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That’s the problem with me. I constantly read the room and cater my movements, words, thoughts, which-comma-goes-where to other people.
Will Langford writes poetry in faultless cursive in his Moleskine notebook in a Middlebury crew neck and khakis. Absolute catnip for girls like me.
“I’m Leigh, by the way.” He nodded. “I know. I’m, uh, Will.” A wildfire erupted in my stomach. “I know.”
He’s tall and broad-shouldered and is wearing a loose button-down shirt with rolled-up chinos, loafers with no socks. His hair is wavy and light brown, a lock hanging in front of his forehead.
He nods. “Sounds productive.” Then adds, in a low voice, “You look good, Leigh.” He looks better, but I don’t tell him that. Instead, I do something even more self-indulgent, something I absolutely know I’d never do if I were sober. “So, you bring your girlfriend to move here with you?”
You can take the girl out of high school, but you can’t take the fractured remnants of an obsessive crush out of the girl.
“Tell us, William, could Leigh pick him up in a bar?” Athena asks. “I’m sure. Leigh could probably pick up anyone in a bar.”
he underlines the couplet “how his palm unfurls / like spilled ink on my hip bone.” I have no idea how to interpret the underline, but I spend way too long thinking about it.
“Maybe this is lame, but would you want to do the corn maze?” I ask, my face reddening slightly. He grins. “No self-respecting Midwesterner would turn down a corn maze.”
“‘In a Pittsburgh Parking Lot, I Break Down,’” I begin and a shiver rips through me. I say, you look really good tonight like it’s currency, and in your neon pink heart, the tip’s not included so I try my luck: You burn the whole way down like vodka- laced Sprite, like a high school crush, your strawberry hair, glowing in autumn leaves’ crunch. You’d read me Mary Oliver as if you were silk- caressing my jaw over candlelight and pancakes in a rusty kitchen, our cheeks February-flushed magenta. You’re jealous when I thread myself tight into slick-lipped girls, as if I didn’t drunk-drag you into
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“It’s like the shit women notice all the time. Women are into rolled-up sleeves and forearms and veins and eyebrows, and I feel like men are just, like… boobs. Y’all are much simpler,” says Kacey. “Your wrist / and I choke in lavender,” I recite part of his final couplet. “Your speaker hasn’t even touched the object of his desire, and yet he’s completely overwhelmed by, like, her fucking wrist.”
“Leigh.” I fold my arms, carefully distributing my weight on my feet equally. “I thought about it,” I say. “What?” “It’s not persona. And the speaker isn’t William, either. It’s Will.”
He takes half a step toward me and reaches for my wrist, gentle, feather-light. “Do you want it to be Will?” he murmurs.
“I think I wanted to prove to myself I could get someone like you. The hot, deep literary guy who made me feel hot and deep and worthwhile by association.”
“Who’s the poem for?”
“Who’s the poem about, then?” But Will either doesn’t hear my quiet words or chooses to ignore them because he looks spellbound. He leans his entire body in until his hips are against mine and my skin is on fire.
“Will,” I whisper. “Who’s the poem about?” His hand traces my collarbone, a finger slipping under the neckline of my dress. “Who do you think, Leigh?”
“Because you’re writing these, like, love poems about Katherine, but if your parents hadn’t walked in just now, I’m pretty sure we would have—” He rolls his eyes. “The poem is not about Katherine, Leigh, and you know it.” And you know it.
“Lucas is here for his weekly peep show.” Will frowns and starts taking off his sweater. “Take it.” He hands the sweater to me. “Maybe it’ll be fine.” Will presses it into my hands from across the table. “Take it,” he says, firm.
it’s warm and soft and smells like Will—cedar cologne, pencil shavings, some musky scent all his own.
Will is clearly eavesdropping because he interjects from the main table, “Leigh, you only have thirty minutes—your appointment’s coming in at six forty-five.” I know what he’s doing and something blooms in my stomach, the sweetness of his lie.
Under his focused, locking gaze, I go from Leigh the rejected to Leigh with the neon-pink heart and ashy-blond hair. The high school crush.
“I’m going to kiss you, is that okay?” he says, so quiet it’s almost a whisper. My body thrums under his gaze, almost shaking in restraint. “Yes.”
When I emerge, my lips re-glossed and ready, Will is leaning next to the door. “Creepy, do you always just follow me when I go to the bathroom?” I frown. “You look good.” I watch his eyes sweep over my body, lingering on my fishnet legs. “Your date looks good.”
“Do you remember that ‘Mr. Brightside’ was playing when I bumped into you and spilled your drink on you?” I shake my head. “Yes you do,”
“I was thinking of that moment just now, out there.” He puts his hands in his pockets. “You were wearing this pink dress and the soda left this giant mark.” He closes his eyes as if he’s trying to visualize it. “I remember thinking how good you looked wet.”
