You Between the Lines

by Katie Naymon

It was at this year’s homecoming dance, when my best friend Gen (who snagged the second junior spot in this class) tried to orchestrate a meet-cute by steering me in his direction. I bumped into him mid “Mr. Brightside” and spilled Sprite on us both. He apologized even though it was definitely my—well, Gen’s—fault. He couldn’t even look me in the eye as my hot-pink dress clung to my body, soda-wet and sticky.

This interaction will haunt me for the rest of this book.

his eyes were a choppy mosaic, twinkling with shards of copper, sage, and seafoam.

His voice carries all the gravitas of a sixty-four-year-old novelist and National Book Award winner—deep, rich, buttery. The croissant of voices.

As if from far away, I hear his voice—deep, like honey, trickling over my skin.

mmmmm

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.

When he moves his hand off my back at the base of the stairs, I grab his hand before I can convince myself not to. He’s quiet for a second. His thumb trails a path across my knuckles, and a low hum buzzes under my skin. Then he steps away from me, dropping my hand, and opens the door to his and Morris’s room. “Good night, Leigh.”

He’s wearing black high-top Converses, muted green chinos, and a cream sweater. His Cleveland Museum of Art tote bag is by my feet. His car is a manual, which is something that should not be as hot as it is.

He rolls up the sleeves of his sweater, exposing the tops of his forearms with thick veins and a smattering of light brown hair, and I’m beginning to truly understand the meaning of You played yourself.

“Come here. I won’t let you fall. Just trust me.”

it’s too risky to get distracted. Forearms and tugs-on-sweaters be damned.

But in my haze, I feel like somehow this is where we were both meant to be, what we were both meant to do. Some inevitable conclusion. I want to memorize five senses’ worth of data to inject into every poem I write for the rest of my life.

yes yes yes

All he knows of me is what we’ve both watched from afar over the course of high school, what he read between the lines of my writing from class. The intimacy he’s gleaned from that. And somehow, that’s so, so much.

“Okay, fine, I know it. And I want you to know that I’m interested in… this. Whatever it could be. Will, I like you. I’ve liked you. For basically all of high school. I mean honestly, I’ve thought about you for years even when I’ve dated other people. I still have all your comments from workshop, even the harsh ones. That’s weird, isn’t it? I don’t know, it’s just your writing and how you talk and your face. How you smell and stand. I like all of it. A lot. And I always have.” The words fall out before I can edit them.

He twists his fingers in the hem of my sweater—his sweater. “I like this on you,” he says as he pulls away and begins moving his mouth over my neck, slow and purposeful.

It’s a push and a pull, a call and a response. It’s a rhymed couplet, this poem we’re writing.

He’s wearing black pants and a white billowy shirt and he looks like a nineteenth-century poet, which is to say, he looks extremely attractive.

“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.”

smile. “Nothing about you is obvious.” He walks a few feet to my left and sits down on Penelope’s bed, a queen with messy blue linen bedding. “Though I like to think I can read you better than most.”

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.

While everyone else asks for a performance, some heightened version of what I’m offering, Will just asks me to be more myself.

I want to close my eyes so badly—to lose myself in the feeling—but I want to look at him, too. I like the way his shoulders fan out beyond mine, the contrast of his hard chest against my softness, his arms lightly ridged with muscle, the way he looks at me like I belong to him.

“And look at you,” he whispers into my ear, his head in the crook of my neck, staring at me in the mirror. “How can I get this out of my system? I want to do everything with you.”

Omg

When I feel pressure building, I close my eyes, lost in his smell and the sound of his deep breathing, in the horrific, decadent ache of feeling seen. Of feeling complete. “Look at me,” he says, because he wants to be seen, too. I open my eyes and his gaze sears through me like a bolt of electricity. It sends me over the edge and I explode into a million pieces, each one a different shard of the Leighs I am, and the Leighs I could be.

That’s not going to be the only time.

“The lavender has always driven me crazy.”

“It’s like…” He looks up, dead in my eyes. “… watching you lose control and knowing it’s all because of me.”

I can’t think. I am just words on a page and he’s the poet, arranging me how he wants, using alliteration, rhyme, white space. Every moan a couplet, every breath a sonnet.

And even when he’s done, he winds me up one more time. I give it to him. Just like he said I could.

“There’s nothing to see. It’s just the inside of my brain. I’m blabbering on the page.” “The inside of your brain is not nothing.”

So I scan just the first line. But as with every Will poem, you can’t just read one line. He grips you by the throat and refuses to let go.

The perfect mix of style and substance.

shared, is that I am irrevocably in love with you.

Not a bella swan quote !!!

“I want… I want you to put my wrists above my head and keep them there.” There’s a glint in his eye. He does what I ask, his large hand just-tight-enough over mine. “You’re so pretty like this,”

He nods, then tightens his hand around my wrists

The wrists are important...all roads lead to that poem

So I tell him. I write him an entire poem and I read it into his ear, each word hot and damp like his hand gripping my thigh. He groans in free verse, my own climax sharp like an end-stopped line.

“Somehow you knew who I was before I did.”