Eager to Love Page 3

  We’d cleaned up after lab, of course, and someone had taken care of Cane’s guy’s area for him. But they’d missed something. A tiny piece of paper the size of a fortune from a cookie was wedged and crumpled under the digital scale. I grabbed it and absently uncrinkled it as I headed to the trash can. However, when I read what was written on the paper in block pencil letters, it halted me in my tracks.

  The paper said:

  BURN YOURSELF

  Chapter 5

  “This is it,” Ashley said, putting her truck into park in front of a pale blue house off Highland Road.

  In the passenger’s seat, I wrung my hands and stared at the front door, my stomach twisting into a knot.

  Ashley picked up on my discomfort, like any good friend would. “You want me to come in?”

  I shook my head. “No, that’s all right. I think I need to do this alone.”

  I looked at her, and there was concern in her eyes. “You sure?” she asked.

  I nodded. “I don’t want to outnumber her.”

  “Good idea.”

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be. It might be a while.”

  “I’ve got Fruit Ninja,” Ashley said, smiling.

  “Thanks, Ash. I appreciate it.”

  I pulled the handle on the door, stepped down out of Ashley’s comically large Ford F-250, and started the long trek to that foreboding front door. I closed my eyes and forced my breathing to steady. The hot and heavy September air wrapped around me.

  Far too soon, I reached the porch and had no more steps to take. I looked up at the door, which had long ago been painted black and was now peeling and flaking. I glanced back at Ashley’s truck.

  I considered bailing. The situation went so against my personality. Here I was, about to knock on a stranger’s door and force them to talk about something that was painful to them. Something that they probably wish they could leave behind. I thought about how I would feel if someone knocked on my door and wanted to chat about Caleb’s death. I would feel intruded upon, violated, invaded. Especially if they were a stranger.

  I’d spent the last few months tracking this woman down, though. It seemed like a waste to turn back at this late hour, but… I was shaking. In spite of the Louisiana heat, my hands were shivering. I clutched them together.

  I realized I shouldn’t be doing this. It was rude, and it was wrong. I thought of Marty’s floundering attempts at conversation and I knew that I was about to put my foot in my mouth in exactly the same way.

  I almost turned to leave when the door suddenly creaked open, and a tired-looking Asian woman opened the door. She had keys in her hand, and it was clear she was intending to go out. She looked surprised to see me.

  “Oh,” she said. “Hello. Can I help you?”

  She was very pretty, and for an awful moment, I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “I, uh. I’m so sorry. I was just…” I extended a hand. “I’m Caitlyn Seager.”

  The woman stared at me for a beat, then looked down at my outstretched hand. Instead of taking it, she immediately broke down weeping.

  This. Was. Awful. Worse than I could have ever predicted.

  The woman bawled openly, her hands over her face.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said. “I just… I had to see you.”

  “No,” the woman said, gathering herself together. She sniffed and wiped at her eyes. “I should be apologizing. I’m such a wreck. Please, come in.”

  “Are you sure?” I said. “You look like you were just leaving.”

  “Just errands. I can do them later.” She extended a hand herself, and I took it gratefully. “Ana,” she said. “It’s good to finally meet you, Caitlyn.”

  Ana Nguyen had been my brother’s girlfriend all the way up to a couple of weeks before his death. They had met each other in undergrad and dated for almost two years.

  “I know why you’re here,” Ana said after we were seated at her kitchen table, she with a glass of orange juice and me with ice water. “You want to know if he was depressed.”

  I nodded, feeling guilty.

  She shook her head. “He wasn’t. If anyone was, it was me. Did he ever tell you why we broke up?”

  It was my turn to do the head shaking.

  She sighed and drank half her orange juice in one long, delaying gulp. “I thought he was cheating on me. He wasn’t—I’m convinced of that now—but at the time… I don’t know. I was a stressed-out, insecure grad student. And he just seemed to be ‘busy in the lab’ a suspicious number of nights.”

