essay excerpt: on a gray January afternoon
an unpublished scene
Reunited after break, the dean and I began meeting with a sound engineer to record our music at the campus’ hilltop studio. I often fell into a perfectionistic spiral when laying down vocals, my nerves wrapping their claws around my throat, but sometimes I got a note just right and felt it deep in my chest. I would watch her watch me, her gaze electrifying every part of me that ached for validation.
On a gray January afternoon, we sat outside during a recording break, my legs dangling over a stone ledge as she smoked a cigarette. I looked at the campus below us. Graduation was six months away, but I hadn’t made any plans yet; I did not want to think about a future without her.
“I’ll miss this so much,” I said.
In the near distance, tower bells announced the arrival of evening. She put out her cigarette and we sat in silence, our bodies enveloped in a cloud of quiet sadness. Something felt big and unnamable. But then she spoke.
“I love you.”
The energy between us shifted, like a dam bursting, and my chest began to pound with nervous anticipation. I reached for her hand, feeling suddenly responsible.
“I love you, too,” I responded, lightly.
She lowered her voice.
“No, I love you.”
I didn’t know what to say so I squeezed her hand, not letting go. Love. No one had ever confessed to loving me before and in all my yearning to be special to her, I hadn’t imagined this. What happens now? I wondered, in a trance. I felt an overwhelming need to hold her or be held.
The sound engineer appeared from around a corner, startling us apart. Deep in his beer, he didn’t notice our flushed faces as we returned inside to finish the session, a new magnetic force demanding we reach for each other. We made plans to meet later that night.
She picked me up from an off-campus party in her husband’s car to avoid recognition. I knew something important was about to happen—but what, I didn’t know. I was drunk, dizzy. We drove in silence to her empty office building, where the hallway fluorescents clicked on as we walked past the academic advising rooms and flyers about freshman seminars. She unlocked her corner office and closed the door behind us and as I stretched out on her loveseat in my tight black dress she knelt on the floor next to me so her face was level with mine and as I fingered the buttons of her soft white shirt she said, almost whispering, You’ll have to kiss me first. So I did.
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