Tempting (8 page)

C
ounting
out my share of tips from my last three shifts at the coffee shop alerted me to two things:

I leaned back against my couch with a sigh. I had enough in the bank for rent, for my power bill this month—woohoo! And my tips would need to float me for food and my Charlie card for the subway. As much as the subway, the T, pissed me off, riding it was my only option to get around.

Leo was one of the few people I knew that had a car in Boston and he’d often given me rides to class or for shopping. But at the moment, Leo wasn’t exactly jumping out of his pants at the opportunity to speak with me.

I couldn’t blame him, not after the very unromantic kiss I’d given him. And the fact that I hadn’t texted him or called him since it had happened over a week ago didn’t do me any favors either.

It was October eighth, eight days after I had kissed Leo and seventeen days since Nathan had shoved a mirror in front of my face, showing me how stupid I was.

And looking around my apartment, bereft of normal things apartments had, I definitely couldn’t disagree.

I knew moving into Boston would be risky, financially. I anticipated living paycheck to paycheck, forgoing things like shopping sprees, food that wasn’t ramen, and my own internet connection. I knew I likely wouldn’t make many friends in Boston—that wasn’t different from growing up. But what I hadn’t prepared for was the silence.

When I pictured myself moving to Boston, I imagined long walks through the city, whale watching, museum touring, bar hopping, once-in-a-lifetime experiences that only Boston could give me. I’d needed to get away from the people at home with their snide looks and, most of all, his silence. I’d felt heavy at home, buried under the weight of his disappointment.

Except so far, I’d replaced his disappointment for another’s: mine.

And I wasn’t just talking about my lack of things, but my behavior. I’d known Leo for more than ten years, beginning the day he’d kept me entertained in gym class after I’d broken my leg and had to sit out. I wouldn’t say that growing up being called “the slut” had made it easy to make friends of the female variety. And men had lost interest in me when I’d told them my own disinterest in sucking their dick.

Throughout high school I’d only dated college guys which should have made the girls in my class feel secure that I wouldn’t reel their boyfriends in for a fling. But since it hadn’t and I’d been scarlet-lettered, I’d had the whole don’t-give-a-fuck attitude in high school, only letting my guard down when Leo had tried to make me laugh—not to impress me, but to help me drop the fuck-this-shit attitude.

And one drunken night had shown me what a great friend I was to Leo, kissing him because I felt bad, and confused, and lonely.

I hung my head, cradling it in my hands. I wanted a good drink, but since spending the last week annihilating whatever pathetic little bit of liquor I had, I was fresh out. A fact that I cursed heavily upon seeing my mother’s name flash across my phone.

“Hey, mom.”

“Hey, baby.” Her voice was breathy, as usual. I glanced at the time.

“You’re calling late.” For her. It was just after nine on a Thursday, a time which was usually reserved for her shows.

“I wanted to see how you were doing.”

I looked at my fridge, knowing she was talking about the $200 she’d sent me to fill my fridge and cupboards. “I’m good. Thanks for the money, I bought enough food to last me the rest of this month.”

“Good, good.” There was something else and I waited, to hear what it was that I’d done this time.

Instead of prompting her to tell me what that something was, I waited on the other end of the line, the awkwardness growing between us with each second of silence.

“Well,” she began, and I imagined her clutching her necklace—probably pearls—and worrying the gems between her fingers. “Are you coming home for Thanksgiving?”

It was still over a month away, but my mother was the embodiment of a housewife with her shit together.

“I don’t know,” I said, withholding the sigh.

“Dad might be joining us.” The statement from anyone else, anyone who was not my mother, would have sounded like a natural thing to say. But in the words my mother spoke, I heard what she didn’t say: So you should make sure to not upset him.

I took a deep breath. I wasn’t sure which was worse: a mother who loved me in the only way she knew how to but fell short in the honesty department, or a father who made his disinterest and disdain completely transparent.

“Maybe I won’t then.”

“Oh,” she said, her voice airy. I could practically see her worry through the phone. “We’d love to have you.”

The only “we” she could be referring to was Celeste and my father and it didn’t take a genius to deduce that the “we” was actually just my mother. Because as much as Celeste had guilt-tripped me for not attending our father’s birthday, she didn’t want me there anymore than he did. That was one of the many fucked up things about the situation: that they guilted me for not attending but if I had attended, I would have been ignored anyway.

