Teach Me (12 page)

Then
the rest of my brain wakes up enough to figure it out. The shivering
is Harper, still wrapped in my arms, still completely naked, curled
into my chest for warmth, though apparently not enough.

For
a moment, all I can do is stare. She’s
even more gorgeous now, lying bare before me, her hair mussed, her
body pressed against mine, completely trusting.

I
want to take care of her.

The
thought startles me. It’s
not something I’ve
ever really felt before. Not like this. Normally I date the girl
who’s there. Sara
sat next to me in English class when we were just bairns. Bethany was
the first girl to ask me out at college. Kim, Carly, they just made
sense, were attractive enough, turned me on physically.

But
I’ve never felt
responsible for someone like this. I’ve
never, deep down, truly wanted to wrap my arms around a girl and
shield her from anything the world wants to throw at her.

I
want to do that for Harper, though. Wrap her up in this moment and
keep her safe for good.

I
should probably start with getting her some warmth, though. Moving
carefully so as not to wake her, I slip sideways off the couch, then
scoop her into my arms. Cradling her against my chest, I carry her up
the stairs—careful
not to bump her head or her knees on the narrow walls of the
staircase. At the top, I kick open my bedroom door and pad across the
bare floorboards to lay her down in the bed. For a moment, I hesitate
beside her—should I
take the couch, be a gentleman and let her sleep here alone?

I
decide the moment to play gentleman with her has long since passed,
and besides, the bed will be warmer with two of us. So I crawl in
behind her and hug her against me, my arms wrapped around her
shoulders, and for once, I want nothing more than to hold her like
this as long as she’ll
let me.

I
listen to the slow, steady rhythm of her breath and stare at my
ceiling, lost in thought.

Sleep
will be impossible for me now. But it’s
almost time for my usual 6:00 a.m. alarm to go off anyway. I don’t
know how long we slept on the couch, but it must have been long
enough to pass most of the night. Dawn tints my dollar-store white
curtains a faint pink, and highlights Harper’s
face enough that I can see a faint smile curving her lips.

I
wonder what she’s
dreaming about.

I
have never wondered about someone’s
dreams before. It’s
a strange sensation. Usually I’m
so wrapped in my own head, I forget that the people around me all
have complex thoughts as well. I’ve
never much cared before. They’re
welcome to the privacy of their own thoughts, and I’ll
stick with mine.

Now,
I wish I could peer into someone else’s
head. I want to know what she’s
thinking, what she’s
feeling. She told me all she wants right now is a hookup, but then
she falls asleep in my arms, totally trusting. Is that something you
do with a hookup? I can’t
remember any of the women I’ve
slept with (though admittedly it’s
a relatively small number) ever simply passing out after sex.

Hannah
in particular always wanted to quiz me on her performance after every
get-together.
How did
you like when I did this, and what about that move, should we try
that again next time?
She’d
never have just let the experience speak for itself, or drift off
savoring it.

For
that matter, I’ve
never fallen asleep straight afterward either.

My
hand moves, seemingly of its own accord, to brush a strand of hair
away from Harper’s
cheek. Her hair pours through my fingers like red-gold silk. Before I
can pull my hand away, her eyelids flutter, and then she’s
blinking up at me, her eyes an even paler blue than I realized in the
orange glow of the sun.

“Did
I fall asleep?” she
murmurs, then shifts to stretch. She blinks again, and glances around
at the bed we’re
lying in. “Oops,
sorry. I must have really been out.”

“You
don’t have to
apologize.”

She
cracks a shy grin. “I
do that afterwards usually. Totally zonk out.”

For
some reason, this sends an unpleasant twist down my spine. Oh. So she
just passes out after sex all the time. It means nothing.

That’s
good,
I tell myself.
That’s
what you wanted. Just a hookup.

So
why does it bother me to think that this was nothing special to her?

“What’s
wrong?” She’s
still watching me, and in my early-morning pre-coffee daze, I must
not have a very good poker face.

I
force a haphazard smile. “Just
thinking, that’s
all.”

