The Original Sinners: The Red Years

“How do you feel?”

“Disoriented.”

“The blindfold will do that. Don’t breathe too deeply and don’t lock your knees.”

He nodded and tried to relax his legs.

“Do you know why I’ve done this, Zach?”

“No.”

“I could say it’s because I want you. I do want you. I have rarely been so attracted to someone in my life. But if I just wanted you I could have had you the day we met. Yes?”

Zach knew she expected an answer. He decided to save them both time and simply go with the truth.

“Yes.”

“Do you know why I didn’t let that happen? Why I stopped you before you could ask me up that night in the cab?”

Zach experienced a mild wave of vertigo. Nora moved as she spoke and the words seemed to come from everywhere at once.

“Why?” Nora had never made her attraction to him a secret. Why she’d turned him down the one time he’d come on to her was something he’d wondered about since that night.

“Because when you said Grace’s name you had so much pain in your eyes. I knew you didn’t really want me. You just wanted to not think and not feel for a few hours. Yes?”

“Yes,” Zach admitted.

“I do want you, Zach, but I also want to know you.”

“You do know me.”

“You’ve kept half your life from me,” she said. “I don’t want half. I want all. You know my secrets now. Time to tell me yours. It’s all or nothing tonight. Say ‘all’ and we go on. Say ‘nothing’ and this ends now and forever. You decide.”

He felt the floor rock underneath him. On the wood floor and in his bare feet, he imagined for a moment he was on a ship in a storm.

“All.”

“Good,” Nora said, sounding relieved and yet determined. “Now…tell me about Grace.”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Then say your safe word and end it. But that will end it. It and us. But if you don’t want to end it, answer the question.”

For a terrible moment Zach considered his options. There were some things he simply did not talk about. But they’d come so far now…it would be a more difficult journey back than forward. Zach took a few short, shallow breaths and used the street sounds below to orient himself.

“Grace was eighteen when we met.” He gave up the words like precious possessions to a thief. “I was…older.”

“You were teaching at Cambridge then, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Grace was your student?”

Zach swallowed hard. “Yes.”

“That explains why my relationship with Wes made you so uncomfortable at first. Dеj? vu, right? It seems so unlike you, getting involved with a student.”

“All teachers nurse attractions to the occasional student. I never intended to act upon it. Grace was lovely beyond words, twice as bright and talented as any student I’d ever taught. She wrote poetry, good poetry. No eighteen-year-old in history has ever written good poetry. But she did.”

“What else did she do?”

“She brought me her poetry sometimes and asked for my opinion, my help.”

“You were her editor.”

Zach laughed bitterly.

“I suppose I was.”

“She loved you.”

“As much as a girl of eighteen can love her thirty-one-year-old teacher. At the time, I simply assumed she cared only for her writing.”

“Eighteen means she couldn’t buy booze in the States. It doesn’t mean she couldn’t love you.”

“It does mean I shouldn’t have loved her back.”

“But you did.”

“Foolishly, yes.” His stomach churned as he relived that year, that nightmare of a year. “Or what passed for love at the time. But I never acted on it. I loved my work, loved teaching, loved my life.”

“What happened?” Nora’s questions were as relentless as any assault.

Zach took another breath. He never even allowed himself to think about that time, much less tell another soul about it. It was his burden alone.

“I was in my office late on a Friday night. I had a hundred exams to grade that weekend. I suppose I’d complained about this in class. Somehow she knew I’d be there.”

“She came to your office?”

“Yes. I was exhausted.” Suddenly Zach was back in that cramped third-floor office again. His sleeves were rolled up; his fingers were tinged with red ink. His head ached from the hours of reading, the endless concentration. He yawned, stretched, heard a noise in the hallway. “I heard footsteps in the hall and looked up. She was standing in my doorway.”

“She came to your office late at night. Shall I assume the inevitable happened?”

“It felt inevitable. She came inside without waiting for me to ask her. And then she closed the door behind her.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘I don’t have any poems tonight.’”