Teach Me (26 page)

When
we finally break apart, he swings me around in a circle, grinning
like an idiot, and I dive right back in for another long, slow kiss.

We
miss the first half of the show.

Well,
not miss, exactly. We hear it. But from the moment we stumble through
the curtain into the private box he reserved for us, we’re
too lost in each other to actually watch. We ignore the four chairs
provided and I curl up in his lap, kissing his lips, his neck, his
jaw, every inch of his skin I can reach.

The
music swells, the bass vibrating in my chest, and we move with it,
his lips closing and parting over mine, his tongue slipping in to
twine around my own. His hand slides down the length of the gown,
down and down and down toward the hem just past my knees, then up and
up and up until his fingers slide into me, and I gasp, and someone
from the box beside us hisses at us to “be
quiet,” and we both
dissolve into silent laughter, until finally we give up and slip out
of the show at intermission.

“You
really should give them another chance though,”
he murmurs in the cab home, between kissing his way down my neck.
“They’re
really very talented.”

“Hmmm,
I’ll take your word
for it tonight.” I
grin and pull him into another long, breathless kiss.

The
taxi driver lets us off in front of his hotel with a muttered
Happy
Valentine’s
Day
, and we stumble up
to his room, punch drunk on finding each other again. We don’t
even make it halfway through the door before I’m
tearing at his suit coat and he’s
pulling the silky dress he bought me over my head, letting it fall in
a puddle on the bathroom floor as we stagger to the bed and
practically fall into each other.

I
never in a million years would’ve
seen this coming.

I’d
planned this day down to the minute we saw one another in the lobby
of the Kimmel Center. After that . . . Well,
I never allowed myself to think beyond that moment. Because I was
sure, I was so sure, that I already knew what was coming.

I
am incapable of love. Real love, I mean, the kind with the potential
for marriage and babies and happily-ever-afters. I always have been.
My whole family knows it; they remind me every chance they get. I had
one last chance for love with Hannah, and I threw it down the toilet,
so I’d already
decided on my future. Just me, myself, and I (and maybe an occasional
fling, because hey, I’m
human).

I
never saw her coming.

Even
while she was here, I didn’t
understand, because I’d
never felt like this before. I wrote it off as sparks. Passion. A
flame that burned as bright as this one could never last, I told
myself.

But
as the days passed and I continued to fail to resist her, I should’ve
noticed that something was different this time.

Sadly,
it wasn’t until the
funeral—the day we
marked the passing of the man who constantly told me I was a failure,
not good enough, not manly or living my life right—that
I finally realized why things were so different with Harper, why
I
was so different every
time I was with her.

She
makes me a better man. My love for her makes me better.

Of
course, that same day, I also fucked up so colossally, I figured I
was doomed. I’d
finally met a woman I could see myself spending the rest of my life
with, and I went and pushed her away in the most definitive, dickish
move possible.

My
father was right. I deserved to spend the rest of my life alone.

I
spent the rest of the semester moping. All the way up until we handed
out the grades on the last day of the semester. That night, I finally
agreed to meet Drew and Mindy at the Bird and Baby for drinks. It was
cold, snow falling heavier than ever outside the pub windows. We
bundled up near the fire.

“I’m
buying,” Drew
insisted. “It’s
a special occasion. First time we’ve
seen Jack’s face
in . . . well,
we forget how long, that’s
how long it’s been.”

“Drew,
be nice.” Mindy
aimed a kick at him under the table. “Jack’s
been mourning.”

I
had. But not for the reason they assumed. “What
have I missed?” I
asked, and I let Mindy fill me in on all the gossip with her friends,
until Drew returned with the first round, and filled me in on all the
gossip he’d
overheard tending bar for our colleagues as well.

“Hannah
seems . . . not
good,” he ventured
after our third round.

“I
wouldn’t know,”
I reply, downing the whiskey. “One
more set?” I skipped
to the bar, hoping to avoid this conversation. But as I turned to
bring our third set of whiskeys back from the bar, I glanced across
the room and noticed a familiar face.

