I wished I had gotten Del a phone, although I knew she wouldn’t have kept it charged and wouldn’t have carried it with her at all times. It began to grow dark. William asked me if I was ready.
“I have to take a shower.” I stepped into the bathroom and turned the taps to the shower. The pipes groaned, and I left the water running to heat up.
William sat in the duck-carved chair. He often did, to read, and he was looking over student essays. “What have you been doing all day?” he said. He kept his eyes on the pages in his lap.
“I was in the lab.” William was always curious about my work—always asking me if I would like him to take me to sites he’d found. I suspected his interest was more competitive than he would admit, and I mostly refused.
I stood in the light from the little bathroom. I’d taken off my clothes, and the water was running in the shower. He looked up at me, and his expression changed—his eyes softening.
“You want to kiss me,” I said.
He shuffled the pages, slowly, his eyes still appraising. “That and more,” he said. “We have to leave in fifteen minutes, though. We’re riding with Geoff.”
I went to him and moved the essays from his lap, slid my legs alongside him, and took his face in my hands. He groaned, a sound I loved to urge from him. Meanwhile the shower ran and the apartment steamed up—the cold windows by the chair, the chrome fixtures on the stove, the mirror hung beside the door. We’d often made love in the chair—William’s head leaning against the upholstered chair back, and me moving over him, clutching the carved ducks’ heads. I would close my eyes and then open them to find him watching me, intently, and sometimes I found it disconcerting that he would see me in the moments I was least in control. That night he kept his eyes open in the darkening room, the steam swirling around us, and I didn’t protest or ask him not to look at me, as I often did. It was funny how you expected the moment of orgasm to be joyful, but really, his eyes revealed so much more—a strange mixture of joy and pain and sorrow. Once I mentioned putting the mirror behind the chair, so I could see what I looked like, what my own eyes revealed. William never moved the mirror, but I knew he didn’t judge me for my request or think me strange; rather my desire to see my own expression was just another thing he found interesting about me.
That night I kissed him in the fog of steam, and he lifted me off of him, almost abruptly.
“I don’t want to make Geoff wait,” he said.
I felt out of sorts, reminded of the first night he refused me. “Come in the shower with me,” I said, tugging on his arm, but he pulled away and gave me a look I suspected he gave his most ignorant students.
I took only a few minutes to shower, then I dressed, shivering with cold. Neither of us spoke. We went downstairs and I knocked on Del’s apartment door, but there was no answer, no lights, and no smell of incense. Geoff was waiting for us in his car at the curb, exhaust spilling out and blackening the snow.
“You’ll have to help me watch for black ice,” he said as we climbed in.
I made a sound of concern, and he chuckled.
William pulled the passenger door closed. “Black ice is transparent,” he said to me. “We’ll know we’ve hit it if the car is spinning.”
“Where’s your sister?” Geoff asked.
“I don’t really know,” I said. “Maybe she’s with Alice’s family.”
The thought of Del seated at a dining-room table covered in a lace cloth with Alice and her grandmother and Erika—tan and striking against the gray scene through the picture window—didn’t make me feel any better. Next, Del would be planning her own trip to Florida, she and Alice with Erika in her convertible speeding along some palm-lined boulevard.