“Yeah, well classes have me busy…” my voice trailed away.

“We haven’t been together as a family for years.”

Because of him. That wasn’t on me—that was on
him
. Years after my mother had insisted on not aborting her surprise pregnancy even though she was forty-five and hadn’t been pregnant in sixteen years, my father had sort-of/kind-of walked out on her, on us. He’d been off doing God-knows-what or who while my mother had raised me solo, her eyes always wandering off, thinking of him, mourning his absence, forgetting me at school or neglecting to brush my hair. She’d lapsed into a silent kind of depression, only getting her spark again when dear old dad showed up on the doorstep just as I was finishing middle school.

I pinched the bridge of my nose to keep myself from saying the things I wanted to say and instead said, “I’ll try.”
I wouldn’t
. “Maybe you all could come out to Boston.”
They wouldn’t.

It seemed lying to one another and to ourselves was our forte in this family.

“Dad’s here right now, do you want to talk to him?”

I knew even if I said yes, he wouldn’t talk to me, because he just didn’t. His only form of communication with me existed solely in the glances he gave me. And the fucked up thing about my mother asking me was that she knew. She knew he wouldn’t talk to me, even if I wanted him to. She was an actress, starring in this scripted show where her husband wasn’t a scumbag, who loved his daughters equally. A man who stood by his wife, a man who actually spoke words to his youngest daughter.

But my father didn’t speak. He glared, he sighed heavily. He saved all his words for Celeste and my mom and spared not a one for me. Celeste and my mom were the way he communicated with me, relaying messages through them. I was a disappointment, a mistake; one he reluctantly supported financially as she grew up—as if that was all a child needed.

“He mentioned your tuition, you know.”

“Oh?” I asked, my interest far from piqued. I’d already moved onto the next thing to do: deciding which bill to pay on time and which one I could pay late. “Is he willing to pay for it now?” I couldn’t keep the bite of snark from passing through my lips.

“If you make some changes. He just wants you to use the money wisely.”

Anger and frustration warred with the feeling I felt all too well: inadequacy. I mumbled a goodbye to my mom and dropped my phone onto the couch. Rubbing the headache that was just beginning at my temples, I let loose a breath.

Since he’d come back into my life at thirteen and silently asserted his disinterest in me, I’d looked for attention elsewhere. It didn’t take a psychologist to conclude I had daddy issues. It was why I never chased a man; I hadn’t needed to. I’d kept them long enough until I was over it, leaving
them
to chase
me
. Clearly, that had done
such
good for me since I was wholly out of my element with Nathan, having no experience with a man who didn’t chase me when I still wanted him.

To my father, choosing to study creative writing was a waste of “good money.” Why spend money on something I could do since elementary school when I could focus my attention on something more worthwhile. His words.

My phone buzzed, a calendar reminder:

Shit. The assignment was due Friday—as in, tomorrow. And I hadn’t even begun. Scrambling for my notebook, my thoughts raced on what to write. When I saw my mother’s face on my recent calls list, a thought came to me and I wrote and revised until three in the morning.

F
rom my perch
at my desk, I watched students filter in through the door, tapping my pencil against my leg. Adele usually came in just a few short minutes before class started, cutting it closer to being late, more often in the last week. That was my fault, I’m sure.

I didn’t pride myself on being an asshole, despite what my students probably thought. Saying what I’d said to Adele had been one of those necessary, horrible moments that I couldn’t take back. But the days got easier the less I looked at her, and the less I thought about her.

Until I picked up her paper and felt it slam between my ribs.

Ten years ago, maybe even five, I could have written that paper word for word. After thirty-four years of silence and minimal attention from my father, it didn’t hurt me the way it used to. But reading her words, I’d known they were hers before I really even noticed her name in the top left corner.

Laughter and chatter filled the air in the lecture hall while they waited for me to do something, anything. I kept waiting until the clock was two minutes past when I should have started. Only one student looked back at the clock and gave me a quizzical glance. The back door popped open, and Adele came down the steps until she got to her usual seat. She didn’t look straight at me, which was surprising; it was almost like she’d resigned herself to my disregard the previous week.

I cleared my throat, and she finally looked up at me, shock widening her eyes when she saw me looking back at her. Lowering herself into her chair, she tilted her head and I could almost hear the question like she’d asked it.

