Beneath The Skin (A College Obsession Romance) (35 page)

“I make you too happy?” I throw back, grasping at straws. “Is that it? Is that an accurate assessment of what you’re saying? You realize how ridiculous that sounds, Nell?”

“It’s not exactly that. I just need to make art, Brant, and I don’t know how to do it when I’m … feeling like I’m feeling.” She holds her stomach suddenly, like she’s sick. “I’ve been so alone for so long. And my art … my art has been
everything
to me. Don’t you understand I can’t just give it up? It’s my fucking blood, Brant. Maybe it’s not the same for a guy like you, who’s been so comfortable picking up and tossing aside careers and majors and girls for years … but for me, it’s—”

“I resent that.”

“For me, it’s very different,” she finishes. “Art’s been there since the beginning. I need it. Can you say the same about that camera of yours? Can you say that, if you don’t take pictures, you feel like you’re going to die? Do you fall into a miserable, self-questioning, hateful, hellish depression when you don’t snap a gorgeous photograph? Where’s the spark in your eye, Brant? I don’t see it.”

“Yes you do,” I argue. “You’re the one who’s been encouraging me. Of course you see it. What the fuck are you talking about, Nell?”

She rolls her eyes and pulls away from me, hugging her knees to her chest. “Mistake. All of this. Such a mistake.”

“Nell.” I sigh, pissed at myself suddenly. “Forgive my language. I don’t mean to be acting like an asshole. Just … I really hate that you’re suddenly pretending like you don’t know me. Or like you weren’t the one who was just … telling me to take pictures until I’m sick of it. You told me that I see the world. You pushed me to be a better artist. Don’t shut me out. Please, Nell. Don’t underestimate how badly I need you.”

“We’re not breaking up, Brant,” she says suddenly, then rises from the curb.

I notice a car approaching. It must be her friend Minnie.
Dang, that was quick.
I clamber to my feet. “Then why are you leaving me??”

She opens the passenger side door, then turns toward me, yet does not meet my eyes. “For the record, I love you too, Brant. And maybe,” she adds, quirking her eyebrows, “maybe that’s why I have to go.”

The car door shuts, and then she goes off, the engine purring into the distance as gently as a sigh.

BRANT

“I guess my real question is, did you
know
he was a sex addict?”

Dmitri signs the question at Clayton across the table, though from the smirking look on his face, I think he understood the gist. “Pretty much,” he answers. “I mean, he came home late all the time. He had these weird … habits. My mom knew, yet still somehow justified staying with him. She kept saying it was like any other addict, that he just had this
need
he had to fulfill.”

“Wait,” interrupts Dmitri, signing as he speaks so as to include Clayton fully. “Are you trying to compare Nell’s artistic hunger with Clayton’s dad’s sexual addiction?”

I scoff at him. “No, dude. I’m saying I think Nell might
be
a sex addict.” I sigh. “And yeah, I’m kinda comparing her artistic drive with her … with
our
sex drive. Maybe I don’t know anything. I mean, we’ve been fuckin’ like crickets for months.”

“I don’t think that’s the saying,” Dmitri mumbles.

“And,” I go on, ignoring him, “the sex is sometimes so wild. I mean, I’m all for wild sex. Don’t get me wrong. But like … I also kinda want to just … be with her. I want to hold her in my bed and like, I don’t know. Fall asleep watching
The Breakfast Club
. Or pull out all four seasons of
Breaking Bad
and just binge with her.”

“There were five seasons,” Dmitri chimes in.

“I feel so fucking inadequate for her. Being around her makes me feel so goddamn simple.”

“You shitting me?” Clayton blurts before Dmitri’s even finished the signs. “From what you’ve told me, I think you’re the complicated one, not the simple one.”

I screw up my forehead. “Dude. I’m a pretty simple guy with a dick and a libido. I don’t get much more complicated than that.”

“You’re not inadequate,” Clayton retorts. “You finally found your damn calling. And you found a woman who knows it. And you’ve let her run away because … because … what was the damn reason again?”

“Dog. Scary story. Never mind that,” I say, waving it off. “She says she needs time to ‘be an artist’ or something. She doesn’t do good work when she’s with me. She thrives on pain and darkness. She made it sound like she …
counted
on me breaking her heart or something. Like that’s the only way she can make art.”

“That’s crap,” Dmitri cuts in. “I do my best work when I’m
happy
. When I’m sad, I just sulk and drink wine and—”

“Jerk off a lot, yeah, I know,” I interrupt. “But apparently Nell isn’t like that. She needs her space to … be all dark and shit.”

“Or she’s lying.”

I stare at Dmitri. “Lying?”

He shrugs. “She’s just afraid. Maybe she’s feeling too much for you and it’s freaking her out and she’s … taking her distance from you. I mean, dude, you have a reputation.”

“Of being a
god
in the bedroom,” I say. “
She’s
the one who’s wantin’ to have sex all the time. And on people’s
lawns
, for shit’s sake. She isn’t afraid of anything, she says so herself all the time.”

“Probably because she
is
afraid of everything.”

I sneer as Dmitri finishes his sentence with his hands, signing for Clayton’s inclusion. Clayton nods mutedly, sipping his coffee and shaking his head, as if in pity. What the hell are they suggesting I do? Run off and capture Nell and insist that she’s just afraid? Tell her she’s wrong and she doesn’t need any room to be all dark and artistic?

