Tap & Gown (8 page)

But I didn’t go to my place.

I went to Jamie’s.

Jamie answered the door in an undershirt and sweatpants. “Hey there!” he said, smiling broadly. “What a pleasant surprise. Have you had breakf—”

I threw myself into his arms and started kissing him.

“Pleasanter surprise,” he managed, backing us away from the threshold. There’s the idea. I pushed him gently against the wall and started tugging on his shirt.

“About to get even pleasanter,” I murmured against his neck as my fingers found the drawstring of his pants. Bad grammar is such a turn-on. I loosened the strings, then dragged the pants down and over his hips. Ooh, nice. He had a bathing-suit tan going on. I trailed my fingers across the line of demarcation on his torso, then lower.

I leaned in, pressing my advantage. I was fully clothed, his pants and boxers now pooled around his ankles. He leaned against the wall of the foyer, practically in view of the street, relaxed and yet utterly alert. “No,” I whispered. “I haven’t had breakfast.”

“Oh,” he said as I began to slide to my knees. “Because I’m making waffles.”

“Hmmm.”

A loud buzzing noise interrupted me. Jamie clunked his head against the wall.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I told you: I’m making waffles.”

“Will it go away?”

“Around the time the fire alarm starts up, yes.”

I groaned and rocked back on my heels and Jamie hurried to pull up his pants and tend to his burning breakfast.

I stared into the kitchen. “That’s a Dining Hall waffle maker.” I knew them well. The industrial-sized spinning machines were stationed on tables for student use every brunch.

“I know. Can you believe they were tossing it?” He pulled a golden, fluffy Belgian waffle from the machine and plopped it on a nearby plate. “All it needed was some work on the springs.”

“You fished that thing out of the trash and now you’re cooking with it?”

“I washed it first. And fixed it, too, I might add. Aren’t you impressed with my engineering skills?” He rejoined me at the wall. “Okay. I’m back.”

I stood up, lips pursed. The scent of freshly cooked waffle filled the air—sweet, bready, wholesome.

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“Or did you want me to bring the syrup?” he asked.

The first time I’d been in this apartment, I’d felt nothing but contempt for the guy standing before me.

And every ounce of that contempt had transferred to his belongings—the sagging couch, the old and threadbare clothes, the giant snake. His room hadn’t had the same panache as George’s jukebox-filled bachelor pad or the comfortable, lived-in look of the suite I shared with Lydia. But Jamie’s place had reincarnated waffle makers and half a dozen vegetarian cookbooks and a pet mouse he’d kept and named for my sake. The people in my club didn’t know this about him. I hadn’t known this about him.

I don’t know if anyone did.

“Why don’t you have a roommate?” I asked abruptly.

“Huh?”

“It would be cheaper.”

“It would also be less private,” he hinted. “Now, about that syrup—”

“Do you have any friends at Eli Law?” I pressed.

His eyes narrowed. “Why do you want to know?”

So he didn’t. “How about people still in undergrad?”

“A couple. And a few at the law school, too. Some folks from my section.”

Study buddies. And undergrads I’d never heard about before. The defensive tone was back as well, threaded through with a shot of frustration. Now I knew what I’d done to him last semester, kicking him out of the tomb, and why it had made his general disdain for me turn into full-on hate.

“I told you last year, Amy. I made Rose & Grave my life. Nothing else mattered. I don’t keep in touch with many of my barbarian friends.”

Something in the way he said it gave me pause. “How about your ex-girlfriends?”

He sighed and retied the strings on his sweatpants. “Is that what this is really about? I have condoms.”

Wow, was that not at all what this was about. It was about knowing him, having the slightest idea of what made up this guy’s life outside the tomb.

“Though to be perfectly honest,” he continued, “I haven’t had sex with anyone in a while.”

“How long a while?”

He fixed me with a look I could read clear as day.
Longer than you
.

Because of course he knew all about me. Unfair.

I swallowed. “I think you need to understand a few things about … George.”

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“I promise you I understand everything I care to.” He turned and entered the kitchen. “And my waffle is getting cold.”

“But this is going to keep coming up.” I followed him.

“Whose fault is that?” He ladled more waffle mix into the machine and slammed the top down.

“What did he tell you?”

He shoved a waffle plate in my hands. “Nothing.”

I suppose he didn’t need to. Everyone knew George’s reputation. And Jamie was not stupid. I wondered if he thought I was different, having slept with George. If I expected something special … or could do something special.

“You know,” I said before I could stop myself, “it’s really not George who should bug you. Remember that guy I was upset about right before Spring Break? Brandon?”

“And I thought I couldn’t hate this conversation more than I did five seconds ago,” he grumbled without looking up from the machine.

“Not that either of them should bother you,” I clarified.

“They don’t.”

“They clearly do.”

The buzzer went off. Jamie swatted at it, then righted the machine, pulled out the waffle, and dropped it onto another plate. He grabbed my dish from my hands and brought both over to the coffee table, with the syrup and two forks. As I sat down, I noticed he’d put the older, colder waffle in front of himself.

“What bothers me,” he said, pouring on the syrup, “is my girlfriend coming over, making a pretty good show of seducing me in the hallway, then stopping mid-act to talk about her ex-boyfriends. Call me crazy.” He shoved a bit of waffle in his mouth.