“About
what?” Those pale
eyes wander across my features before returning to search my eyes,
like she can read the answer straight out of them.

Who
knows, maybe she can. I try to think of the best way to tell her the
truth without giving any false impressions. Because I’m
thinking about her—but
tell most women that and they’ll
immediately assume it means you’re
feeling something, getting serious. That’s
obviously an impossibility for me. I’m
thinking about her because she’s
an interesting puzzle, that’s
all.

“Wondering
how you wound up here,”
I say. That’s as far
as I’ll confess.

It
makes her crack a smile, though, and just that simple muscle
movement, a slight difference in the curve of her lips, makes it feel
as though a weight is lifting off my chest. “Well,”
she says, “first I
boarded an airplane from Philadelphia, then I landed in London and
caught the endless transfer bus toward Oxfordshire . . . ”

I
snort. “So you’re
from Philadelphia?”

She
shakes her head, which makes the strand of hair fall across her
forehead once more. I fight the urge to brush it away once more. “A
little town southwest of there. Lancaster. Don’t
worry, even people from the eastern US seaboard have never heard of
it,” she adds when I
pull a confused expression. “It’s
mostly Amish people and corn. Which is why I applied to go to the
University of Pennsylvania the moment I could escape. It’s
not far enough, but Mom wanted me kind of near home, and I wanted to
be in a big city, plus I got a really big scholarship package,
so . . . we
compromised.”

“That’s
a good school.”

She
nods. “It is, but I
want to go farther, you know? Philly’s
only a couple hours away.”

“You
don’t like the
city?”

“It’s
not that. I mean, it’s
okay, I guess.”

“There’s
a great music scene there. The Philadelphia Orchestra is fairly
spectacular, if you like that sort of thing.”
I’ve always wanted
to see them in person, though the few times I’ve
been to the US, the dates have never matched up right.

Harper
smirks. “Never been,
but I bet I would like it if I could afford it.”

My
mouth drops open in only slightly exaggerated shock. “You
live right there and you’ve
never seen one of the best orchestras in the world?”

“Student
budget, remember?”

“We
really need to remedy this some time.”
I shake my finger at her, faux-scolding. “That
must be why you don’t
like Philly.”

She
laughs. “It’s
not the city that’s
the problem. I’m
just afraid if I stick too close I’ll
wind up getting sucked back into my hometown the way so many of my
high school friends did. Some of them have
babies
already, can you imagine?”

I
shudder, which makes both of us laugh. “That
why you decided to study abroad?”

Another
nod. “Traveling has
always inspired me. I’ve
been to London before to visit Mary Kate, and I’m
always like a zillion times more productive on those trips than any
other time in my life.”

“What
do you mean, productive?”
I ask. Somehow, this seems to be the wrong question. Suddenly she
flushes bright red, and ducks her head toward the pillow. On
instinct, I reach out to cup her cheek. Her skin burns hot beneath
mine, though she does lift her face to mine again, seeming to forget
about her desire to hide it. My thumb traces the curve of her
cheekbone, and she exhales softly, a faint breeze on my palm.

I
wait a moment, before smiling. “You
were saying?”

She
groans and bats my hand away, sitting up in bed. “Stop
trying to distract me into baring my soul.”

“Oh,
but it seemed to be working.”
I wink.

She
laughs, a throaty, breathy sound that drives me wild. I could take
her again right now, pull her over top of me until she straddled my
hips and let her ride me while I gazed up at her perfect, impossibly
round white breasts, and savored the way her long red hair would
bounce against them.

But
somehow, strangely, even more than I want to do that, I want to know
what makes her tick. “So
you like to travel because it makes you . . . work
better?”

She
groans. “You don’t
give up, do you?”
She swats my arm with the back of one hand. “I’m
a writer, okay? There you go. Shameful confession complete.”

I
lift one eyebrow. “I’m
a poetry professor, you really think I would judge you for being a
writer?”