  “Other people in the chemistry department say he was a very hard worker,” I offered.

  “He was,” Ana said. “I mean, it’s obvious now. Caleb was… He was a goddamn laser beam, you know?” She laughed in a brittle way. “Once he got locked onto something, he was just—” She raised her arms like she was holding an invisible sci-fi weapon and made a ‘laser’ sound. “Nyeeeerow!”

  I laughed. “Yeah, that was Caleb.”

  “So, yeah. He was working on this big Alzheimer’s breakthrough, putting in all kinds of insane hours and blowing his co-GA’s and professors away. And I was becoming increasingly convinced that he was seeing someone else. Stupid. I was stupid.”

  “So you broke up with him?”

  She shook her head. “No, he broke up with me. I was starting fights almost daily, and he said that he loved me, but he just couldn’t take the up-and-down any more. Said I was distracting me from his work. That’s what hurt the most, I think. It made me furious.”

  “You were mad at him?”

  “Livid. For days after, even. But then, a few weeks later, I called him to try to get back together with him. He turned me down. Not a hard refusal, mind you. He just said he couldn’t deal with a relationship right then and that we could talk about it when his life was simpler. That flew all over me too. The idea that I was something that had to be dealt with.” She took another drink, and I caught a faint whiff of vodka undercutting the OJ. “I sound like a crazy bitch, in retrospect. I guess I kind of was. I was working on my thesis, and he had kind of become the only solid thing in my life. When my work got harder, I wanted to be closer to him. He was the opposite, I guess. When his work got harder, he got distant. The perfect emotional storm, really. I got clingy and desperate to close that gap at the same time he was increasing it.”

  I nodded, thinking about how astounding my sex life with Jeffery got during finals week last semester. I supposed we were both of the getting-closer variety. In that hurricane of tests and essays, we became each other’s shelter. It was like, when we together, none of the professors and classes and grades outside the bedroom door even existed. Only he and I were real. I couldn’t imagine how hard it would be if Jeffery pulled away at the same time I needed him most.

  “Well, I got drunk,” she said. “A few nights after he’d told me he couldn’t deal with me. I got drunk, and I called him.” She took a deep breath, and I could see she was close to tears again. “He was in the lab. I knew he’d be in the lab. And I called him, and I hated how cheerful his voice sounded. I hated it. I was miserable without him, and I was miserable all the time I spent working on my thesis. And there he was, chipper and bright in a lab somewhere: delighted without me, delighted to be working. I was so mad.”

  She looked at me, then she looked away.

  “I’ve never told anybody this,” she said. “And when I tell you, you’re going to hate me.”

  “I won’t hate you,” I said.

  She bit her lip and wiped both of her eyes. “Keep in mind, I was drunk. I was drunk, and I was so, so angry at him. I think I’d meant to call him to cry and beg him to take me back, but when he answered the phone so happy, it just threw a terrible switch. I told him… I said…”

  Her face broke, and for a moment I thought she was going to start crying again. She steered out of it though and stabilized. She took a breath.

  “I said, ‘You know what, Caleb? You should kill yourself.’ And I hung up. And
then the next morning, come to find out, he actually…” She did start crying then. She put her face in her hands and leaned forward against the table. “I’m sorry. No part of me ever considered that he actually would. He was so happy, and so smart, and so good at what he was doing. Jesus.”

  A cold ball had formed in my stomach, and I realized she was right: I did hate her.

  But it didn’t make any sense. Caleb wouldn’t kill himself just because an ex-girlfriend drunkenly told him he should. Something was missing. Or it was just a coincidence. And it was clear that this woman had carried around a tremendous amount of guilt over the last years.

  I reached across the table and touched her arm. She looked up at me, her pretty face marred and streaked with tears. Her eyes looked tired beyond belief.

  I thought that there were probably very few opportunities in a person’s life in which they found themselves in the position to absolve someone. Why not take it?

