Finding Dell (27 page)

When the movie action ramped up, I felt Will shift behind me and I realized he was becoming hard. I struggled to ignore it, but the more I tried not to think about it, the more I felt him pressing into me.

Later, when an instrumental song signaled the end of the movie, I didn’t dare stir from my spot. I felt a soft touch on my shoulder and the recognizable tickle of Will’s hair brushing against my skin. I glanced back and he was smiling sheepishly, his mouth near my shoulder.

I realized that the touch I felt was his lips, kissing me lightly on my shoulder.

“Do you want to go to bed?” he asked.

I nodded and followed Will into his room where he rummaged through a pile of clothes on the floor for a pair of cotton shorts I could wear for the night. He left to brush his teeth and I shimmied out of my jeans and into his shorts before crawling into bed.

Will returned and climbed into bed, lying on his back at first. After a few minutes he turned on his side and curled his body around mine. I stared wide-eyed at the wall in front of me and bit my lip. Neither of us had spoken a word since he turned off the lights, not even a whispered “goodnight.” I was afraid to break the silence and even more scared to shift my body in any way.

Silence filled the room. I could feel the steady rise and fall of Will’s chest against my back as he took measured breaths. Then, I felt a fluttering on my shoulder again, this time more insistent.

This time I couldn’t ignore it.

I turned my head gently, careful not to disrupt Will. In my peripheral vision I could see that he was kissing my shoulder lightly, with just a brush of his lips on my skin. I turned completely, until we were face-to-face, and he smoothed his hand over my cheek. He closed his eyes and kissed me.

He kissed me deeply, exactly the way I remembered. I fell into the kiss immediately and completely. Slowly, Will moved his body against mine until I was lying on my back and he was on top of me as we kissed breathlessly.

Gradually, we slowed down, our kissing becoming more romantic, then sleepy. Will slid off of me, onto his side, and I curled my body into his, sliding between his broad arms and tucking my head into his chest. He smoothed my hair down and kissed my forehead.

“We still fit perfectly,” he said in a sleepy voice. “Goodnight, Dell.”

“’Night, Will,” I whispered. I was brimming with excitement, but I was exhausted. I must have fallen asleep almost immediately in his arms.

Hours later, the morning sunlight began its mission to break through the blinds, sending the room into a dizzying pattern of horizontal lines. I squinted at the window and nuzzled my head further into Will’s chest. Neither of us had moved all night, I found this comforting, just like the first time we got together. I closed my eyes again, trying to block out the harsh sunlight. I dozed off for a few minutes, and when I stirred I thought I was back in Sugarbush Hall again.

Will kissed my forehead when he felt me move, and I wondered how long he’d been awake. I smiled up at him and we kissed playfully for a blissful half-hour.

“Let’s go in the living room,” Will said. He rolled out of bed and I followed him, dragging a blanket around my shoulders.

He put in another movie and we cuddled on the couch, kissing and giggling, paying no attention to what played on the TV screen.

In a sudden burst of bright light and fresh air, the front door rattled open and Rocco walked in. He carried a duffel bag and a surprised look on his face. His eyebrows lifted comically and he stammered a greeting.

“Wow, sorry to interrupt. Dell, hey. Hey, Easton. You’re together. On the couch. Under a blanket,” he said.

I bowed my head and blushed with embarrassment.

“Hey, man. How was the weekend at home with the folks? Anything new happening in Cape Girardeau?” Will asked lazily, as if he wasn’t weighed down by my entire body lying on top of him.

“Same old. Nothing new in the Cape,” Rocco said, fumbling
to remove his key from the door. “I’ll tell you about it later. When she’s not around. I’ll be in my room.”

I fought against rolling my eyes as Rocco shuffled out of the room, oblivious to his awkward behavior. But even before he was gone, Will’s mouth nudged into the slope of my neck for a kiss and I forgot all about Rocco.

“I still remember your favorite spot,” Will whispered.

We stayed like this for a long time, and I fought to stay in the moment, but my mind raced between memories of the past and images I’d conjured of the future.

When I rested my head on his chest, a memory from last year hurdled into my mind.