When my hips begin to buckle, he starts murmuring ridiculous things in my ear. How pretty I am like this, how he knows I need it, how crazy I drive him in workshop, how he can’t write a single poem where I don’t exist. In his stanzas, his lines, his words.
But two days ago, in the quiet of Penelope’s room, he murmured, I can’t write a single poem where you don’t exist.
Being Will’s enemy was hard. Being his friend, if you could call it that, was harder. But being his nothing is maybe worst of all.
“William Langford, as I live and breathe,” Gen exclaims, standing up. He casts me a quick look—the most intimately we’ve communicated in weeks—then allows her to hug him.
While everyone else asks for a performance, some heightened version of what I’m offering, Will just asks me to be more myself.
I insist on eye contact from the man who’s avoided me for the last two months but is now crowding me against his car.
“Who was that?” “My mother.” “Why wasn’t I allowed to hear?” He sighs. “I don’t want you to see me when I’m like… that.” “Like what?” He pauses and it suddenly doesn’t feel like there’s any air left in the car. “Cold.”
“You’re allowed to be happy,” I say coolly, without looking at him. “I’m sorry your dad wasn’t as generous with his feedback as he should have been, but just because he was famous or whatever doesn’t mean his opinion was the end-all be-all. You’re supposed to do this, Will. Instead, you’re looking for ways out. Of being a writer. Of other things, too, maybe.”
Before I can walk into the lobby, though, he rolls down the window. “You’re right,” he says. “But you’re looking for ways out, too.”
“You could have taken the bus.” His voice is even lower than usual. “You could’ve not left with me and Jerry,” I retort. “Yeah, well, you could have not climbed on top of me in Penelope’s bed on Halloween.” “And you could’ve not submitted that poem to workshop.”
“Okay, maybe we just get this out of our systems.” Will laughs, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Famous last words.” “No, listen, you’ve built this up in your head now for a decade. God knows why but you have.
“See, the reality has been so much better than my imagination that I really don’t see how I can get this out of my system. I’ve already tried for ten years.”
Instead I see a text from Will, sent an hour ago while I was still asleep. That’s not going to be the only time.
“Sleep well?” he asks in a low voice that’s just for me. I nod. “You?” He nods back and then runs his hand lightly over my knee. “You look nice,” he says, like it’s simple. Like we’ve been dating for years.
So that’s why I don’t tell him. Because as much as I want the fellowship and the validation that comes with it, I want Will, too.
He breathes in deeply and lets out a muffled sigh against me. “The lavender has always driven me crazy.” His other hand slinks under my shirt, tracing up my stomach. “You’ve had it in poems before.”
“I wasn’t sure if they were about me or not.” He coaxes my thighs onto the bed so I’m straddling him and pushes up my shirt so he can press his mouth to my bare stomach. “All of them are about you,” he breathes, trance-like.
I nuzzle into him, his arm looped around my shoulders, my head perched on his chest, listening to his steady breathing. “Leigh.” “Mhmm?” “We should’ve done this way earlier.”
“Great picks. Those are some of my favorites of yours,” Hazel says, and I internally roll my eyes. At least I think it’s internal—until Will captures my foot between his under the table and squeezes.
“Why would you do that? I thought you desperately wanted this.” He shakes his head. “I didn’t want to be something standing in your way. I wanted it, yes, but honestly, Leigh, I want you a million times more, and you deserve it more than me.”
“You say you don’t like pretentious, Leigh, but it’s not true. You went to Rowan and Tufts and now you’re in a fucking MFA program, and you’re only interested in guys that look like me, aren’t you?” He spits out the words, frustrated. “Maybe that’s why I started going by William after Middlebury. Maybe that’s why I changed my glasses. Maybe that’s why I signed up for this stupid program in the first place. You want pretentious. You wouldn’t be attracted to me otherwise.”
For what? You think I’d spend—I don’t know, ten years?—embarrassing myself in front of you, so desperate for you to like me, for you to maybe love me, only to throw it all away when it finally feels like it’s mutual?” Will closes his eyes, runs his hand through his hair. “I’m actually not sure anymore.”
“You’re both terrified to give in to this because you both ultimately think you’re not good enough for the other,” Gen huffs. “You think he’s going to reject you the way your parents rejected each other, and he thinks, Well, my own father whom I looked up to barely thought I was good at anything; this perfect girl won’t, either.
“For what it’s worth, I really liked your Taylor Swift and One Direction poems.” I stiffen. As a fiction writer, there’s no way Houston could’ve heard them, unless a poet showed him the early drafts I submitted to workshop. “What? When did you read them?” Houston’s eyebrows raise. “William read them. At the reading. We all thought you… knew.”
