Quinn (6 page)

Will sat under a tree beside the massive stone steps that led to the library entrance. He leaned back against the tree trunk with one knee bent to support his book, a slim volume that absorbed his attention completely. Watching him, Quinn wondered if she had forgotten the mechanics of breathing. As she approached she tried to tell herself that she could still turn and walk the other way. But she knew she couldn't; there was this giant invisible hand pressing hard against the small of her back, propelling her toward him.

Will glanced up, and for a moment she thought he didn't recognize her. Then the vague, dreamy look lifted from his face and he gave her one of his strange half-smiles.

“All right. You win,” Quinn said. Until this moment she'd had no idea what she would say to him. Her words seemed to float up into the branches of the tree and hover there. She felt as if she could follow them, she was so light and giddy.

“Thank you.”

She waited for him to say more, but he just looked at her. Finally she stammered, “I'll be around this weekend. Next weekend.” She stopped for a moment, trying to pull herself together. “Saturday night, this coming Saturday night.”

“I know the one you mean.”

She inspected his face to see if he was teasing her, but he seemed earnest enough. “Is that okay?”

He nodded.

“Seven?”

“Fine. Shall I pick you up?”

“No!” Quinn burst out. “No, I'll come to you … to your room.”

“All right,” he said.

She looked at his leg stretched along the frozen ground. “Aren't you cold?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

Again, she waited for more, but he just continued to watch her patiently. She knew that her face had gone deep pink. “Well … see you then. Thanks …” She turned and started walking toward the library. Thanks for what? she thought. Thanks for turning my brain into rice pudding? She resisted a powerful impulse to run, but halfway up the steps she tripped anyway, barely catching herself. She could feel Will's eyes on her still, and cursed fiercely.

Once inside the ornate marble entrance she began to gasp like a drowning person surfacing for a final lungful of air. Then she started laughing and finally had to go to the ladies' room to splash cold water on her face before she could stop.

Over the next few days she distracted herself with responsibilities, real and manufactured. For a baffled but delighted Gus she did a record number of brake jobs, repaired five snow tires, and performed a miracle on a particularly wayward exhaust system. She worked extra hours at the cafeteria. She researched a term paper for Poli Sci that wasn't due for four weeks. She exhausted herself, hoping to fall asleep every night without a thought in her head.

But as she lay waiting for unconsciousness, Will Ingraham's voice whispered in her ear, his face stared from the darkness—tender, enigmatic, apologetic face. She imagined his body, muscular and lean. Seduction scenes from countless movies played across the window shade. Will was Kirk Douglas in
Spartacus
watching her bathe naked in a lake like the lovely, sensuous Jean Simmons. Quinn was Deborah Kerr lying in the sand. The surf pounded as Burt Lancaster took her in his arms for a passionate kiss. She was Phaedra to Anthony Perkins's Hippolytus, twisting together in the firelight in an ecstasy of forbidden lust.

She flopped on her side and pulled the pillow over her head. There was time to back out. Even now. She didn't have to go through with it. But what to do about that sensation between her legs? Every time she thought about Saturday, she began to tingle. Her breasts felt as if they were stretching against the fabric of her T-shirt, turning her nipples to hard little knobs. Sister Maria Theresa always said you could tell a sinful movie if you had to cross your legs to watch it. Well, thinking about Will Ingraham made her cross her legs. Oh, Saturday. Maybe she would die before it ever got here.
Please.

Please what? Quinn asked herself. Please
yes,
she'd die, or please
no,
she'd live to bed down with this potential Marvin the Magnificent? Fifty-fifty, she decided. Even Stephen between
nothankyou
and
yesokay-Iwantto.

She lifted the pillow off her face. Liar, she thought with a sigh. The ratio was a whole lot more like twenty-eighty.

Van walked into Quinn's room at six o'clock on Saturday evening and said, “What's this, a garage sale?” She picked her way through the piles of discarded shirts, sweaters, and dresses that were heaped on the floor.

“I look awful,” Quinn wailed. “I tried Vamp. I tried Sweet Young Thing, Nubile, and Urban Sophisticate … oh, the hell with it.” She yanked a jersey off over her head and flung it onto the bed in disgust.

“What's the difference? You're only going to take it all off anyway,” Van said.

“Jesus Christ,” Quinn breathed, holding her hand to her heart. She closed her eyes, reached into her closet, and said, “Okay, whatever it is, I'm wearing it.” She extracted a flowered blouse and slipped it on, tucking it into a pair of bleached-out jeans. Then she donned her ski jacket, brushed her hair, and stood staring at Van with wide eyes. Van reached into her pocket for a faded party noisemaker which she held to her mouth and blew. With a feeble wheezing sound it uncurled into a paper snake.

