Something Fierce (3 page)

She’d been smitten from the moment he had walked into room 121 and maybe that was the problem. Maybe her infatuation had clouded her judgment. Could she have read too much into those times their eyes met? Maybe the day he’d lost his place in the lecture—that moment she was
sure
they’d shared and had given her the courage to be so bold—had been a misunderstanding on her part. Maybe it had nothing whatsoever to do with her. Maybe he’d simply lost his place and happened to be looking at her at the time. Which would explain why he’d made no mention of it in his response to her email: he had no idea what the hell she was talking about. Oh God! She wanted to crawl under the seat. “Do you mind if I turn on the radio?”

“Not at all. Put on whatever you like.”

Good music would give her confidence. When she leaned toward the radio, she was close enough to catch the clean, masculine scent of his cologne. Her stomach did a somersault. She imagined kissing him. Her hand was shaking as she reached for the tuning knob and she was sure he saw it.
Strike one
, she could almost hear an umpire shout.

“I’ve explored some on my own,” Seth was saying as she moved through her favorite R&B stations, praying for something to calm her down. “The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Flats, scalped a ticket to a Cavs game,” he continued, “but it’s always fun to see a new place through the eyes of someone who lives there.”

“Of co—” her mouth was cotton dry, she coughed, swallowed, tried again, “of course.” She needed to settle down. Her mind raced. She could take him to Tremont or Little Italy. He hadn’t mentioned either of those. Finally, the sultry voice of Alicia Keys was filling the space between them, promising to keep a lover’s secrets like the pages of a diary. Kerri tried to let the music seep into her.

“Have you traveled much?” he asked.

“Not much,” Kerri said, counting her second strike, the fantasy of seduction well on its way to being another of the countless disappointments that made up her miserable, little life. She told him that growing up, there had been family trips to Chicago, New York City, and Niagara Falls. He wanted to know what she thought of these places and the truth—that they didn’t make much of an impression on her at all—made her feel like a fool. But seriously, what was there to say about a place built around a waterfall and catering to every conceivable view of it? She had a stomach virus when they were in Chicago and it had rained the whole time they were there. It was sweltering when they were in the rotten apple. The only good thing about that trip was getting to see
Phantom of the Opera
on Broadway. Everything else she could think of was negative, unoriginal, or both: unbearable heat, blaring car horns, throngs of rude people, and the moist smell of garbage mixed with body odor and expensive cologne. “New York was great,” she said.

He agreed. He had the opportunity—that was the way he put it, “the opportunity”—to live there for a few months, staying with a friend. She imagined that this friend had been a lover and that she’d been beautiful and sophisticated: a woman of the world with a career and a well-decorated apartment in a trendy area of the city. Kerri felt sure she couldn’t compete with the women he’d known. Seth was going on about the grit and radiance of the city, the endless varieties of food and people. During his time there, he had walked Manhattan Island from end to end, making it sound like every day was some exotic adventure. He visited the World Trade Center four months before it was destroyed. “I remember being in the elevator to the observation deck,” he said. “Everyone was excited to go up, all these hushed voices and nervous laughter. I counted four languages other than English being spoken in that one elevator. It was the coolest damn thing. Standing on the roof, it honestly did feel like you were on top of the world. I remember looking
down
at a helicopter.”

He had been to Chicago and Niagara too, but again, he was interested in
her
impressions. Her mind was blank. She was screwed. Or rather not screwed and out of her league. He was Professor Hotness—as the girls in Comp One had privately named him—and she was just another silly female student crushing on him. Unable to come up with a decent lie and too smart to tell the truth, she turned the question back to him. He seemed a little disappointed. Even in class, his lectures were always more of a dialogue between teacher and students than a straight lecture, but he answered her question, bringing the places more alive to her than when she had actually been there. So much so, that she honestly found herself wanting to go back and have a second look.

