Beneath The Skin (A College Obsession Romance) (75 page)

I end up cheek-to-wood when I reach Dessie’s, feeling the vibrations of my own knocks as my face presses against the door.

The door opens, nearly spilling me inside, and I find Dessie’s alarmed eyes staring back.

I see her stiff shoulders. I see her tensed jaw and lips, the tightness of her fingers squeezing the doorknob, and her taut forehead.

Something’s wrong with her, too.

“Are you okay?” I ask her first.

After a moment of indecision, she sighs and falls into my chest, wrapping her arms around me and vibrating with deep breaths that match my own. My clothes are a little damp from the light rain that caught me outside, but she doesn’t seem to care. We stand there in the doorway for countless minutes just holding each other, saying nothing.

Whatever’s bothering her stays inside her, and what’s bothering me stays inside my clenched fists and strained eyes.

After some time, she pulls away and draws me into her room. The door stays open behind me as we lower onto her bed. The windowpane fills with little droplets and streaks of rain. The room is dim and cold, the coldness made worse by the feel of the air conditioning against my rain-speckled clothes.

Dessie faces me and starts to spill her worries in broken signs and words. The gist seems to be that Chloe’s heart was broken, apparently, and Victoria and her are saying awful things about me now, for whatever reason. Added to that, she’s about to perform this Friday to her first-ever audience since her time in Italy, and she’s having a mental breakdown—or something to that effect.

I have my arm around her the whole time, and I can’t help but feel comforted by holding her body against mine, no matter the shit that just went down before I took flight from the theater or the turmoil that’s making a mess of my stomach.

Despite not being able to keep my hands very steady, I speak back to her while signing at the same time: “You’re going to be fine, Dessie. From what I could see in the rehearsals, you look confident up there. No matter how you feel inside, it doesn’t show.”

“I feel like a failure
,” she signs and says to me.
“I feel like a cheat. I feel like someone else better than me deserves to be on that stage.”

Half the signs are wrong, but I understand well enough. This isn’t a lesson in sign language; it’s a lesson in self-confidence, of which Dessie is lacking. How can I convince her of the beauty I see every time she graces the stage? How can I convince her that she commands the attention of the audience even without the assistance of my stupid, inadequate lights?

“See it like one of your songs,” I tell her, fighting through the fear of what irreversible damage I’ve done to my career in the past hour. I’m so angry, I could punch him again until I
do
draw blood—and it’d be blood from his face, not my knuckles. “See it like a song at the
Throng
where you own that microphone and that audience is captivated by you. You have this story you need to tell, so tell it.”

Somewhere in that last sentence, my phone shakes in my pocket. When I pull it out, my stomach falls through the floor.

DOC THWAITE

I need to see you

as soon as possible.

Can you drop by my office

within the hour?

Well, I should’ve known it was coming. I can’t tell if I’m wet from the rain or if there’s an instant pool of sweat under my arms. I feel a chill race up my back, but I don’t know if it’s from fear or anger.
I could fold that fucker in half right now.

Dessie taps my thigh, then signs:
You okay?

The last thing I want to do is draw her into my problems. “I need to head back to the theater,” I say and sign to her. “Maybe we can meet up at my place after rehearsal? I may … I may be occupied … with …”

“The lighting,”
she finishes for me, nodding with understanding.
“I need some time alone to rehearse before Sam’s back from class,”
she says and signs, using the sign for “restaurant” in place of “rehearse”.

And really, I’d much rather be at a restaurant kicking back with her than returning to that theater, where I’m quite sure I’ll not be allowed to step foot into another rehearsal ever again.

Needing it suddenly, I push my face forcefully into hers. Our mouths interlock as if they were starved for one another. Her hand grips my arm instinctively, as if bracing herself for my sudden impact, and my hand grips her thigh hungrily.

I could do so much more to her right now. I want to slide that hand up between her legs and make her moan.

Then, I feel her moan.

Oops.

With my hand tucked between her legs with more aggression than I’d planned, my mouth moves down her neck, nibbling as I go. I feel her trembling against me, her fingers clawing into my arm.

When my mouth reaches her breast, suddenly I stop. All the breath falls out of me and I feel myself seize up with anger.

I can’t even enjoy this.

I feel the vibration of words in her chest. My face pressed against her, I growl with frustration. I don’t know whether to hit someone, break something, or scream out and cry.

Instead, I calmly lift my face to hers. “I gotta go.”

She studies my eyes uncertainly, her lips parted.

I take a breath. “Doctor Thwaite. He texted me, called to his office for a … for a meeting.”

Dessie’s eyes widen.
“Doctor Thwaite?” she says. “He actually
texts
you? You get text messages from the Director of the School of Theatre himself?”

I interrupt her with a kiss, causing her to swallow the last word or two. “Being deaf and being the head lighting guy has its perks,” I mutter.

Head lighting guy
—not for long.

I rise off the bed. Before I leave the room, I glance back at her and say, “Tonight? My place, after rehearsal?”

Her eyes small, she simply nods.

Dessie, you know how to break my heart and put it back together with just one simple nod.

I let the door close softly behind me.

The West Hall falls at my back. What was once a light drizzle has grown into a torrential downpour. I feel the thunder at my feet as I plod through puddles in the road. The tunnel under the Art building provides a short reprieve before the courtyard between the Music and Theatre buildings thrusts me back into the unforgiving rain. Edging by the windows under a lip of canopy, I move unhurriedly toward the glass doors.