  “It’s not your fault,” I said, and I smiled in a way that showed I meant it. “It’s crazy to think he would do that just because you told him to. Not that you’re crazy, I mean. It’s just… can’t you see that’s absurd?”

  She sniffed, and then broke into tears of a different sort. And I knew they were tears of gratitude.

  Half an hour later, as I stepped out of her air conditioned house and onto the sidewalk, Ana’s eyes were still red and puffy.

  “It really was good to meet you, Caitlyn,” she said.

  “Call me Lynn,” I told her. “All my friends do.”

  “Okay, Lynn.” She gave me a hug, and I started down the sidewalk toward Ashley’s enormous waiting truck.

  “One more thing, Lynn,” Ana said.

  I turned and saw that she had a very peculiar expression on her face.

  When she spoke again, her words were halting and carefully chosen. “If you don’t know what I mean when I say this, then that’s all for the better, and I won’t explain. If you do understand, then I earnestly hope you’ll take my advice. Stay away from the Union.”

  The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and in a flash I remembered the very same words spray painted next to a flaming skull deep in the bowels of the abandoned Huey P. Long building.

  Ana turned and went inside. The door clicked shut with solid finality.

  I stood on the sidewalk, still staring and covered with goose bumps.

  Chapter 6

  When I got back into Ashley’s truck, she was playing her cell phone and the air conditioning was making her springy blonde hair dance. “So, how’d it go?” she asked.

  “Good,” I said numbly. “Will you take me to campus?”

  “Campus? But it’s Saturday.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just need to go there.”

  Ashley, being a good friend, read in my voice that she didn’t need to know any more. She dropped me off near the parade grounds after making sure that I was okay, and she told me to call her if I needed a ride, adding, “I don’t judge, even if you get in my car smelling like another guy’s cologne.”

  In another moment of paranoia, I thought she knew, but then I realized she was just injecting her usual innuendo to try and cheer me up. I forced a smile. “You just wish you had an excuse to get Jeff for yourself.”

  She rolled her eyes. “We already both know you have an awesome boyfriend, okay? No need to gloat.”

  I shouldn’t have brought up Jeff. The iron in my stomach doubled.

  “I’ll catch a bus later,” I said. “See you back at the apartment.”

  “Later, chica,” she said.

  And then I was alone on LSU’s campus. I didn’t catch a bus later. I caught one right then. And I didn’t go back to our apartment.

  Forty minutes later, I stood on another front porch. But this was no ramshackle blue house with a flaking old door. This was a borderline-mansion with bright, polished glass and ivory pillars. I rang the doorbell, and Dr. Giacomo answered.

  “Lynn. Well, this is a pleasant surprise,” he said in a voice like marble. “Come in out of this heat.”

  I obeyed, taking off my shoes as I entered, as was the custom of his house.

  Giacomo didn’t have a wife. Though much of him was still a mystery to me, I’d worked out that much. No wife, no family—or if so, then divorced and separated and somewhere far away. No, I was the only cheater in this relationship.

  He led me to a living room with a white leather couch and an enormous plasma screen television. Books lined the walls, and a brightly colored rug splattered the floor like modern art. Unlike the more traditional opulence of Giacomo’s office, his home was a testament to the conveniences of modern living.

  I’d come to know him as a man who appreciated aesthetics. Of course his office would be the most exaggerated, lush caricature of what a professor’s office should look like. The decoration of the room was almost an art project for Giacomo: the achievement of a precise aesthetic. His home, then, boasted comfort, vibrancy, and recreation. Gone was the chalky, whiskey smell and cigar-smoke haze. Replacing it was the perennial aroma of freshly baked cookies and the sly, piney trace of cannabis. Classical music played faintly from somewhere.

  “Make yourself at home,” he said. “Do you want anything to drink?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “What’s your poison?”

  “Whatever yours is,” I said, and Giacomo returned with two open bottles of Guinness Extra Stout. The open mouths of the bottles smoked lightly.

