writers seminar; a trip to the Ben and Jerry’s on Newbury Street because somebody had left a stack of two-for-one coupons on top of the trash can in the hallway of my dorm building. “What’s the deal with you guys?” my roommate, Roisin, asked the week before Christmas break, pulling me aside at student-discount ice-skating night on the Common. Her hat had a giant pom-pom bobbing on top of it; her brown skin was faintly rosy with the cold. “I feel like he’s been staring at you piningly all night.”
I shook my head, reaching out for the paper cup of hotchocolate she was offering. “We’re just friends,” I told her, and I meant it; still, when Ian mentioned going on a few dates with a girl in his teaching cohort in the middle of January it put me in such a bad mood that I blew off the superhero movie we were supposed to go see and jammed my sneakers on my feet instead. I ran all the way to Jamaica Pond in the screaming, skin-cracking cold.
Don’t be spoiled, I scolded myself as I swallowed down deep gulps of the dry, stinging winter air. After all, it wasn’t like there was anything I could do about it. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know if or when I would be. Ian might have thought he wanted to date me for a minute there, sure. But only because he didn’t actually know me at all.
Still, as the weeks went by I saw him more than I didn’t: we ate mushroom and ricotta slices at the trendy pizza chain across from the BU arena. We sat in the oversized chairs on the second floor of the student center and studied for exams. In March we went to an extremely long, extremely awkward improv show in the black box theater on campus, after which we stood bewildered on the sidewalk and tried to figure out what we’d just watched.
“Okay,” Ian said, rubbing a palm over his face. He shuddered visibly, like a dog shaking off water after a bath. “Wow. That was...”
“Special?” I supplied.
“That’s one word for it, certainly.” Ian grinned. “I think I need a beer. You wanna come over for a beer?”
I looked at him for a moment, his cheeks ruddy in the streetlight, his hair growing out past the collar of his warm-looking woolen coat. “Sure,” I said. “That sounds great.”
We followed the trolley tracks back down toward Kenmore Square, still totally unable to get over the weirdness of it: “I think my favorite part was when that one guy sang theBarneytheme song and then meowed like a cat for six minutes,” Ian said thoughtfully, and I laughed. It was only a couple of weeks until spring break, but Boston was still freezing and damp, the winter clinging endlessly on; my mittens had long since gone gray and dingy, a hole in the webbing between my fingers and my thumb. It had snowedagaina few days before, everyone in the dining hall looking out the window and groaning in unison as the fat flakes began to come down, and now I picked through the slushy black remains of it, water seeping into my ankle boots. “Easy,” Ian said, catching my hand when I almost slipped on a patch of ice slicked over the cobblestone sidewalk. “I gotcha.”
“Thanks,” I said as I righted myself again, my whole body going pleasantly alert inside my parka.
Ian smiled a little shyly. His hand was improbably warm. “No problem.” He started to let go, but before I knew what I was doing I tightened my grip, like a reflex. Ian’s eyebrows shot up in the darkness, but he didn’t comment. “It’s just down here” was all he said, nodding at a quiet side street.
Ian lived with two roommates in a scuzzy student apartment near the Fens, a listing walk-up where the narrowstairwells reeked of weed and Bagel Bites and his mail was perpetually getting stolen. The living room was drafty and cavernous, with tall coffered ceilings and molding that had been painted thickly over so many times it had lost all its detail; in the hallway, the colorless carpet was worn completely bald. The linoleum was peeling up in the kitchen. The windows rattled inside their frames.
It was Friday, and Ian’s roommates—a kid named Harvey who was studying engineering and stayed at his boyfriend’s most nights, plus a girl named Sahar who played in a punk band in Somerville on the weekends—were both out; the apartment was quiet, save a faint, irregular scratching in the walls. “It’s a mouse,” Ian confirmed, when he caught me tilting my head to the side to listen for it. “He’s basically our fourth roommate, I’m not going to lie to you. He doesn’t even have the decency to scurry. He just, like, strolls through the room while you’re watching TV or making a sandwich or something. Harvey calls him Old Chum.” He grimaced. “You’re rethinking your decision to come over here now, aren’t you.”
I looked at him evenly for a moment, then shook my head. “No.”
Ian’s ears got faintly red. “Okay,” he said, clearing his throat a bit. “Well, good.”
He got me a beer from the ancient fridge and burned some popcorn in the microwave; we sat on the sagging IKEA futon in the living room and watched aFriendsrerunon cable. It was late, nearly time for the T to stop running, and I knew I should head home, but the longer I sat there the clearer it became that I didn’t actually want to go back to my tall, sterile dorm building. I wanted to stay here, in this warm, scruffy place.
“Your socks are wet,” Ian observed suddenly, reaching out and flicking the bottom of my foot; on TV, Joey and Chandler had just left a baby on a bus.
“My feet are freezing,” I confessed, tucking them up under me.
“They are?” Ian made a face. “Why didn’t you say something? Hang on, wait a sec.” He got up off the couch and disappeared down the long, narrow hallway, his shoulders so broad he seemed to fill the entire space. When he came back he was holding a thick pair of navy blue socks.