Quinn giggled.

“Well, I felt there ought to be some kind of formal send-off,” Van said. “The walls of Jericho and everything …”

Quinn gave Van a quick kiss on the cheek and marched past her and out the door.

This was the first year of up-to-midnight visiting hours in the men's dormitory. In fact, it was rumored that next fall one of the women's residences would become co-ed for seniors. It was a far cry from St. Theresa's, and Quinn still felt awkward walking along the corridors of Will's building.

She stood in front of his room contemplating the pattern scratched in the peeling gray paint of the door. A fence, perhaps. No, more like a reclining skyscraper, or a jet plane taking off. Soft flute music piped away inside, but the sound was not comforting enough to neutralize her sudden longing to flee. The exit sign beckoned from the stairway at the other end of the hall. Her right sneaker tapped against the linoleum floor—dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot—in unconscious imitation of the SOS code she had absorbed from Late Show World War II movies.

The music whispered again, soothing siren song. He was probably stretched out on the bed, deep into somebody's poetry, she thought. His eyes got a funny cloudy look when he read that stuff. Out by the tree, in front of the library, they'd appeared bright blue, when all along she had thought they were gray. Tommy's were gray. Maybe she'd got them confused. All at once the need to know seemed urgent. She knocked on the door.

“Come in.”

Quinn poked her head into the room. He sat in a chair by the window, his shaggy hair golden in the light of his reading lamp.

“Hi,” he said with that weird half-smile. Blue eyes. Lazy, summery blue eyes.

Yesokaylwantto
, she thought. One hundred percent. She stepped inside and waited for him to tell her what to do.

He got up, reached her in two long strides, and drew her farther toward the center of the room. “Want something to eat? We could go to Lou's.”

She shook her head. “I'm not hungry,” she said, much louder than she had intended.

“Sit,” he said, gesturing at the worn recliner. He pulled out his desk chair and sat reversed, one leg stretched out on either side. He wore a dark turtleneck jersey, jeans, and moccasins. He crossed his arms on the chair back, rested his chin there, and regarded her curiously.

“Is this music all right, or do you prefer jazz?”

“It's pretty. What is it?”

“Bach. Rampal playing Bach.”

“I don't know anything about classical music,” Quinn said.

“Then you're missing something.”

“I can sing you any song from the top ten, 1959 to '63,” she said, looking straight at him for the first time.

“What happened to '64?”

“I lost track after the assassination.”

“Why?”

“I guess it just didn't seem important enough to bother with.”

They watched one another in silence, but after a few seconds Quinn grew uneasy and began to toy with the pen that lay on Will's notebook beside the chair. She moved the point around and around inside one of the rings. Will observed the motion and began to smile. She flushed and dropped the pen as if it had stabbed her fingers.

“You don't have to go through with this, you know,” Will said gently.

“Yes. I do have to.”

“Whose rules?”

“Mine.”

“Don't you ever bend them a little?”

“I committed myself and I'll go through with it.”

“How noble,” he said.

“Thank you.” Her words were stiff.

“But not very sexy.”

“Screw you,” she said.

“That's much better.”

She stared at him. Her freckles were turning darker by the second.

“You know,” he went on, “I almost called to tell you to forget it.”

“Well, why didn't you, then?” she asked.

“I decided you would never do anything you didn't really want to do.”

“I haven't done anything yet,” she retorted.

“No. And it's looking less likely every minute.”

“I'd really like to know exactly why you did this,” she said. “I mean, you're not an easy person to figure out. You don't grin, you smile. You don't laugh, you chuckle. You don't talk, you watch. Why the hell did you write that poem?”

He just looked back at her.

“It's for damn sure you don't like me very much. Was it just the challenge?” Her body, already impatient at sitting still, was leaning forward, perched on the edge of the chair. Intermittently her left toe hammered the floor, acknowledging Bach's counterpoint.

Will ran long fingers through his hair. It was a weary gesture. “I'll admit there was some of that in the beginning. But then I started to think about you, and watch you, and besides …”

“Besides what?”

“I knew you wanted it.”

“You arrogant bastard,” she murmured.

He raised his eyebrows at her.

“I could walk right out of here—” she said.

“But you won't.”

She headed for the door. “Watch me.”

He stood as she passed him, and caught her by the waist. As she struggled he said her name softly, several times. Quinn looked up at him through tears of mortification and rage.

