The anomaly scares me, terrifies me more than anything ever has.
His sweat-soaked chest and torso contract with every heaving breath. He lets go of my thighs and grabs hold of my chin, looking deep into my eyes. For once, I don’t want them on me. I don’t feel any pleasure in their blazing, fire-breathing look.
“I’m not your boyfriend, Layla. I’m not going to hold your hand or take you to a movie. I’m not going to talk about my feelings with you.” His fingers flex on my jaw. “Tell me you understand this.”
I blink my heavy lids and tears fall from the corners of my eyes. They make him even angrier. There’s a harshness in him I haven’t seen before. Maybe he’s been fooling me all along. Maybe I never made anything better. Maybe it was all an insane dream I made up to keep doing this.
“Tell me,” he says harshly.
Afraid, I jerk out a nod, but he shakes his head. “No, say it. Give me the words, Layla.”
I hear the shatter of my heart. I hear that sound from long ago when I broke the bottle of that expensive champagne when Caleb left. But this time around, the sound is like a gunshot, more jarring and deafening. It’s the sound of my castle falling through the air and crashing to the ground.
“You’re not my boyfriend and you won’t take me to the movies or hold my hand, and you won’t talk to me about your feelings,” I say in a monotone. I say it without halting or stuttering. I say it clearly.
His grip loosens and a look flashes on his face, but it’s gone before I can decipher it—and I don’t want to decipher it. I just want to leave. Thomas moves away, goes to the window, and lights another cigarette, like he did that first night he fucked me. Everything is coming full circle now, but I’m a lot different than what I used to be.
Swallowing, I try to sit up. Wounded and battered, my body is a warzone, a torn-up village after a sandstorm. I dress myself while Thomas is busy watching the darkness. Usually, he takes me home in his car and I’m under my purple blanket within ten minutes, sleepy, dreaming of him. Tonight, though, it looks like I’ll be walking home. It’s no big deal. Midnight streets and I are old friends.
Before I turn the knob, I face Thomas. “You know I want you. I’m the crazy girl who lets you fuck her however you want. You can see it in my eyes. That’s what you said, isn’t it? It’s in your eyes. You can play with me. You can play with my body because you know how much I get off on it. I’m an open book to you.” I take a deep breath and unlock the door. “But I can read you too. It took me a little while. It took a lot of staying awake at night, thinking about you and yeah, stalking you, but I finally figured it out. You’re suffocating yourself, hoping to breathe life into your relationship, into your love. You’re holding on too tight, and maybe you need to let go, because if you don’t, you might just…kill everything.”
I close the door behind me, and then I walk away. From him. From the only home I’ve ever known.
The Bard
It takes me a few minutes to come out of my stupor.
She’s gone.
She left, all alone, in the dead of the night. I see her running through the darkened streets, crying, her wild curls flying, in disarray. What if she stumbles and falls? She has a knack for doing that. What if she bumps into a boy? A drunk boy who can’t see straight, let alone understand the meaning of the word no?
Layla is just…a child. So young and fragile, but brave too—brave enough to be with me, to take my abuse. Her courage floors me. Her courage highlights my own cowardice.
I can’t let her go like this. I can’t. I can’t let her go. Period.
As I throw the cigarette out the window and button up my shirt, I become still. I become afraid. Am I not always that way?
All this time, all these nights that she came to me, she has always been alone. She has walked those streets all alone, unprotected, probably without a care because she was eager to get to me.
And I have been just as eager. I have been just as bent out of my head for her to get to me that I never once questioned it. I never once questioned how she got here. I never asked her if she was being careful or if she met someone on the way over, or if it’s safe for her to walk at night.
I never once asked her anything. I just took and took, like I always do. I become so wrapped up in my head that I never care about anything else—but didn’t I tell her this already? Didn’t I warn her? Why did she keep coming back? Why did she keep offering herself to me like a fucking sacrifice?
I told her she’d regret this.
My head is aching, burning up. I need to make this right, but I stubbornly don’t move from my spot. I won’t move. I told her. It’s not my fault that she left crying, that she thought this was more than what it was.
I’m rooted in the middle of the room when there is a click and the door swings open. For a fraction of a second, I think it’s Layla, and my body comes out of its deathly stillness—but it’s not. It’s Sarah.
She has a bundle of papers tucked in the crook of her arms. Even so late at night, she appears put-together, her hair polished and well-kempt.
“I came to get some last-minute printouts from my office for tomorrow,” she explains, motioning to the papers.
Tomorrow, Sarah and I are heading to New York for a poetry convention. We’ll be back Monday, hopefully with a bunch of signups for the coming semester, given I’m the bait—the youngest poet to win the McLeod genius grant.
“Layla Robinson,” she says, her demeanor cold. “You’re having an affair with her.”
The flame flickers to life in my abdomen, and I tighten my body for the first electric rush of heat. No matter what the situation is, her name is powerful enough to affect me deeply.
I neither confirm nor deny. Affair isn’t how I’d describe what Layla and I have. No, it’s more…complicated than that, more layered. Sordid. Pure. It’s more than I could ever put into words.
And right now, she’s out there alone because of me.
It’s not my fault.
“What, no response? What happened to all your sarcastic wit?” Sarah smirks, shaking her head.
“Get to the point,” I manage to croak out, gritting my teeth.
“So you’re not denying it, then. You are, in fact, sleeping with one of your students. Jesus Christ. You know, I didn’t believe it. I knew something was fishy with all those meetings you had in here that strangely required her to go to the ladies’ room after, and then, imagine my surprise when I find you here in the dead of the night after I saw Layla running out of the building.” Her eyes are shooting icy daggers at me. “Congratulations, Professor Abrams. You’re both an incompetent teacher and a pathetic human being.”
She was running. That’s all I can think about. She was running when she left, and I know she’ll slip or stumble and she’ll fall. I need to get to her before that happens.