I sat at a wooden table in the hall, nearly dozing as I stared, red-eyed, at Photoshop on my laptop screen. The machine gun roar of a video game was muffled to a dull growl through the wall and it lulled me closer to sleep.

A soft touch on the crown of my head stirred me awake. It was Will, back from the studio, looking bleary-eyed himself. He set his backpack down on the table and steered me to the couch.

I nestled into the nubby maroon fabric and rested my head on his lap while he sat facing out the window, staring into the dark void that was Magnolia Banks Lake. Our sleepy mumblings turned to hushed whispers, whispers that only happened in the dark, after the world has gone to sleep. It was a conversation that inevitably turned to talk of stories you didn’t often tell, the type guys pretend not to need until someone listens.

“. . . And my brothers climbed the tree, this towering tree. I didn’t want to be left out. I always wanted them to like me. More than that, I guess, I wanted them to be impressed. So I climbed it, too. And I got all the way to the top. But I forgot the other half. I forgot I had to get down. So I clung to the top branch for what felt like hours, until my mom had to climb up and rescue me.”

Will was still stroking my hair when I rolled onto my back and looked up into his watery blue eyes.

“Are you joking?”

“Why would I joke about climbing a tree?” he asked, a hint of a smile playing at his lips.

“This is unreal. The exact same thing happened to me. My mom had to climb up to get me and everything. I think I even tell the story in the same way.”

He twirled my hair into a knot but didn’t untangle his fingers.

“I know.”

“You know what?”

“It was you.”

Suddenly, I remembered telling him the story, months ago. Long before we got together. And still he remembered it, word for word.

I almost felt dizzy looking up at him. The couch and the video game’s muted hum both dropped away. My stomach filled with . . . pangs. Like I could burst and tell him I loved him right there. It was a rolling jolt in my stomach, the same way I felt when he kissed me. And I just
knew
.

He leaned over to kiss me on the forehead while the pangs still rolled through my body.

“Just testing you. I wanted to make sure you were still awake. I like when we fall asleep together,” he said.

With that, we stumbled sleepily into his room, where the gunfire of the video game grew to an insistent roar, and even through that, we could still fall asleep at the same time.

I opened my eyes with a start. The memory felt so real that I even relived the pangs I felt when he looked at me like that.

Instead of the bitter disappointment I’d felt for months when I woke up after a daydream about Will, I was with him this time. I didn’t want to close my eyes again and risk it disappearing, but the pangs had returned, strong as ever, and I knew I’d finally clawed my way back to the path I was supposed to be on all along.

CHAPTER 29

“WHAT IS THE
answer to the question, ‘Why do we forget?’” Professor Leach asked as he strolled the shallow stepped aisles of Carroll Hall.

“I don’t remember,” a boy near the back of the room joked. The class tittered with laughter, but Professor Leach kept pacing, his hands arched contemplatively in front of his chest.

Today, the lecture hall didn’t captivate the way it did on sunny days. A fog settled in after a morning rainstorm and the arching windows of Carroll Hall gave way to an opaque sky. The hall looked more shabby than grand in the dismal light; even the fire-red curtains looked dusty and moth-eaten. I shifted in my seat with a sigh. My feet ached from a frantic run across campus in heavy rain boots. I had waited in the lobby of Paso Fino for Helen until it was almost time for class to begin, only to find her already seated comfortably with Tennessee when I arrived.

“There are four major reasons why people forget, but today we’ll cover only one, and the most interesting one at that: motivated forgetting. Active memory failure can be attributed to sup
pression or repression. Could someone enlighten us to the definition of those terms?”

A girl near the stage began to speak and I wondered idly what Professor Leach would say if he were to analyze my relationship with Will. Would he label me a “conscious suppressor” if he knew the way I ignored months of hurt to wait for this moment, a reprise of a happy time?

Once we spent our first night together, Will and I hadn’t missed a chance to be together for weeks. I slept at his apartment, he met me in the library, and Helen created diversions to sneak Will into Georgian Grande so we could eat dinner together. It felt perfect. But sometimes, when the clock ticked so late that it was actually early morning, and the remoteness of those isolated hours made you confess secrets to the person next to you, I waited for Will to acknowledge our time spent apart, but he never did. I ached to ask unanswerable questions.