“Let me go,” she pleaded.

“Not yet.”

She tugged at his arms, but he held her fast. “Go flex your iambic pentameter someplace else,” she said.

He was silent until she stopped moving.

“Quinn,” he said again. “Listen to me. I want you. I want to make love to you.” Her body was rigid. “This isn't how it should have been. I wish to Christ I'd asked you out months ago. Sent you flowers. Took you for walks. All that.”

The burning sensation was beginning in Quinn's body, centering between her legs and radiating outward, tingling through her limbs. Will felt the tension along her spine where his hand rested, but she no longer tried to pull away.

“There's no rule that says it can't be done in reverse,” she said.

“Rules again.” He touched the back of her neck and lifted his fingers through her hair.

Quinn felt weak. “The … flowers and the … walk. Can come later.”

He drew her over to the bed, sat down, and pulled her onto his lap. Her eyes seemed a very clean blue. He could not imagine her capable of evasion or falsehood, not with those eyes.

“You promised to show me,” she said.

He kissed her carefully. His mouth felt softer than it looked, with lips that were curious rather than tentative, exploring hers in their own good time. He held her away from him and began to unbutton the flowered blouse. Again he was in no rush. She kept her eyes on his face. His lashes were dark against his cheeks as he watched his hands making her naked.

“Stand up,” he said. The blouse slipped off her shoulders. He unzipped her jeans and slid them off with her underpants. He kissed her breasts.

The power of Quinn's arousal seemed to be melting her body from the inside out. She clasped her hands behind Will's neck, clinging to keep herself from falling. Her legs had turned to hot liquid. Will reached behind her knees and lifted her onto the bed. As she watched him undress, the space on the blanket between them seemed like desolate terrain. She was deserted, everywhere abandoned, all the pieces of her hungry for more touching. When his bare chest finally brushed against her, she cried out, feeling the emptiness fill with fire.

She lay next to him, one arm stretched across his stomach. His body hair was pale and soft, and the light from the reading lamp in the corner made minute rainbows in it.

“You think I'll get the hang of it?”

He turned his head on the pillow to smile at her. “I'd say there's hope.”

“Have you done that a lot?”

“What's a lot?” He picked up a tendril of hair from behind her right ear and began twisting it. Shivers scurried down her back.

“With a lot of different people, I mean.”

“Never under these circumstances, I assure you.”

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“One brother. Why?”

“Older or younger?”

“Younger. What is this?”

“I want to know what you think. What you had for breakfast. Everything.”

“No, you don't.”

She lifted herself up on one elbow and stared into his face, “Oh, yes. Everything.”

“You can't.”

“Why not?”

“Some things have to stay inside.”

“Why?”

“Because nobody wants their guts on display.”

“I don't mind. You want to see mine?”

“No. You should be allowed the privacy of your own intestines.”

“I'm an only child, I was spoiled rotten, my family's poor, I don't believe in capital punishment, I don't have any phobias but I hate the idea of a bat getting stuck in my hair. Or a bird. My idol used to be John Wayne but now it's Ted Manning because I'm going to have my own TV news show exactly like his and interview everybody who's anybody. I went to a Catholic school and I don't think it screwed me up much … Hey,” she said, and stopped abruptly. “You aren't listening to me.”

“Yes, mostly.”

“You aren't even
interested
in my guts.”

His eyes fell appreciatively to the soft curve of her stomach. “I'm sure they're beautiful, as guts go.”

“Don't condescend to me, you complacent—”

“Wait, wait …” He put a hand on her cheek, cooling it. “I was floating. I'm sorry. I feel so Goddamn good.”

She glared at him for another second, then mischief twitched at the corners of her mouth. “What do you suppose old Buxby would say if he could see us now?”

Will kept his voice dry and clipped. “Rather barbaric. Rather, uh, primitive. If you catch my drift.”

Quinn laughed and bent her head to kiss him. It began as an appreciative, friendly kiss, but soon became greedy. She fell back against the pillow.

“You know, the mythology is all wrong.”

“What?” he asked, stroking her hair.

“You didn't take anything away from me. I didn't lose anything. It's like being filled up with … with beautiful things. Being showered with presents … shit, I can't say it.”

“You do all right.”

“But Will …” She looked pained.

“What is it?”

“Well, sex is great and everything. I really like it a lot …”

“But?”

“First I've got to go to the bathroom, and then if I don't get some dinner I'm going to wither up and die right here in your bed. When do we eat?”