In the meantime, she was leading him randomly through downtown Cleveland unable to decide between Tremont and Little Italy. He must have figured out that she didn’t know what she was doing because he started asking about whatever was in front of them: the Terminal Tower, the giant rubber stamp sculpture, this bridge, that bridge. Then, he started asking her about area restaurants, where her favorite book store and movie theater was, the best place to buy ice cream. “I appreciate what you’re doing,” she said, “but you can stop now.”

“Stop what?”

“Rescuing me.”

“Rescuing you?”

“You’ve clearly written me off as a real date and you’re showing me mercy, keeping the conversation going so I don’t make a bigger ass out of myself than I already have.”

“Is that what you think I’m doing?”

“Isn’t it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I see. You just really want to know where to buy the best ice cream?”

“Hell, yeah.”

“Scoops and Sprinkles,” she said, flatly. “Sorry. This was a stupid idea.”

“It’s not a stupid idea. You’re just a little nervous. So am I.”

“What would you possibly have to be nervous about?”

“Well, maybe nervous isn’t the right word. More like…guilty.”

“Guilty?”

“Yes. Do you know how old I am?”

“I don’t know. Thirty-one? Thirty-two?”

“I just turned forty.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah, no kidding.”

“What kind of moisturizer do you use?”

He gave her a look.

“What? I’m supposed to see you differently now?” she asked. “Be less attracted to you. You never struck me as the kind of guy to label people by age and shelve them accordingly.”

“I’m not. It’s my own age that I’ve become aware of lately. Not that I feel older. I don’t. A little smarter maybe, a little more confident, but otherwise, I do all the same workouts, play the same sports, and everybody’s cool
until
I tell them my age. Then they look at me like I have a disease that’s not being properly treated.”

“Forty isn’t old.”

“No, but it’s probably too old to have never married, to be writing books without a shred of proof that I’ll ever make a living at it, to be traveling the world on a wish and a prayer, supporting my writing habit with odd jobs, to be…spending the afternoon with a twenty-year-old.”

“‘Probably too old?’ What? You’re not sure?”

“I’m not sure about much these days. My internal compass is out of whack. In fact, I have the sneaking suspicion that it never worked at all, but I was so enthusiastic about living a life of adventure and becoming a writer that I didn’t notice until now, when I’m pushing middle age with no other skill set to fall back on and nowhere near being able to make a living as a writer.”

“So you’re giving up.”

“No. I never said that.”

“But you’re not writing.”

“Teaching takes a lot of time and energy. And what makes you think I’m not writing?”

“In class, anytime someone asked about the second novel, you’d make a joke and change the subject.”

“I did?”

“Every time. Which tells me, you’re not writing and it’s freaking you out.”

He looked impressed. “You’re a pretty smart cookie, Kerri Engel.”

“Certified genius, actually. IQ of 163.”

“Wow. Seriously?”

“Seriously. And yet, still dumb enough to piss away a scholarship to Oberlin and with it, any financial support from mommy and daddy to start over somewhere else. At least, until I prove myself
worthy
, which is what I’m doing at the community college. Penance. I’ve read your published short stories too.”

“Bet you had to dig to find those.”

“Not really. I just Googled you…like every other girl in class. Most of the literary journals are online.”

“Those stories were the first things I ever published. I got paid in contributor’s copies.
The Fourth Option
came quite a bit later.”

“I could tell. They were good, but the novel is great.”

“Thank you.”

“Is it true?”

“I hope so. You tell me.”

“It feels very true. Like it really happened. Did it?”

“Sort of.” He told her that the book wasn’t exactly a roman à clef though it did fictionalize the general direction his life took after leaving the tiny, hick town of Cherry Run, Pennsylvania, and spending that first year or so living on the road. “Some of the stories were kicked off by real people or experiences in my life, but once the story started to breathe, it became its own thing, went its own way. What did and didn’t actually happen isn’t important at all; the only thing that matters is telling the emotional truth. Fiction is the most direct route.”

“Sounds like a contradiction.”