Professor Leach made his way to the stage to continue his lecture and the hour was a long one. The hall filled with the restless squeak of wet shoes as we waited for his dismissal into the overcast afternoon. The room breathed a sigh of relief when Professor Leach brought a hand to massage his strained forehead and dismissed class fifteen minutes early.

Outside, the fog had settled close to the ground, making even the iconic bronze statues lining the walkway difficult to distinguish.

A shadowy figure emerged, and despite the haze I recognized Will’s blue eyes cutting through the fog.

My head buried into his chest and he kissed my head through my hair as I breathed his scent. I wasn’t surprised to find him waiting for me, and the realization that we were settling into an expected routine pleased me.

“Class got out early today. We might have missed each
other,” I said into his shoulder.

“Not a chance. I’ve been sitting over there for the last half hour,” he said, pointing to a bench near a grove of poplar trees, barely visible in the fog.

With an arm slung over my shoulder, he steered me to the bench that was wet with condensation. I winced as I felt my jeans collect water as I sat down.

“It’s still hot,” Will said as he handed me a coffee. He settled on the bench and I took a tentative sip.

“Have you been waiting for me all this time?”

“Not waiting. Relaxing, thinking,” he said.

Nearby, a squirrel bounded across the grove into a blackberry bush and startled me. I sat on the edge of the bench, prepared to leave, until I realized that Will was content to sit there for the afternoon. It struck me how different we were. I never slowed down to purposelessly sit on campus and reflect on my thoughts, but Will was comfortable doing just that.

“In class today, we learned about strengthening memories through rehearsal,” I said, rolling the warm coffee cup in my hands. “Do you ever worry that you’ll forget if you aren’t actively remembering? Like, maybe we need to do memory exercises to keep them in shape, so we don’t lose them?”

“What are you trying so hard to remember?”

“Our happy memories from last year,” I admitted in a quiet voice.

“You don’t need old memories. We’re making new ones. All you have to do is remember right now.”

A smile curled at my lips. I handed my coffee to Will while I removed my rain boots and curled my legs comfortably under me, snuggling under his arm. Will’s damp hair curled out at the edges and tickled my temple when I rested my head against his.

We sat on the bench by the poplar trees watching indistinct
students enter Carroll Hall through the blurry fog for the rest of the afternoon, and I never worried that we were wasting our time.

CHAPTER 30

“THE HALASANA POSE
is supposed to decrease insomnia, so if you’ve been having trouble sleeping, you could do that before bed,” Natalie said.

We were on our way back from our weekly yoga class. A storm rolled through town while we were practicing our rhythmic breathing and downward-facing dog stretches, but the night sky had already cleared by the time we started home.

“Is that the one where you bend your legs over your head?” I asked, sidestepping a puddle. “That one is pretty extreme, but I do feel looser afterward.”

“It definitely releases tension from your shoulders,” Natalie agreed.

The rain-soaked windows of the dorms in Wild Mare Point shimmered with the glow of the streetlights. The unmistakable humidity of wet spring showers had started to creep in, along with longer days and later nights.

We neared the dorm and I didn’t see Will until he slid off the open bed of his truck, where he’d been waiting in front of Paso Fino.

His shaggy hair was wet and clung to his forehead in clumps. He sheepishly brushed his hair with his fingers as he approached.

“I got caught in the storm on my way over. I wanted to surprise you, but I forgot you had yoga class tonight,” he said.

Natalie lightly elbowed me in the ribs. “I’ll take your mat in for you,” she said.

I shrugged the mat from my shoulder and handed it to her. As she walked away, I took a step toward Will. He placed his hand on my chin as he kissed me. His wet hair smelled like an earthy spring storm.

“You waited for me in the rain, just to spend the night?”

He shook his head and pointed a finger upward. “Now that the storm’s passed, there are no clouds. Perfect to spot some stars.”

He took my hand and led me through the wet grass toward the lake. My gym shoes were instantly drenched. He stopped at a wooden picnic table close to the water’s edge and we sat on the tabletop. I untied my shoes and let my bare feet rest on the seat. Will stretched his arm around my shoulder and I cuddled into him.