“You’re
a poetry professor, isn’t
it pretty much your
job
to judge other people’s
writing?” She
wriggles her eyebrows as well.

“Only
their poetry,” I
say, and as her face falls into a scowl, I realize that
duh,
Jack
, that’s
exactly what she must write. “But
I’m sure yours are
brilliant, if they’re
half as good as your essay work.”

“They’re
not.” She collapses
back onto the pillow face-first. When she speaks again, it’s
muffled by the cotton sheets. “I
haven’t written a
word since I got here.”

“Have
you traveled since you’ve
been here?” I point
out.

She
turns sideways to shoot me a what-the-hell look. “Uh,
hello, American in Oxford. Pretty sure this whole trip is traveling.”

I
shake my head. “You’re
living here now. It’s
completely different than just stopping by for a visit. If travel is
what inspires you, then you need to travel somewhere else, not just
hang around this crappy old city for the next three months.”

Harper
rises to prop her head up on one elbow. “I’m
listening.”

I
shrug. “There’s
a million places to go. For one thing, flights between European
countries are a hell of a lot cheaper than they are from Europe to
the US. You could do weekends in Paris, weekends in Barcelona.”

“Yeah,
I can afford maybe two of those tops.”
She rolls her eyes.

“So,
take some day trips.”
I wave a hand at the window, through which you can see the spires of
Christ Church. “There
are tons of homey little country destinations all within a couple
hours’ drive of
here. Hell, some are even closer. The Cotswolds, for instance, have
always been a favorite of mine. If you’re
free Saturday, we could reach the nearest village in half an hour,
spend all day meandering around.”

I
don’t stop to think
about what I’m
doing. Inviting the girl I just told to stop hooking up with me (and
who I then subsequently hooked up with) on a day trip. That’s
a very couple-y move.

But
if I don’t think
about it in practical terms like that—if
I just think about asking Harper to wander through the sprawl of tiny
little medieval villages, churches and centuries-old homes that make
up the Cotswolds, stopping in the markets to buy some snack food,
maybe, or enough to make a picnic, and then traipsing up through the
rolling hills that surround said scenic villages to perch on top of
one and share an outdoor lunch . . . I
want to share that with her. I want to show her that part of my
life—the childhood I
spent roaming those hills whenever Mum and Dad took us on family
outings.

It’s
been years since I’ve
been back there, but who knows? It could be inspirational for me too.

So
when she agrees, still watching me with wide eyes, like she’s
afraid she misheard and I didn’t
just ask her to do this, I smile, reassuring, and run my hand through
her hair. “Don’t
worry,” I say, right
before I lean in to kiss her soft, unresisting lips. “I’ll
only make you share one poem with me as payment.”

I
have no idea what to expect from this trip. Aside from the fact that
Jack made me agree to read one of my poems to him (which in and of
itself is terrifying enough), I don’t
know where we’re
going or what to expect. He told me not to look it up when I asked
him what a Cotswold was. He said it would be better as a surprise. So
I dutifully have resisted all search engines for the past three days
(aside from when I needed them for the project).

In
fact, I’ve avoided
everyone and everything for the past three days, getting
laser-focused on the poetry analysis, since we wasted so much time on
day one figuring out how the hell to deal with the sexual tension
between us.

So
far, our best bet seems to be ignoring it. Jack sits on his side of
the desk and I sit on mine, and we make no eye contact, just bend
over the manuscripts we’re
studying (and okay, every now and then I sneak peeks at the way his
shaggy haircut falls in his eyes, or the way he’s
letting the stubble on his jawline grow a little longer between
shaves, to the point where I bet it would scrape my thighs just the
right amount . . . Yeah,
sneaking peeks no longer allowed).

We
spend most of the time in total silence, reading or writing or
thinking to ourselves, lost in our own separate worlds, worlds that
Eliot created—because
the more and more time we spend with these poems, the more and more
positive I become that Jack was right all along. These really are
Eliot’s work, lost
for the ages in an old, forgotten corner of the Merton Library, only
discovered again by a stroke of pure luck.