Twice my wet hand slips on the handle before the damn thing lets me inside. Then, once my feet meet the tiled entrance, I nearly slip, catching myself on the trunk of a fake plant near the door. I don’t bother glancing at the lobby to see if anyone witnessed; I just rush ahead, pushing through a crowd of freshmen who look like they’re waiting out the storm before heading to their next class.

I make a quick trip to the restroom, using some paper towels to dry off my hair and shirt as best as I can. It doesn’t matter how I present myself. I know the outcome of this meeting is going to be the same no matter which way my hair’s falling.

I fight an urge to punch the reflection in the mirror. My knuckle’s bled enough today.

The office is eerily empty. I see Dr. Thwaite’s door is open, so I let myself in. He sits at his desk, an older woman in a chair by his side laughing. When the pair of them look up, the laughter ceases.

I’m ready.

Dr. Thwaite gestures toward a free chair in front of his desk. I take my seat and stare at him. Then, as he begins to speak, the woman at his side moves her hands. Oh, she’s the interpreter.

I’m back in high school again, meeting with the principal because of another not-so-innocent kid I beat up, an interpreter seated by the desk, and my sad, irritated parents sitting across from them.

But there are no parents here. Just me, the Doc, and some woman I’ve never met, an interpreter who is
not
about to get banged in a supply closet after this meeting’s over.

The woman signs his words:
Thanks for dropping by on such short notice. We’ve had a situation arise. Kellen has had an emergency. He let me know through an apologetic email, and he’s returning to New York at once.

I swallow hard, my eyes reeled in on the woman’s long, wrinkled hands with the intensity of a hawk.

The woman goes on:
I know the lighting work is mostly finished, but there are still details to iron out before opening night. You are the most intimate with Kellen’s design. Is it possible for you to finish it on your own, because of Kellen’s untimely and sudden departure?

I feel sweat all over my forehead. My breath is so heavy, every effort at filling my lungs is exhausting. The room spins around me. Am I the butt of some joke right now? Is Kellen fucking with my head?

The woman prompts me again:
Clayton? Are you able to? If it is too much work, Dick can easily do it on his own. I simply wanted to extend the opportunity to you.

“Yes,” I finally say, out of breath. “Yes. Thank you for the chance,” I say to the woman’s hands without being able to look Doctor Thwaite in the eyes. I feel like if he saw them, he’d somehow know the truth.

The woman smiles.
Good
, she signs.

I stagger out of the office twenty minutes later after he covers all the details, which basically adds about six to eight more hours this week of work at the theater, which I am more than willing to do, considering I thought, after the incident, that I’d be spending exactly zero more hours at the theater.

I take some time to calm down by the side door where the smokers live in a permanent cloud of smoke around that Arnie dude who always seems to be out here. It’s on a bench outside that side door that I stare at my hands and try to make sense out of what happened.

Did Kellen literally just pack up his things and go?

Did I scare him so badly, he opted to hightail it back home instead of confront me again?

Did his guilt over what he did to Dessie outweigh the arrogance he displayed to me?

Maybe that’s it. Maybe he couldn’t risk me—and maybe also Dessie—exposing what he’d done, ruining his reputation with Dessie’s dad and/or Thwaite.

But that doesn’t quite add up either. He could simply have played a her-word-against-his sort of thing. I’ve seen guys like that before, guys who push their weight around, who wear their importance or their family name like armor, invincible to anything that comes their way.

Though, his soft face and those fuck-off designer glasses didn’t prove so invincible to my fist.

Rehearsal glues me to Dick and to the lighting instruments more than it does to the stage, which is regrettable since I wanted to watch Dessie and give her some words of encouragement when I see her later. Every action seems surreal now with Kellen gone, likely with the bruise I left on his cheek still smarting, and having had not only no consequence served to me, but being given a reward instead. Dick is far calmer, far more fun, and arguably even more educational to work with. We become a team and end up finishing Monday’s work in half the time than we’d expected. Because part of Kellen’s work for the funeral in act three wasn’t finished, I even get to implement that idea I had, if I were able to design the show myself. Dick goes along with it, happy to just have the work done.
“What the hell was Kellen doing with you that took him so damn long?”
Dick jokes to me, if I got his words right. I tell him it would take anyone longer to hang and focus lights with a stick up their ass, and Dick laughs a bit too hard at that.

When it’s nearly eleven and the stars are trying to poke through the pitch-nothing of the sky, Dessie finds me waiting for her on a bench. Her hair is messy and tangled, which gives her this feral sexiness that gets me going the moment I see her. When I bend in for a kiss, though, she seems distracted, her eyes lost in the distance somewhere. “What’s wrong?” I ask her, but all she signs back is:
I’m tired.

When we make it to the apartment, Brant and Dmitri are gone. Normally that means Dessie and I can let loose and have a little fun, but there’s tension in her eyes and no smile touches her face. When she sets down her things, she goes straight to my bed and lies down without another word. I watch her through the bedroom door for a moment, confused. Was something said to her at rehearsal? Is Victoria being a bitch again? Victoria attends some of the rehearsals now, sent alternatingly with some of the other costume crew members to tend to meticulous costume adjustments.