That
punk kid who’d had
his arm slung around Harper, the last time I saw her in here. He was
sitting with Mary Kate and another girl I didn’t
recognize. Harper’s
friends. Only, no Harper this time.

I
returned to our seats, swallowed half my fourth whiskey, and cleared
my throat. “I’ve
been sleeping with a student,”
I said, just to get the worst of it over with.

Mindy
gaped at me.

Drew
looked torn about whether he should high-five me or scowl, for
Mindy’s sake.

I
just swilled the liquid remaining in my glass and stared at it so I
wouldn’t have to see
their expressions while I talked. “At
first it was an accident. Then it became a repeated accident. Then I
realized that . . . I
mean, I actually started to . . . ”
I closed my eyes. This was idiotic.

But
I needed to tell someone, and I clearly couldn’t
have told Harper, who replied to any emails I sent with a blank
email, if she replied at all.

“I
think I love her.”

After
that, Mindy dragged the whole story from me. The trip to the
Cotswolds, her staying over at my place. The funeral. Hannah seeing
me there with Harper. Me and Hannah fighting. Me taking it out on
Harper.

“But
you never apologized after that?”
Mindy raised an eyebrow at me.

“Of
course I did. I emailed her every day afterward saying I was sorry.”

Mindy
actually rolled her eyes. “That’s
not apologizing, Jack. That’s
an email.”

And
right then, it dawned on me what I needed to do.

It
took me a while to convince Harper’s
friends to tell me when her plane was leaving. The next day, it
turned out. From London Heathrow.

“Promise
if you do this, you really mean it,”
Mary Kate told me as I stood to leave their table.

“I
swear,” I told her.
“I really, really
mean it.”

Back
at my place, I sobered up in a cold shower and set my alarm for my
usual break-of-dawn. It would leave me five hours to make it to the
airport. Plenty of time.

I
hadn’t planned on
London traffic.

By
the time I made it to the Heathrow security gates, I only had two
hours left. Still plenty of time.

But
security insisted I couldn’t
go through without a ticket, not even to meet someone on an
international flight who needed help speaking English (okay I may
have fibbed a little). I wound up buying the cheapest flight I could
find, a flight over to Cardiff on a puddle hopper, and then I joined
the endless security queue.

By
the time I made it through, I had half an hour left. Her flight was
listed on the boards, and it still said boarding.

I
ran. Really ran. Harder than I’ve
ever run before. But by the time I reached the terminal, they were
announcing the final boarding call, and the gate stood empty. I asked
at security, begged them to let me onto the plane to see if my nephew
had wandered onto it by mistake (okay maybe a lot of fibbing). No
dice.

So
I sat in Heathrow airport clutching a ticket to Cardiff, and I
watched her plane home take off.

Then
I came up with Plan B. Took a week off work, bought a much bigger
plane ticket than the little puddle hopper to Cardiff, and set about
researching tickets for the Philadelphia Orchestra.

I
never actually expected it to work. I never expected her to speak to
me again—it’s
why I sent the dress and the ticket instead of showing up at her door
(Mary Kate came in handy yet again—turns
out the pen pals still exchange real snail mail letters on the
regular, and are very useful people to know when you, say, need to
take a guess at someone’s
dress size).

I
figured this way, Harper had an out. If she didn’t
want to see me, if she didn’t
want to give me another chance to explain, she wouldn’t
have to. She could just tear up the ticket, sell the dress, or wear
it on another date with whomever she was surely dating by now, and
that would be that.

My
stomach sank at the thought of her with another man. But a woman like
Harper wouldn’t stay
single long. Not if American men had eyeballs in their heads.

I’d
all but convinced myself she wasn’t
going to show, that she’d
clearly turn down this invitation, because why on earth would she
still want to give me the time of day, let alone a date?

That’s
when the doors to the building blew open again, and her familiar
auburn head appeared between them.