“And she’s afraid of that reputation of yours,” Dmitri goes on, his hands flipping around in the air before him. “She can’t feel secure with you, not when she thinks you’re always one day closer to abandoning her. If that scary Dog story was any indication, sounds like she’s been plenty abandoned before.”

“So … she thinks I’m gonna leave her. After we’ve been so damn happy and having so much …” I bang my hands together to indicate two people having sex, for Clayton’s benefit. From the muted snort, he got the message. “Is that how you sign the damn word? Fucking?” I repeat the gesture lewdly, which now earns a laugh from Clayton.

“You need to reassure her,” says Dmitri seriously.

“How? That’s bullshit. I don’t look at other girls. I don’t even get any texts anymore. What more reassurance could I possibly give her?”

Dmitri shrugs. “I don’t know. Just continue to show her love. Make her something creepy and dark and tortured, to represent how lonely and miserable you are without her.” He pushes a finger into his glasses and lifts his eyebrows. “Maybe tell her you don’t think her stories are crap and that your little comment about her repetitive adjective choices and lack of a climax is, in fact,
not
offputting and perhaps is exactly what her story ought to be.” He glances at me, then realizes what he just said. “Uh, no. Sorry. I’m talking about
my
relationship suddenly. Shit, fuck. Damn it, I just cussed.” He buries his face into his palms.

I give his shoulder a hearty slap and a rub, jostling him from his mental torment. “You and Riley on the jagged rocks?”

“And sharp rocks. And invisible rocks. All the rocks.” He slaps his own face, once on either cheek. “It’s because I have some growing up to do. Nothing wrong with Riley. She’s … She’s just perfect,” he says, but his energy falls flat. He’s a bad liar.

“Alright.” I drop the subject, not pushing it further. “Thanks, man.”

“For what?”

“For pointing me in the direction of …” I sigh, at a total loss. Maybe
I’m
the one who needs reassurance. “In the direction of …”

It’s Clayton who punches my arm, stealing my attention. Then he says, “Keep it simple, dude. Let her know how you feel. Let her know that you’ll be there when she’s ready. And for fuck’s sake, bury yourself in that work of yours.”

Dmitri nods encouragingly, his dark eyes burning behind those thick glasses of his, and then his gaze breaks away, lost again in his own troubled relationship and whatever waits for him there. Clayton’s smile is infinitely more heartening, thoughts of Dessie and him giving me just the boost I need to make it through the night.

Afterwards, with a blanket of half-hidden stars overhead, I cross the quiet campus with my hands shoved deep in my pockets. It’s way too early for a cold front, but I feel downright chilly tonight. Seems like the weather is doing all it can to support my sullen mood. All I need is a damn rainstorm and I’d be all set. Not even the crickets sing tonight. My only company is the soft crunch of grass beneath my shoes, followed by the soft tapping of my soles against the pavement as I approach the School of Art.

I push through the doors, allowing an even colder air to swallow me up. I fold my arms as I move through the dim halls. On the way to my destination, I happen to pass by room 1401, the infamous room in which I first stripped down and took to a stool in front of Nell and the rest of her class. I hang at the door, noticing a few students inside sitting at their easels and chatting to one another, their drawings being ignored as they laugh about something to do with a Saturday night outing. They turn for a second, notice me, then return to their chat.

It’s so strange, to think back on that day when I bared it all for Nell, yet bared nothing at all, as she didn’t yet know me. Maybe naked isn’t enough. Maybe naked was never enough, not for someone as deep and dark and beautiful as Nell.

I need to get deeper.

I need to reveal myself. I need to show the parts of me that I haven’t revealed to anyone, parts of me that I may even be scared to reveal to myself.

My own scary Halloween stories.

Like, maybe I’m still the petrified kid in the back of the party, the one Clayton used to make fun of, the one who never touched a girl in his life. Maybe the “Brant” that everyone knows is just some armored version of my scared childhood self, like I wear all this cockiness and confidence on me like armor, masking all the fear and doubt and second-guessing I really feel. Maybe I’m a big ol’ liar and the real me is something so much simpler, so much more …

Naked.

These thoughts are what I take with me when I sit in the digital media lab and plug my camera into the computer. Sorting through the photos, I squint at the screen and think long and hard about what I really “saw” when I took each photograph. Crumpled leaves at the base of a tree. A strange fissure in the red bricks of the School of Music. Long strands of hanging beads on a costume rack at the theater. The backside of Clayton’s head as he’s watching Dessie perform from the wing of the stage.

So many photos. So many moments.

A view of the School of Art from the ground, the sunlight blaring behind it and turning the structure into a huge, daunting silhouette. A blue candy wrapper caught in the grass with a single ant perched atop it, separated from its family. The anthill from which that ant likely came, its impressive palace standing like the capitol of a great queen-ruled empire—with a condom resting at its base. Soil turned up from a tiny hole in the ground by a rosebush where a squirrel had hidden its dinner.

What do these pics even mean?

What did I
see
when I took them?
“What do you see in this?”
I can hear Nell asking me.
“You don’t ever
just
take a photo.”

I turn to the next photo.

My throat constricts as I gaze on the side of Nell’s face in black and white, her hand up by her cheek, caught in the process of drawing hair behind her ear. I stare at that photo for so long, I feel it burn into my retinas.