You Between the Lines

by Katie Naymon

I love reading, I swear. But I’ve never been able to sink my teeth into these lauded literary classics—the ones written by men, the ones set in wartime, with stream of consciousness as their stylistic mode of choice, the poverty and depression of men as their focus.

That’s the problem with me. I constantly read the room and cater my movements, words, thoughts, which-comma-goes-where to other people.

How awkward it is to have a body.

“I’m interested in the factors that created you and what shaped that actual first moment before you were taught the tricks to disguise and change yourself. As we all learn to do.”

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.

Bridget is right. I constantly accommodate, but then I secretly resent other people for not being as accommodating.

We’ll have our own conversations that span weeks at a time, lazy and slow in their own way.

“Good.” The word bursts into confetti somewhere deep in my chest.

Brown eyes, jut of collarbone peeking out from my striped boatneck. Full curve of hip in black corduroy pants. Eyelashes thick with mascara. I run my hand through my hair, my bangs slightly limp after a long day. I scan my body, looking for clues, something to romanticize.

The prose in this book is just chefs kiss

“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.”

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.

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.

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

What jolts me out of her voice is Will’s hand next to me, the side of his pinkie pressing into mine. I know then and there that everything has been intentional. He doesn’t look over at me, or at our hands, just stares at Erica as if mesmerized. I, too, don’t look up, but I exert the smallest bit of pressure to his hand and then, as if he’s teetering on some edge and needs to hold me still lest I push him off it, his pinkie is on top of mine, covering half of my nail, pressing my finger down harder into my thigh.

The tension

“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.”

“I’m exhausted by this, by myself. I feel like I have no choice but to give in.” He pauses and takes a deep breath. “Leigh, I can hardly remember a time I wasn’t in love with you.”

You have always been the brightest thing in the room and I have never not wanted to be in your spotlight.”

He groans in free verse, my own climax sharp like an end-stopped line.