The
moment I saw her walk inside, the rest of the world stopped. All the
other people in the building seemed like statues, carved very
realistically, but lifeless, meaningless. There was only Harper, as
far as I could see.

And
somehow, miraculously, crazily, she feels the same way about me.

I
gaze down at her, asleep beside me on the spare hotel bed, after we
destroyed the first one we fell onto. I run my hand through her hair
and for the first time in my life, I know that I’m
exactly where I belong.

“Come
on, Harper!” Mary Kate’s voice calls from around the
bend. “Keep up! Or at least stop canoodling.”

I
unlock my lips from Jack’s to grin at him sideways. “What
do you think? Had enough canoodles for the moment?”

His
answering grin sets off a fresh wave of sparks through my nerve
endings. “Never.” Before I can stop him, he swoops in to
lick my cheek, and I swat his shoulders. His tongue continues on down
my neck, until he’s nibbling on my earlobe, and my knees decide
they’d really like to stop working, please. His knee takes
advantage of this, snaking between mine, and he steps forward until
my back is pressed up against the nearest rough bark tree, and his
thigh rubs along the seam of my pants, just hard enough to make those
nerves pool in my stomach.

“You
two really are impossible,” Patrick adds as he hikes past, his
hand wrapped in his new girlfriend Audrey’s grasp as they both
roll their eyes at us. “More PDA than a pre-college rave party
full of 13-year-olds.”

Audrey,
in her defense, swats his arm immediately. “Quit being a jerk,
babe.”

“I’m
just being honest!” He casts a smirk in our direction. “Catch
up quick, or I’m eating all the cheese.”

“Oi!”
I glower after him, though it’s still not enough to tempt me to
unwrap my arms from Jack’s waist. His hands curl at the small
of my back, and he leans in to nuzzle at the crook of my neck.

I’ve
been back in Oxford for two months, yet it already feels like a
lifetime. A perfect, impossibly wonderful lifetime that I pray will
never end. So far, so good. My classes started a couple weeks ago,
but even with my heavy course-load at Balliol, Jack and me find
plenty of time together. Long days exploring Oxford’s hidden
nooks and crannies, little out-of-the-way restaurants where the
proprietors already know our names, bars where our friends collect
for nightcaps, and museums where we soak in long, lazy weekend
afternoons admiring the art – or pretending to admire the art
and sneaking way too many longing glances at one another, before
we’re forced to sneak off to the nearest private corner,
arm-in-arm.

And
the nights? Flashbacks of last night dart through my imagination:
Jack staying over at my new flat, because my roommates were out
celebrating the first Friday of term, and he wanted to surprise me
with a home-cooked dinner for two.

Accidentally
breaking one of the dishes when we got distracted halfway through
said dinner and he lifted me onto the table, pushing everything out
of the way. Ignoring the crash this caused because his hands were
already undoing my zipper, and before I could blink he was pounding
into me, shaking the floor of the whole place until the tenant
downstairs banged on the roof and shouted at us to shut up.

Then
moving the party to the shower instead…

We
both glance in either direction, our friends out of sight now, and he
leans in again, his lips tantalizingly close, but not quite touching
mine. “I can’t stop thinking about you on your knees in
front of me last night,” he breathes in my ear.

“Mm,
my second favorite part of the night.” I lean against his
chest.

“Second?”
He frowns, offended. “What was the first?”

I
unloop my arms from his waist and, despite the effort it takes, peel
myself away from him to continue up the trail, with only a single
teasing backwards glance. “I’ll tell you tonight. When we
can reenact it.”

He
glares and chases me up the path.

This
Saturday afternoon, “the last summer day,” Jack predicts,
we’ve all left our usual haunts behind. Jack even convinced me
not to bring my laptop, even though there’s an analytical essay
I should really get started on. We all drove down to a miniscule
coastal town (really, “town” is a lie, it’s little
more than a handful of shops and houses) near Brighton, and hiked up
a trail along the beach, to a small cliff overlooking the choppy
September sea.

This
is a day off, completely, a day for all of us to relax.