What are you doing?

I shook my head once, and stood up from my chair, pushing it back with an obnoxious scrape. The chattering slowly settled down while I walked to the middle of the open area in front of my desk.

“I had a lot of reading to do this weekend, going over your monologues. Not all of you failed miserably, which is wonderful. Now, what I didn’t tell you last week is that I typically ask students to come up here and read them out loud, almost like we were in an acting class.”

That gained me immediate nervous shifting in their seats, coughed out laughter, a few audible groans. I held up a hand, moving to lean up against my desk. “The reason I don’t tell you that ahead of time is because monologues demand honesty, as I told you last week. And I often find that if people think they can hide behind their computers, only plan on their horrible creative writing professor seeing the words, then that honesty is much more prevalent.”

Leaning back, I snagged the piece of paper off the top of the stack and looked down at it again, then looked up at the class. They were all staring raptly, probably all sweating a little wondering if their monologue was the one I was holding.

“This one,” I lifted the paper, looking at a few different faces in a few different rows before landing on Adele’s face, which was about the same shade of white as the paper I was holding in my hand, “this one was my favorite. So I’m going to pull it up on the projection screen behind me, so you can see how it was laid out, and I’m going to read it out loud too.” I tapped my ear. “When you have to listen to someone bleeding out on the page, it’s different, it’s more personal.”

I walked around my desk, the squeak of my shoes the only sound in the room. I had never had a classroom full of over a hundred students be so deathly silent. I tapped a few buttons on my laptop and the screen popped to life, the beam from the projector mounted in the ceiling catching dust motes drifting through the air. I faced them, turning away from the screen, and I saw eyes rapidly moving across the display, only Adele’s eyes were not aimed at the words.

No, she was staring right at me, begging me with her eyes not to do this. I held her gaze and spoke the words from memory, since I’d read that damn thing dozens of times over the weekend. I didn’t need to look back once to remember it.

I
finished reciting it
, no one in the room missing that my voice sounded like I was holding a brick in my throat by the time I was done. Jaws hung open, a few girls wiped tears from their cheeks, and more than one face was turning and searching, wondering who’d written that. Adele had turned into stone in her seat.

Switching off the projector, I sat in my chair again, lifting my hands up in question. “So?”

“Wow,” a girl breathed from the front row. “That was … it was really sad.”

I let out a sigh. “A simplistic answer, but I’ll take it. Anyone else?”

David, one of my more intelligent students, lifted his hand. I motioned toward him.

“It felt defensive. Like she knew she was being judged, and she just wanted somebody to hear why she is the way she is.”

Honestly, it was kids like him that kept me teaching. I smiled, nodding. “Very good, David. Very insightful.” I lifted the paper again, keeping my eyes away from
her
. “That’s what makes this so well done. It’s relatable, even if we’ve never had the same experiences that she has. A well-written monologue will hold a kernel of truth for everyone who hears it. Even if it’s not their truth, right? That’s why we go back and listen to certain parts of certain movies, or dog-ear the pages of a book where the main character finally lets it out. Says their piece, because they want to be
heard
, and they want people to recognize the truth in it. It’s a way for them to be understood. And this person?” I tapped the page with my free hand, “I understand this person.”

For the rest of the class, Adele wouldn’t look at me, but I could see her relax a little as we moved away from the monologues. We wrapped up, me reminding them of what was coming up next week so they wouldn’t forget to think about it. I leaned against my desk, absently watching them pack up their bags and immediately pull their phones out to see what they’d missed in that last fifty-five minutes. As the room emptied, I finally let myself stare at her. She’d slowed her movements as the rest of her classmates stood and left, so that it wouldn’t be noticeable that she had absolutely no intention of leaving the room with them.

Our eyes met when the last person left, letting the door swing shut with a clang. The skin on her face was still pale, but she lifted her chin in the air and opened her mouth. Then closed it. I crossed my arms across my chest and waited.

“You had no right,” she said in a low, dangerous voice, starting to stand from her chair.

I held up a hand and gave a meaningful glance to the open windows in the two doors at the back of the classroom. “Not here, Adele. Could we continue this in my office?”

She clenched her jaw and looked away, letting me take my fill of her stony profile. Finally, she gave me a sharp nod and walked out of the room.

A short minute later, I followed.