“What’s this?” I said.
He pulled me in. I smelled the roasted poultry on his sweater, and I almost told him no before his mouth found mine and quieted me, his hands slipping beneath my clothes, cool and quick. One plunged down the front of my jeans, and I knew that we would have only a short amount of time, but we were good at this, having found ourselves able to complete the act any number of places at short notice—his office, with a line of students in the hall, at the back of the library, behind the last stack of books, beneath the dust-filled light of the projector, the only patrons in the little cinema downtown. The coolness of his hand on me made me tremble, and I bit his lip, and he moaned and turned me facedown on the bed. He unzipped his pants, and then he was on top of me, inside me, and the bed’s old springs recoiled against his thrusting, a sound amplified in my ear, my face flat against the raised pattern of the bedspread. There was no explanation for his sudden desire, there never really was. Just the darkness of the stairs, our bodies in that close space, the idea of the other, and the pleasure that could be ours in a matter of moments.
Afterward, in the bathroom downstairs, I rubbed at the mark of the bedspread on my face and swung my hair over my cheek to cover it. I felt slightly abject. It never occurred to me to protest or refuse him, yet he’d refused me just that afternoon. Back in the living room, I took a seat on the floor by the fire, separate from the others. I knew they all knew. “It’s obvious they’re fucking,” the girls would say to each other out of my earshot.
“Mary Rae would have liked you, Del,” Alice said across the room. “You’re just the right amount of smart and crazy.” An irritating remark. Mary Rae had chosen me.
I felt too warm by the fire and regretted sitting there. Anne was watching me, making me feel odd. William’s semen seeped into my underwear.
“Have the police found any clues about what happened?” I said.
A log fell into the flames. Kitty, sitting the closest to me on the floor, bit her fingernails, smearing her lipstick. Alice played with the fringe on the afghan she’d wrapped around her and Del’s shoulders. I’d made yet another mistake.
“No one seems to know anything,” Anne said, her cigarette dangling from her bony fingers. “Her mother has been hounding the police. But they aren’t used to this sort of thing. This is a small town.”
I angled myself away from the fire and imagined the heat of it catching the loose pieces of my hair. I smelled the singed pelt of the stag mounted above my head. “Was she seeing someone?” I asked.
What if it had been a situation like the one in the movie Laura, in which a spurned lover decides if he can’t have the woman, no one will? In the dim room the pale faces of the Milton girls seemed detached from their darker clothes and hair, from the green velvet of the couches they sat on.
“Not recently,” Kitty said, her voice hard.
Anne reached out for her sherry glass on the table in front of me, and I handed it to her. “Who was she seeing last?”
“We don’t know,” Anne said, bringing the glass to her lips. “She was taking a break from boys.”
“She only loved one boy her whole life,” Alice said quietly. Her hair had fallen partially over her face. She fiddled with the afghan fringe, her fingers as nervous as Mary Rae’s were spinning her locket.
Anne stubbed out her cigarette. It sent up a small spark that singed the couch cushion.
“And who was that?” I said. I knew, but I wanted them to tell me.
“She and Billy were a couple senior year,” Kitty said. “She never really got over him.”
“Everyone wanted to date Billy,” Alice said, abandoning the afghan fringe and brushing her unruly hair from her face. I sensed the word “date” was used for Anne’s benefit, that to say “fuck” might have been offensive to her. Del, slumped against Alice under the afghan, gave me a sad little smile that I didn’t want.
“Mary Rae kept thinking they’d get back together,” Lucie said.
Their voices were soft and seemed sorry to break this news to me. The boys in their fast cars took turns with all the local girls, and William played the elusive, handsome, older guy—though his hanging around with high school girls was a little disturbing. Was this why the Milton girls disliked me? Had I landed their star local guy?
“Alice, you saw her last,” I said.