The Headmaster's Wife(35)
“I love you,” he says, and she leans into his shoulder, where his skin is warm and clean, and places her face against it and she softly bites his neck. He pulls back and laughs again.
“Hey,” he says. “No biting.”
“Maybe I want to.”
“I love you,” he says again, and this time it sinks in, more definite than her teeth on his skin, makes an impression even, one that will last, and she allows herself the tiniest of moments to appreciate that this is the second time a boy has said this to her in the past month, though now it feels different. It is not just words, not just the silly words of teenagers, but it’s real somehow, realer and bigger than she can imagine, bigger than their bullshit lives and this small room with its wrestling mats piled high everywhere. And when she goes to reciprocate, it is not the struggle for authenticity she imagines, but rather, it flows off her tongue, and she means it as much as she is capable of meaning anything at this point in her life when she is still learning how to molt into adulthood.
“I love you,” she says.
He turns his head toward hers, and for a while they kiss, until they realize they are late for dinner. Ten minutes later, walking into the broad dining hall with its high windows and its chandeliers—to eat, paradoxically, fried chicken sandwiches or whatever is planned for that evening—she likes the fact that they are late, that they make an entrance, that the eyes of the school absorb the two of them as they rush in with the winter behind them and their hair tousled. She likes the clear obviousness of their affection. There is nothing to hide.
That Saturday night, they both sign out for home and separately leave campus, and in the small strip mall parking lot out of town they hop the bus and ride together to Burlington. A light snow falls, and they sit in the back of the bus and look out the windows and she leans into him, and they watch the snowfall stick to the trees on the sides of the highway.
They reach Burlington at dusk, and it is snowing heavily now, and the wind coming off the lake is fierce, but they do not care. He takes her hand as they walk down Church Street, and at a coffee shop they drink milkshakes and eat hamburgers and there is something nice about this, she thinks, for he is so easy for her to be with, different from Arthur, nothing enigmatic about him, just straightforward and as wholesome as the chocolate shakes they slurp with their straws and laugh about, looking across at each other, and then out to the street, where college kids and others move quickly and covered against the snowy cold.
They rent a room at a cheap motel on the waterfront. Russell pays the bill up front and in cash, counting the ones out carefully and without pretension. Upstairs he seems unsure what to do, and thankfully the bed actually has a slot to put quarters in to make it rock, and this is both puzzling and hilarious, and it breaks the ice for both of them when they lie on it and he says, “Does anyone actually like this?” as the whole bed quakes with epileptic fervor.
For a while they just kiss, and outside the snow muffles the sound of the cars moving down Battery Street. He asks if they can turn out the lights. She rises and flicks the switch. Back on the bed, she likes how slow he takes it, finally unbuttoning her shirt and stopping so she can help with the bra, and when later she takes him out, she is stunned at how big he is compared to Arthur, which shouldn’t be a surprise, because he is a giant relative to slight, thin Arthur, and when she slowly lowers herself onto him, she looks in the half dark toward his face, and he smiles right at her, and she smiles back, and then she quickens her movements, and a moment later the entire bed breaks.
It crashes to the floor with what sounds like a tremendous crash. They fall apart from each other, letting out peals of laughter that start slowly and build to near hysteria, and then someone is pounding on the door, and Russell stands up and he is still erect, and she laughs and says, “What are you thinking? You can’t answer it.”
She wraps the sheet around herself and gets the door. It is the hotel manager, summoned by the crash, and she explains that they were not doing anything, it just broke, and in the end, he gets them a different room, but the spell is more than broken.
Later she thinks that if she had known this was the last time he would be inside her, she would have climbed right back on top of him in the new room. She would have ripped him apart limb by limb. She would have chewed on him like a wolf.
But at the time they had no way of knowing this, of course, and on the bed in the new room they lay together in comfortable semi-postcoital silence and watched a Celtics game on television, the men running up and down the court, until she fell asleep in the crook of his arm.
A few days later, back on campus, Russell Hurley had his room searched, and under his bed they found an illegal stash of liquor, all kinds of liquor, and this under the bed of a boy who wasn’t going to let anything stand in the way of his dream not to work with his hands and so had never so much as sipped from a can of beer.
He knew someone had planted it, and seeing Arthur’s smug smile as the student rep on the discipline committee put it in his head that he might have done it, but Betsy was certain of it, though it was hard for small-town Russell to imagine anyone could be so malignant. The headmaster, Arthur’s father, offered him an out if he admitted the booze was his, but he couldn’t do it. He had too much integrity.
And so Russell Hurley left Lancaster without ever doing the one thing he was brought there to do, wearing the black and orange and shooting long jump shots in front of a packed gymnasium.