Drinker of Ink

by Shannon Castleton

I leaned down to extract a pen from my backpack, because honestly, I think a spell is attached to his eyes—if you look for too long, you’ll start unbuttoning things in slow motion.

As Peter let go, I touched my shirt where his arm had been. For a split-second he’d held me, and it felt exactly how I’d imagined it would: like stepping into a cottage warmed by a fire as lightning flashed out the windows.

If you have questions and/or concerns, I would prefer you write them down, as I am convinced a certain spell was cast upon your eyes at birth, and I do not trust myself to keep a coherent thought in my head, beyond Should we kiss?, as they look at me.

So much happens to and inside every human being on this planet—it’s as if we are all small infinite worlds. And how do we connect? How do we come to see each other’s constellations?

“A mini Sophia Loren, spouting humble insights that anyone can see light our hot graduate instructor’s brain on fire.”

Just please God, don’t let him forget that we’ve shared a sweatshirt.

Omg the angst is too relatable

He’s 26? I was thinking. So when he turns 56, I’ll be 50? We’re practically Irish twins.

I bounced my backpack up on my shoulders again in a way that signaled I intended to go, but as I pulled my fingers from one backpack strap to wave a nonchalant goodbye, he touched the tip of one of his hiking boots to the toe of one of my Keds. I froze, staring at our shoes in a half-turned-away, half-wishing-I-could-rest-in-his arms position. “Say it,” he whispered.

“My name,” Peter whispered. A warmth filled my chest like tea poured into a cup. I let go a breath.

“I say your name every day, Vivienne”—he quick-shook his head, taking one step toward me—“I mean every other day. I’m sure you can say my name one time in the library.” He nudged my shoe again. Twice. He had touched my shoe twice. “I’m defending my dissertation next month and visiting my family in Ljubljana for the summer, and who knows where I’ll go after that. You don’t have much time to call me by my name.”

“Yes. I think we need to do something. I mean, I don’t think A.J. is dangerous. He said he told you that he takes pictures of you, but then he swore on his vintage Leica that he doesn’t. But I’d still prefer for him not to breathe the same air as you.”

I wanted to see something of yours in a space that was mine, and to be honest, it looked quite at home there.

(And just incidentally, what would be so terrifying about being my lover? Feel free to not read that hypothetically.)

p.s. I’m sorry about my eyes. I don’t know that they’ve ever affected anyone in quite the way you describe. I’d close them or look away if I could live with the thought of not seeing you.

He was tugging my head gently away from him—for breathing room, I thought, for a moment of space—until he began leaning in, and in the slowest route a mouth has ever traveled, he pressed his lips to the shadowed skin beneath my earlobe again. His breath hitched on an inhale. “I want you to be my koala.”

Beneath the lamplight at my dorm entrance, he brushed his lips over my ear. “Vivienne, you’re better than poetry.”

“But I told her last Saturday that I’d already lost my heart to a poet who never looked at me for longer than three seconds.”

“This is a life event, Vivienne.”

“That’s right! I wanted to take you to my house for coffee that day. I wanted to injure whomever had hurt you.”

“I think,” he tried again. “I mean, I haven’t decided which offer. But I think I might like”—his warm hand moved to my neck—“I might like . . . a life in New York.”

“How did you get me talking like this?” The words I ended up saying came by themselves, without need for arrangement or command from my brain. They just were—as any true thing is: sunlight, heartbeat, crocus in April. I said, “I want to know everything.” “It’s so easy for me to tell you.” His hand combed the ends of my hair. “Have I even said that you’re beautiful?”

His hand lifted to cradle my head. “You’re beautiful the way birds are beautiful—the way they startle you from gray and inertia. The way each bird’s song is completely its own. And your words—I’ve never—”

If I had allowed him to finish his sentence, my heart would have burst, and I don’t mean figuratively. The organ—it would have exploded.

Peter’s smile crept across his face as though someone were slowly drawing it there with a pencil. “You’re humble, Vivienne. I’ll give you that. But someday, I’ll make you listen to me describe how I see you. You can shake your...

“You know you’ll get into Philbrick. You sent samples of your poems and essays?” “Yes.” I pressed my ear to his heart. “They’ll pay you to transfer.”

“I didn’t get you anything to remember me by,” I said. “Thank goodness you’re unforgettable then.”

“That one’s for the first time I saw you.” Peter tried to tuck a stray wisp of hair behind my ear. “I hoped like hell that you’d be a good writer, because every time I looked at you, I’d see you in my arms.”

“Please.” He reached for my face, but I lurched away. My heart felt as though it had turned to sharp glass. Every time I breathed in, it shattered.

“I just need—” I turned to Adèle. What did I need? With my free hand, I rubbed at my eyes. “—that . . . woman.” As I write now, I believe that one sentence might embody all the need of the last five years of my life.

There was no use pretending that I hadn’t noticed the ring. Or that I didn’t care, even after living almost halfway around the world from her. She was wearing a symbol of loyalty and affection for a man who, as sure as every bullet that had ever missed my heart or my head, wasn’t me.

Are you married? God knows it’s dramatic, but I envisioned the question mark of that sentence dangling over my head upside-down like a noose. I wanted her to save me. I wanted her to be the instructor this time, to teach me the blurry way back to her.

“I bought a plane ticket to New York the day after you discovered I planned to teach in Ljubljana. I was going to fly to you that weekend and stay until we had made plans for a future that allowed us to be with our families for the time that they most needed us.”

BRB CRYING

Are you with someone else now? And if the answer were no, could we swing our tired hands together as we made our way home? To her home in a literal sense, but also to the home I feel when we are together—the home she has written about in her journal. The home I can’t un-imagine us making.

I entered Vivienne’s bakery at 4:45 p.m., not wishing to rush her, but physically incapable of waiting another fifteen minutes outside the sun-strength beam of her presence.