Summer Sons(61)

“Yeah,” he said, straightening from his slouched perch as the other man approached.

“Bored already?” West asked, lifting his glass for a sip with long fingers spread across the rim rather than the stem.

Andrew said, “Working on it. Got anything interesting to talk about?”

Riley snorted. West glanced at him, smiled a flat, crooked smile, then nodded to Luca with a warmer exchange of murmured hellos. Standing close, Andrew caught the scent of his cologne: cardamom-edged and musky. The cluster of their bodies at angles to one another, observed by the magnified faces of dead celebrities from the room’s posters, carried a tense intimacy—and for once, the tension wasn’t about Andrew. Or at least, he assumed not.

“How’s your research going, Sowell?” West asked.

“Fine; revising my thesis proposal at the moment.”

West watched Riley over the rim of his wine glass as he savored a slow mouthful. “I heard it was rejected at the end of last term, that must have been frustrating.”

“Where’d that information come from?” Riley said.

“We all have our sources.”

“Boys, behave yourselves in front of company,” Luca said as she jerked a thumb surreptitiously toward the bustling chatter of faculty in the kitchen.

“Apologies,” West conceded with a grin that said he knew he’d won that round.

“Sure, sure, you’re right,” Riley said, patting Luca’s leg.

Andrew met Luca’s eyes over the top of Riley’s head. She rolled hers so dramatically that it almost made him snort while West and Riley bristled at each other and nursed their drinks. Andrew felt as if he were juggling three different lives and dropping the ball in all of them, but most of all this one. He had no place at ostentatious academic gatherings where people took thinly veiled potshots at each other’s writing over wine. On impulse, he slipped his phone out to respond to Sam: worse than bored

Oh really. Well come over and we’ll get drunk instead.

Despite his brief agreement, Riley opened his mouth again, like the words were being dragged out of him: “It was a request for revision, not a rejection. I agreed with the proposed narrowing of the research question. How’s your dissertation? Ed told me he thought you stalled out over the summer.”

Andrew’s hackles rose at Riley’s reference to Eddie, while West responded, “I’m not stalled, I’m investigating a fresh avenue for my third chapter my chair insisted on—”

A hand cupping his elbow startled him. He locked his phone screen with a twitch and Jane Troth laughed musically, recalling childhood memories of Eddie’s mother in a loose silk shell top and trim slacks.

“Sorry to scare you,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

“Hello, Dr. Troth,” West said, the animation smoothing from his expression until his face was a polite mask. “How’s your evening going?”

She glanced at him, then said to Andrew, “May I borrow you from your friends?”

Andrew nodded, surprised to see his problem solving itself. As she turned to leave the room, clearly expecting him to follow, he caught sight of Luca wrinkling her nose and West glowering with exhausted irritation at the professor’s retreating back. Riley crimped his mouth too. Subdued, Luca had said, and he thought he maybe understood a glimmer of what she was trying to explain to him.

Nonetheless, he followed dutifully as she led him from the group. The upstairs study she retreated to possessed the signs of human life that the public spaces of the gathering lacked: a pair of discarded socks next to the desk; a closed Macbook on the blotter; a haphazard collection of coffee mugs lined up on the windowsill. Andrew inspected the books on the shelf without seeing the titles. Dr. Troth propped her hip on the desk.

“Eric won’t mind, so long as we ignore the clutter. He offered the space so we could speak in private.”

“Sorry I missed our meeting, things have been busy,” Andrew said.

She gestured to the fading bruises along his jaw and asked, “Were you in an accident?”

“Yeah, and I’ve been catching up on assignments this week to make up for lost time. What did you want to talk to me about?”

Dr. Troth stood straight, pulled a folded square of paper from her trouser pocket, and passed it to him with a cool brush of fingertips. The edges, folded under themselves, formed an elegant packet. His thumb pressed the dense weave of the stationery into a hard ridge on the object it contained.

“Edward’s ring,” she said. “I found it, after, but I hadn’t had the chance to meet with you without an audience, and I didn’t think it would be appropriate to give you in public.”

Andrew tucked the packet into his jeans without opening the flap, imagining the weight of the platinum burning a circle into his thigh. He flattened his palm against his leg to press an indentation of metal to flesh for a split second and said, “Where was it?”

“He’d come to my home for a small dinner party and helped with the dishes after. I found the ring next to the sink,” she said.

“A dinner party?” Andrew repeated dumbly.

Troth swept her palms along the desk behind her, leaned back, and nodded. She was as earnest as a well-bred greyhound. He had a difficult time picturing his Eddie washing dishes at her sink, sleeves rolled, ring on the countertop—considering he’d seen him open beer bottles with the selfsame ring more than once—but the man had contained hidden multitudes, as Andrew so richly understood these days.