“Not really. When you’re writing ‘fiction,’ there’s no need to protect or explain yourself or anyone else. You just let it fly. The truth of the moment is all that matters and you get there anyway you can, without getting bogged down on what someone actually said or did in real life. That’s half the battle.”

“What’s the other half?”

They came to a stoplight and he turned toward her. “A mystery.”

And there it was. The look. That glimmer in the eyes she secretly, playfully dubbed as “wicked.” Its meaning was undeniable. She had not misread him after all. He did like her…
in
that way.
All the awkwardness was gone then and they were both in the same moment, looking at each other, hearing Dave Matthews sing “Crash into Me” over the radio. “Speaking of mysteries,” she said, “how much longer do we have to pretend we are taking a tour of Cleveland?”

I
t was not the
captivating blueness
of Kerri’s eyes that struck Seth so much as what was naked and smoldering in them. He didn’t remember choosing to kiss her, only that he was kissing her and everything around him disappeared, everything but the faint, warm smell of her perfume, her soft lips, cold nose, and bold, probing tongue. Beneath the kiss there was a pleasurable stabbing sensation in his chest and beneath that was a mad hunger demanding to be satiated.

A car beeped and he drove forward, dazed, a little guilty, and very aroused. He wanted to pull off somewhere, anywhere and kiss this girl again, but he resisted the urge, knowing he needed to get his bearings, fearing he’d been irresponsible. Earlier, when he’d been asking about some of her favorite places, she’d mentioned an old theater in Cleveland Heights that played only Independent films. A movie, he decided, was the right direction; a good film could always balance out the world, at least for a while, long enough to center himself, to breathe, to think.

“I’d rather go back to your place,” Kerri said.

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

“You just got done saying you’re not sure of anything these days. So I don’t think we can trust your judgment.”

“Smartass.”

“You think too much, Seth Hardy. You over-think the simplest things, the most obvious things.” Whatever had been smoldering in her eyes earlier was burning hot now. Not one single emotion but lots of them—maybe every emotion—all at once. He found it indefinable. Irresistible. He pulled the truck off the road. It had barely come to a stop before she’d unfastened her safety belt and lunged toward him, pressing her mouth into his.

There was no turning back now. Free-falling, he dove into the moment, matching her intensity and then racing to keep up with it as she rolled her tongue over his, lightly sucking and biting; they twisted and struggled for each other between the driver’s seat and steering wheel, the leather of their jackets squeaking against each other sending up gusts of heat from the bodies burning beneath them. Her cold hands unzipped his coat; then one undid his safety belt while the other groped for his crotch, finding his erection and rubbing it through his jeans. His body ripped itself away from his mind, a little boy escaping an overprotective mother, dashing right into a busy street hell-bound for a carnival, bright and loud and full of forbidden things on the other side.

T
his was the man
she’d fantasized about in class, the one she’d read not only in the lines of his novel but between them. It was so fucking hot! He was breathing hard for her, his face animal-wild. He thrust her from the driver’s seat to the passenger’s in one strong and powerful movement, guiding her into place and moving on top of her. He released the seat and it fell back with a jolt, sending her stomach to her feet. His hand was under her shirt sending chills in every direction, finding the front clasp of her bra, undoing it…undoing her.

He was not supposed to take over like this, consuming her with his strength and passion. The alarms were going off in her head. She had no control here. It was too much. Too intense. She couldn’t breathe. She was turning to Jell-O. Her heart was beating too fast. Her body—hot and damp—was betraying her, legs spreading apart, hips involuntarily rocking with his, nothing under her control, nothing, and all of it too fast,
too much
!

She turned her head to the side. “No,” she gasped, “No! No!”

Unlike so many of the others, he stopped moving. Just stopped. She was afraid of what she’d find when she looked at him—a brute looking through her; a madman glaring at her—but she had to look. His face was wild; he was breathing hard, but he was not looking through her at all; he was looking…
into
her, which was so unnerving that she had to look away again.