Reepicheep rustled in her cage. Lord Voldemort, as usual, was asleep in a coil in his tank. Jamie chewed softly. I ate my waffle. He was quite a good cook.

Pretty good show of seducing him, eh? Go, Amy
. But the tension hadn’t eased one bit from Jamie’s end of the couch. Wouldn’t either, what with this George-shaped gorilla between us.

“The last time I had sex,” I said, “was Halloween.”

He nodded slowly. “That was my birthday.”

I choked on my waffle. This was getting worse and worse. “No!”

“Why do you think they called me ‘Poe’?”

I had always guessed it was because he was morose and taciturn and creepy. “Um … because
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‘Hotstuff’ was taken?”

He snorted. No points there.

“Anything I say will just dig myself in deeper here, won’t it?” I asked at last.

“Likely.”

Did he have a crush on me way back on Halloween? He couldn’t have. I’d kicked him out of the tomb.

He’d hated me. But then, I’d pretty much figured he’d hated me last month, when he’d comforted me and took me out for pizza a few short days before saving my life. He’d liked me then. And he liked me now, which was the material point.

“I’m sorry about the hallway,” I said, after another long silence.

“Me too,” he said. “Way sorrier than you, I imagine.”

“Why is that?”

“I wasn’t the one who would have been kneeling on hardwood floors.”

Jamie and I did not sleep together that day. Or that weekend. We didn’t talk any more about George, either. Instead, we hung out, studied together, and discussed my short list and how best to approach the remaining two people to get a feel for their behavior. Arielle, of course, I had covered.

“I just don’t know if I have the choice I’d like to,” I complained to him. I was lying with my head in his lap, pretending to read my Geology textbook. “Arielle is fine, I guess, but she’s not the person I want to leave my legacy to.”

“From what you’ve said, it sounded like you felt that way about her last year, too.” Jamie patted my hair, then returned to his law books. “So why repeat that disappointment?”

I lifted my shoulders as much as I could against his thighs and turned a page.

“She doesn’t need to be on your list just because she mirrors your role, Amy. It doesn’t need to be that literal. You were a … special case.”

“A charity case, you mean.”

“Charity for whom?” he asked. “We needed
you
, remember? You would have been perfectly happy in Quill & Ink.”

“Who would you have tapped, then?” I asked, sitting up and facing him. “If I’d rejected?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Sorry. You know our deliberations are sealed.”

I pounded my fist against the sofa cushion. “I need to know this information. It will help me pick my tap.”

“How? The person is a senior. Not eligible for tap anymore.”

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“
Person?
Not a girl?” Could Malcolm have traded out, too?

He returned his attention to the book.

“You’re impossible.” I lay back down.

So many secrets. In the tomb and outside of them. He never had answered the question about his ex-girlfriends, I realized. Or about the last time he’d had sex. He spent his time alone in this apartment or alone in class or alone in a tomb filled with people who were not his society brothers. No wonder he got used to keeping things to himself.

“If I don’t include Arielle, that makes my preliminary list really small. I’ve got Topher, whom I’d have to trade for, and whom no one seems to like very much, and then Kalani. So … really just Kalani.”

“What’s wrong with Kalani?”

“Nothing. I hardly know the girl. But I’d like to have some options.”

“Maybe it’s better not to. Court Kalani. Call it a day. Work on your thesis.”

He had a point. These next few weeks would be way easier on me if I just picked a tap and moved on.

And Kalani seemed to have it all. A perfect prospective Digger.

But that wouldn’t be very true to my legacy either, would it? The perfect Digger, I was not. If anything, I’d been the exact opposite.

Kalani Leto-Taube proved difficult to track down. I got her course schedule care of Jenny’s access to the registrar, but when the junior wasn’t actively in classes, she was usually holed up in her office at the
Eli Daily News
. It got to the point where I wondered if I’d have to book an appointment with her to get a chance to chat.

Fortunately, all that activity needed to be fueled by something, and I finally cornered my quarry at a table in the back of a coffee shop. Even among the mug ring marks, discarded sugar packets and stirring sticks, she looked like a queen. Kalani is some sort of exotic mixture of Cuban, Polish, and Hawaiian—tall, big-boned, with huge dark eyes she kept ringed with kohl, and pouty pink lips. Her hair was pulled back in a tight, ballerina-style pony-tail, and she was dressed in a cream-colored skirt suit with a taupe shell that only made her golden skin seem more luminous.

I looked down at my yellow Converse All Stars. Yeah, we had so much in common.

“Kalani, right?” I asked. She looked up from her book and I caught a peek at the title.
War and Peace
.

Bingo. “I think we’ve got the Russian Novel class together. I’m Amy Haskel.”

“Hi,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ve seen you there.”

Probably because I took the class last spring. Aced my final, too, thanks to Rose & Grave’s backlog of exam questions. “It’s a big lecture.” I invited myself into the seat beside her. “I guess almost everyone takes it at one time or another.”

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“I really wanted the Nabokov seminar,” she said, “but it was full again this year.”

“I’m in that, too,” I said. “I love it. Definitely try again next year.” Maybe this would work out. We both loved to read, we were taking a lot of the same classes (or wanted to). “Are you a Lit major?” I asked.

“History and Music,” she replied. “I know, you think it’s strange. Like I should be a Lit major just because I work for the paper.”

“You work for the paper?” I asked innocently, eyes wide, and she laughed.