My Oxford Year(43)

“It’s quite all right,” he says, braving a glance at me and smiling slightly. “I appreciate that, honestly I do, but we’ve a routine. And Oliver is rather private about the whole thing.” He looks down at our hands on the shifter. He turns his hand around in mine and grasps it. “Actually,” he says slowly, “now that we’re on the up-and-up about all this, I’m terribly behind in my work and Oliver has a break in treatment coming up. I hesitate to even ask, but would you be terribly offended if we gave”—he gestures between us—“this, us, a brief hiatus?”

“Of course not. Like I said, whatever you need.” My answer is so automated it sounds like a customer-service call-center recording. Press one for disingenuous pandering, press two for passive-aggressive bullshit—

“You’re just too damn distracting, you see,” he says, leaning in charmingly.

Now I look out the window. “Actually, I could use some time, too. I need to start thinking about my dissertation subject and I’ve barely cracked Middlemarch.”

“Ah, my favorite.” Jamie sighs.

“But it’s not poetry,” I tease.

“I beg to differ. You’ll see. For whose class?”

“Hughes.”

Jamie rolls his eyes. “Here’s a fun game with Hughes. Count the number of times he feels the need, apropos of nothing, to remind everyone how spectacularly unattractive George Eliot was.”

I chuckle and gather my bag off the floor, still holding on to his hand. “So, how long do you think you need?”

Jamie looks outside, considering. “A month?”

“A month!” My surprised yelp is out of my mouth before I can stop it. Jamie doesn’t respond, just keeps staring out the window. I can’t help the ugly pang of hurt collecting in my stomach. I’m not proud of it. I know I’m being unforgivably selfish. But I need to know. “Jamie. Are you done? Because we said we’d be honest when it was over. Which is fine. And understandable. I mean, you obviously have—”

Without warning, Jamie grabs the back of my neck, closes the distance between us, and pulls me in for a kiss. I go molten inside, forgetting anything I might have been saying. Eventually, he pulls away, looks me right in the eye, and says, “I’m not done.” The husky promise settles deep inside me.

“Okay,” I whisper. He releases my neck and I open the door, reluctantly getting out. I sling my bag over my shoulder, lean down, and look at him. “So. I’m gonna go listen to Saunders lecture about the importance of margin notation in early modern manuscripts and you’re gonna get your Tennyson on and we’ll . . . be in touch.”

“It’s a plan,” he says, quoting my standard line, a teasing smile playing at his lips.

I SPEND THE weekend getting a little too drunk with Charlie, Maggie, and Tom. I don’t text or call Jamie and he doesn’t text or call me. I’ve turned our lack of communication into a drinking game: if you look at your phone and he still hasn’t contacted you, drink. It’s very effective.

Gavin throws a lot of work at me. Things I probably shouldn’t be doing. Things outside my auspices as the education consultant. Over the past six weeks, I’ve answered every one of his calls and returned every e-mail within an hour. I think he’s come to rely on me, especially when it pertains to staffing suggestions for young and hungry (i.e., cheap) field-office coordinators. He even asked me the other day for my opinion on a campaign ad. It’s odd imagining where I’ll be this time next year, if I’ll still be working for the senator, or if she’ll be the president-elect? Or if I’ll have some other client by then. The new people I’ll meet. Will I still be in touch with the ones I’ve met here?

I Skype with my mother and hear all about how it’s already snowed once, not much, only an inch or so and it didn’t stick, but she panicked and put the snow tires on and now she’s driving around with snow tires and she doesn’t know if she should take the snow tires off or just wait for it to really start snowing and why haven’t they invented temporary chains yet? They can put a man on the moon but they can’t invent temporary chains? I tell her they can and they have. I tell her my set from D.C. is sitting in her garage right now with the rest of the stuff I packed up before I left the country. This discussion takes a good thirty minutes and I’m able to disconnect the call without actually having told her anything relevant. But not before my door bursts open and Charlie walks in, wearing a new shirt and no pants (which my mother can’t see). He wants to know if the collar should go up or down. My mother tells him down. Satisfied, he leaves. My mother says he’s cute and asks if I’m seeing him. I tell her not yet, but my fingers are crossed.

After class on Monday (where I receive nothing more intimate from Jamie than a furtive wink) and logging a few library hours, I gravitate to the pub with Maggie, Charlie, and Tom. We’re at the Turf drinking cider in front of the temporary fire pit outside when I see a familiar head ducking through the door and coming out onto the patio.

For a moment I can’t place him. He’s handsome. Could it be as simple as that? I just haven’t had my head turned in six weeks and I’m mistaking that with familiarity? But his eyes find mine and, after a moment, he smiles in recognition. He lifts his beer at me in a toast.

It’s the beer that does it. He’s the cute D.C. guy from the Rhodes House. His hair is longer than it was seven weeks ago, blurring his corporate edges. I find myself standing up, telling my friends I’ll be right back. Just as I step up to him, his name flashes into my head and comes right out my mouth. “Connor Harrison-Smith.”