Lies That Bind Us(11)

Marcus and I dated for a little over three years and had known each other for eight. We’d both been at college in Chapel Hill, where I was edging cautiously through a biology premed with a side order of English while he was doing history and secondary education. We’d met at a party, introduced by a theater major who knew us both a little and could have been sexually interested in either one of us. I think it was the weirdness of that encounter that drove us together. Marcus had been wearing a bizarre orange sweater and a pair of heavy-rimmed glasses, both of which I had teased him for, and he had responded by mocking my taste in music (I was going through a hair-metal phase, which I don’t talk about anymore). Marcus said he had an off-campus girlfriend at the time, and I was semi-interested in a guitarist who played in a jazz band, so we weren’t looking for anything other than someone to share the pretty miserable experience of a house party where the only people we knew either hadn’t showed up or were more interested in their other friends.

I should say that I’d also never been involved with a black guy before, and while I wasn’t against the idea, I’m sure it made me cautious. Him too, probably. Race used to make me wary, careful about the signals I sent out and the ones I thought I was getting, terrified of making assumptions or saying the wrong thing based on . . . God, I don’t know: Movies? Social media? Dumb stuff. Anyway, we spent half the night talking and both had way too many tequila shots, so much so, in fact, that if there had been a moment we might have gone home together, we had drunk right past it and wound up staggering off separately. In hindsight this had seemed like a godsend. We saw each other from time to time, but nothing happened between us till half a decade later, when we were, we decided, older, wiser, and free. If we’d gotten together that first night, we said sagely, things would have gotten messed up, and we would never have had a real relationship.

But then we’d messed that up too. It had just taken longer.

The breakup had come six months after our trip to Crete when we had fallen in with Melissa and Simon, Kristen and Brad. I sometimes wondered if the cracks had already been there then but we had chosen to ignore them. How else do you explain a young couple on a romantic vacation on a Greek island spending all their time with complete strangers? The trip was certainly a factor, even if I couldn’t put my finger on how.

And now they were all downstairs, fog cutters at the ready, waiting for me, along with a mysterious spare called Gretchen. For a second I looked at myself in the steamed-up bathroom window and wondered again why I had come.

But I had, and now that I was here, I was not just going to endure it—I was going to enjoy myself. I turned from the bathroom mirror, put my glasses on, wrapped a towel around myself, and tripped barefoot back to my room, confident that the view through the great arched window would lift my spirits.

I didn’t get that far. I was unlocking my bedroom door when I heard footsteps on the stairs behind me and turned to find Marcus looking at me, frozen with indecision. He was wearing khakis and a white open-necked shirt, the sleeves rolled up, showing slim brown forearms. I’d always liked his arms. His hair was cut short, trimmed at the edges to a razor-sharp line. He had new slightly odd-looking glasses with ironically purple frames, and his feet were bare so that he looked quite unlike himself, or the version of him I had seen last. A bit hipper, maybe. The cool teacher. He had been waiting for me to go inside, hoping I wouldn’t see him. I felt it in his stillness, and the impression was confirmed as he tried to blunder his way out of it.

“Hey, stranger!” he said, a thoroughly un-Marcus thing to say. “I was just going to . . . is the bathroom free?”

“Hi, Marcus,” I said, clutching at my towel, terrified that it might shift. “Yes. It’s right there.”

“Right,” he said. “Cool. OK, then. What a great place, huh?”

“Yes,” I said, wishing I was somewhere—anywhere—else.

“Gonna be fun. Us all together again.”

“Yes.”

There was a fractional beat, just a breath longer than was comfortable.

“OK,” said Marcus. “Well, we’ll do the reunion thing when you’re dressed, yeah? Hugs and such.”

“Sure.”

“OK, then. I’ll see you in a few . . .”

I opened my door and slipped inside without looking back, closing it behind me and leaning against the wood, my heart racing.

The reunion thing.

Jesus. I didn’t know which of us had been more mortified. It was the suddenness of the thing. And the towel. Jesus, yes, the towel.

I mean, Marcus had seen me naked in the past, but . . .

And he might be remembering that now . . .

God. It was a mess. And what if he thought I had deliberately bumped into him like that, like it was supposed to be seductive?

I sat heavily onto the bed. It was soft, layered with the thick, fluffy duvet, and suddenly I wanted to slip out of the towel, burrow under the covers, and not come out till morning.

What a fool you are, I said to myself. You came back for him, and in thirty seconds it’s already clear that he’s embarrassed to see you, that he secretly hoped you wouldn’t show, and now he sees you’re here and trolling the hallways in a fucking towel for Christ’s sake, trying to lure him into your bed like some desperate divorcée who stakes out college bars . . .

Shut up.