‘You need to understand who I am, though.’
My voice was cracking too as I tugged at his hair, made him look at me. ‘You might have won the argument, but I made some valid points,’ I said. ‘I’m still all fists. I’m still all teeth. And—’
‘I like your fists.’ He found my hand and bit down gently on one of my knuckles. ‘I like your teeth.’
It was hard not to laugh as he strummed his finger over my lips like a guitar string, pulling the bottom one down slightly before leaning in and lining my front teeth with the tip of his tongue.
I bit his lip in return. ‘I mean it, though,’ I said. ‘Some days I’m probably going to be a real bitch to you. No matter how well and how frequently you dick me down, that’s not going to change.’
‘I wouldn’t want it to – although that does sound like a challenge I’d be interested in attempting.’ He kissed me. ‘Do you know Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130?’
‘Is thatLet me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments?’
‘That’s 116. Also very appropriate, my darling, but not the one I mean.’
He got up, putting his glasses back on and finding his phone in his pants pocket. ‘This is 130,’ he said, settling back in next to me and bringing it up on the screen.
I leant my chin on his shoulder so I could read it. ‘?“My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun”.’
‘It goes on like that for most of the poem.’ He gestured briefly down the first three quatrains. ‘There are some pretty sick burns in there about Shakespeare’s dark lady mistress, to be honest – like, “In some perfumes is there more delight / Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks”? Not terribly romantic.’
He scrolled to the bottom. ‘But I really like the end. Lines eleven to fourteen.’
I started at line eleven. ‘?“I grant I never saw a goddess go; / My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground”.’
‘?“And yet, by heaven,”?’ Jonah said, looking at me, not the screen, ‘?“I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare”.’
I melted into him. As far as declarations of love went, it was entirely citational – quite literally someone else’s words – but it was somehow also entirely personal.
Then Jonah snorted with laughter.
I looked up. ‘What?’
‘Van just forwarded us both an academic jobs digest,’ he said. ‘You’ll never guess what they’re recruiting for back at ESU.’
He showed me.Lecturer in Literary Studies, Level B.
‘Look who the chair of the hiring committee is.’
Direct all enquiries to: Professor Christian Fisher.
I snorted too. ‘Well, that rules me out,’ I said, ‘unless you wanted to take me on partner hire.’
Then, unbidden, a bolt of fear shot through me. What if Jonah decided – what if he wanted—
‘Stop,’ he said, flicking my nose with his finger. ‘I see your mind piecing that argument together, Shaw, and I’m here to tell you that it’s completely without foundation. I’m not going anywhere.’
He tightened his arm around me and kissed me. ‘When it comes to blithely walking into academic jobs I don’t deserve, I haveextremelyhigh standards.’
‘You do deserve—’ I started, but then he was hitching my leg over his lap, and his fingers were sketching a fiery pathway up my inner thigh, and as he closed his mouth over my nipple again, all the words in the world fell away from me.
JULY
Chapter Twenty-OneJonah
The next month was the best of my life.
As a scholar, I had been trained not to make big claims like that – the reality was always more complicated – but the evidence in this case was entirely overwhelming.
