“Never mind the ink,” Katie said. “Look at his triceps.”
Little shadowed dimples in the undersides of his arms, and all Katie could think of for a moment was that he wasn’t terribly tall, and if she had been standing close enough when he raised his hands to take a pass she could have stood on tiptoe and licked them. The image dried her mouth, heated her face.
Melissa would have thought Katie silly for having shocked herself, though, so she didn’t say anything.
Even without the ink, he had the best body on the basketball court. Hard all over, muscle swelling and valleying as he sprinted and sidestepped, chin-length blond hair swinging in his eyes. He skittered left like a boxer, turned, dribbled between his legs—quadriceps popping, calves like flexed cables—caught the ball as it came back up and leaped. Parabolic, sailing. Sweat shook from his elbows and chin as he released.
A three-point shot. A high geometric arch.
Denied when a tall black boy of eighteen or so tipped it off the edge of the basket, jangling the chain, and fired back to half court, but that didn’t matter. Katie glanced over her shoulder to make sure Gina was following.
“God,” Melissa purred. “I love New York.”
Katie, mopping her gritty forehead with the inside of her T-shirt collar, couldn’t have agreed more.
So it was mid-September and still too hot to think. So she was filthy just from walking through the city air.
You didn’t get anything like the blond boy back home in Appleton.
Melissa was a tall freckled girl who wore her hair in red pigtails that looked like braided yarn. She had a tendency to bounce up on her toes that made her seem much taller, and she craned over the pedestrians as they stepped up onto the far curb. “There’s some shade by the—oh, my god would you look at that?”
Katie bounced too, but couldn’t see anything except shirts. “Mel!”
“Sorry.”
Flanking Gina, two steps ahead of her, they moved on. Melissa was right about the shade; it was cooler and had a pretty good view. They made it there just as the blond was facing off with a white-shirted Latino in red Converse All-Stars that were frayed around the cuffs. “Jump ball,” Gina said, and leaned forward between Katie and Melissa.
The men coiled and went up. Attenuated bodies, arching, bumping, big hands splayed. Katie saw dark bands clasping every finger on the blond, and each thumb. More ink, or maybe rings, though wouldn’t it hurt to play ball in them?
The Latino was taller; the blond beat him by inches. He tagged the ball with straining fingertips, lofted it to his team. And then he landed lightly, knees flexed, sucked in a deep breath while his elbows hovered back and up, and pivoted.
It wasn’t a boy, unless a man in his early thirties counted.
“Holy crap,” said Gina, who only swore in Puerto Rican. “Girls, that’s Doctor S.”
Wednesday at noon, the three mismatched freshman girls who sat in the third row center of Matthew Szczegielniak’s 220 were worse than usual. Normally, they belonged to the doe-eyed, insecure subspecies of first-year student, badly needing to be shocked back into a sense of humor and acceptance of their own fallibility. A lot of these young girls reminded Matthew of adolescent cats; trying so hard to look serene and dignified that they walked into walls.
And then got mad at you for noticing.
Really, that was even funnier.
Today, though, they were giggling and nudging and passing notes until he was half-convinced he’d made a wrong turn somewhere and wound up teaching a high school class. He caught the carrot-top mid-nudge while mid-sentence (Byron, Scott), about a third of the way through his introductory forty minutes on the Romantic poets, and fixed her with a glare through his spectacles that could have chipped enamel.
A red tide rose behind her freckles, brightening her sunburned nose. Her next giggle came out a squeak.
“Ms. Martinchek. You have a trenchant observation on the work of Joanna Baillie, perhaps?”
If she’d gone any redder, he would have worried about apoplexy. She stared down at her open notebook and shook her head in tiny quick jerks.
“No, Doctor S.”
Matthew Szczegielniak rubbed his nose with the butt of his dry-erase marker, nudging his spectacles up with his thumbnail. He wasn’t enough of a problem child to make his students learn his last name— even the simplified pronunciation he preferred—though the few that tried were usually good for endless hours of entertainment.
Besides, Matthew was a Mage. And magic being what it was, he would be hard put to imagine a more counterproductive activity than teaching three hundred undergrads a semester how to pronounce his name.
Enough heat of embarrassment radiated from Melissa’s body to make Katie lean on her opposite elbow and duck her head in sympathy.
She kept sneaking looks at Doctor S., trying to see past the slicked ponytail, the spectacles, the arch and perfectly bitchy precision of his lecturing style to find the laughing half-naked athlete of the day before.
She’d thought he was probably gay.
Sure, books, covers, whatever. It was impossible to believe in him exultant, shaking sweat from his hair, even though she’d seen it, even though the image fumed wisps of intrigue through her pelvis. Even though she could see the black rings on every finger and each thumb, clicking slightly when he gestured. She couldn’t understand how she had never noticed them before. And never noticed the way he always dressed for class, though it was still hotter than Hades; the ribbed soft-colored turtleneck that covered him from the backs of broad hands to the tender flesh under his throat, the camel-or smoke-or charcoal-colored corduroy blazer that hid the shape of his shoulders and the width of his chest.
It was maddening, knowing what was under the clothes. She wondered if the barbaric tattoos extended everywhere, and flushed, herself, at least as bright as Melissa. And then brighter, as she felt the prof ’s eyes on her, as if he was wondering what she was thinking that so discomfited her.
Oh, lord, but wouldn’t that have hurt?
On the other hand, he’d had the insides of his arms done, and the inner thighs. And that was supposed to hurt like anything, wasn’t it?
And then she noticed that his left ear was pierced top to bottom, ten or a dozen rings, and sank down in her chair while she wondered what else he might have had done. And why she’d never noticed any of it— the rings, the earrings, the ink, the muscles—any of it, before.
“Oh, God,” she whispered without moving her lips. “I’m never going to make it through this class.”
But she did. And leaned up against the wall beside the door afterwards, shoulder-to-shoulder with Melissa while they waited for Gina to come out. Quiet, but if anybody was going to do something crazy or brave or both, it would be her. And right now, she was down at the bottom of the lecture hall, chatting up the professor.