  He handed me one of the beers and sat down on the couch next to me. “So, what brings you to my neck of the woods?”

  As usual, I couldn’t look him in the eyes as I talked. They were just too intense, and I got distracted. So I sipped my beer and told my story to the carpet.

  When I finished, he put an arm around my shoulders. “I don’t think Ana could have been responsible,” he said.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think she is at all. I really don’t.”

  “I don’t know what motivated Caleb to his action,” Giacomo said carefully, “but he was a smart boy. I don’t think the drunken anger of a girl would have affected him.”

  “Me either.” I looked up to him. “Sorry to spill all of this on you,” I said. “Something she told me just… I don’t know. It shook me. I know you and I aren’t very… talky.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  I blushed and looked away. “I just needed someone to talk to.”

  “Our relationship need not be one dimensional,” Giacomo said, putting a comforting hand on my knee. “If you want to talk, I’m here for you.”

  That hand kindled a flame.

  I looked back up to his eyes, suddenly hungry for him. “I don’t want to talk,” I said. I placed my hand on his leg as well, but instead of the knee, started much higher up on his inner thigh. I ran my fingertips up to the hard bulge I knew I’d find there. When I unzipped his pants and fished him out, he was large as a roll of cookie dough in my hand.

  I led Giacomo up to his bedroom by his cock. I needed no direction. We spent the rest of the evening indulging in each other over and over.

  At some point, Giacomo told me to touch myself. With only the slightest hesitation, I obliged, masturbating as he watched. What began as awkward exposure soon turned to raw lust. I was breathing heavily and building to orgasm by the time Giacomo reached out and cupped my breast. As I rubbed my clitoris, he plunged one large finger deep inside me, and I moaned. I realized Giacomo was stroking himself as well. When I came, my body convulsed in wave after wave of unadulterated pleasure. Giacomo squeezed my nipple in a way that turned pain into joy.

  “Where should I come?” Giacomo asked, still stroking his member.

  From where I lay on the bed, I watched with strange fascination. He hovered over me, stroking up and down.

  “On me,” I said, breathlessly. “All over me.”

  No one had ever come on me before. And I didn’t know why I wanted it now, but it seemed like the most erotic thing in the w
orld. I knew when I said those words, I’d brought him to the very edge, and there was no holding it back any longer for him.

  My body, shivering and glistening with the sweat of good sex lay beneath him like a fertile plain as he straddled me, and then he came, grunting with the explosive force of a bear.

  Long, ropey jets burst from his cock and landed across me like warm lace, draping over the curves of my breasts, the arch of my ribs, the divot of my navel.

  And I rubbed his essence into my skin like lotion.

  “How is it,” Giacomo asked, pushing his hair back and lying down next to me, “that you always seem to know exactly what I want?”

  “We’re just in sync,” I told him. I was just as breathless as him.

  “Have you ever done that before?” he asked.

  “Have someone come on me? No.”

  “No,” he said. “Pleasure yourself in front of a man.”

  I shook my head.

  “What did you think of it?” he asked.

  “Strange, at first,” I confessed. “But exciting.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you like watching me do it too?”

  “Yes.”

  He chuckled lightly. “We are a good union, you and I.”

  It was true. Sexually, I’d never had a lover equal to Giacomo. I also knew that I was mostly a toy to him. Mostly. It wasn’t as if he might as well be masturbating without me. And when he looked at me—especially during—I saw something in his eyes close to admiration.

  I thought about this for a bit as my heartbeat evened.

  Perhaps I’d read this relationship all wrong. Perhaps Giacomo didn’t see me as a toy at all. Maybe he was a kind of sexual mentor. I did know that I felt a burn of new confidence from having masturbated in front of him. Had he led me to some better version of myself? Was this teacher-student dynamic still intact?

  “Pleasure yourself,” I heard myself mutter.

  “What’s that?” Giacomo asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, realizing I hadn’t meant to speak aloud.

  The innocuous—if erotic—phrase had led me to make a strange connection.