Broken

His body didn’t flinch, but his eyes did. “Bad habits should be broken, though, right?”

He turned on his heel and stalked away. Panic flared in me. He was messing up the parts we’d been playing for the past two years. What did that mean? That he wouldn’t be back? Or just that he wouldn’t have another story?

“Joe!”

He didn’t turn, and I had too much pride to call after him again. I waited until he’d disappeared beneath the hanging greens and I was alone in the quiet before I sat on the bench again, my mutilated fists in my lap.

The flowers reproached me, but since they had no voice, I didn’t have to listen.

Chapter 02

I met Adam at a party my freshman year of college. Not at a frat house, this party was at “lit house,” a three-story Victorian monstrosity that had been home to half the English department, grads and undergrads, for as long as anyone could remember. It was its own frat house, in a way, though the graffiti on the basement walls featured quotes from Wilde, Shakespeare and Burns, and the limericks were clever in addition to being filthy. I was there by invitation of my roommate Donna, an English major.

I wasn’t much a fan of beer, but I carried a cup anyway. Donna had abandoned me to hook up with a cute guy from one of her classes. I moved among the crowd in search of the bathroom, listening to drunken discussions about iambic pentameter and poetic imagery along the way.

In the kitchen, looking for the toilet I’d been assured was “just through there,” I found Adam. He lounged on top of the kitchen counter, his incredibly long legs encased in faded blue corduroy pants, immense feet shod in the shabbiest brown oxfords I’d ever seen. He wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a famous punk rock band. He had an earring glittering in one lobe and long hair. He had a cigarette in one hand and a green short-neck bottle of Straub beer in the other.

“Bathroom?” When I nodded, he pointed to the small door just beyond the door to the cellar. “The door doesn’t lock. But I’ll watch out for you.”

He flashed me a grin of perfect white teeth, the upper front tooth slightly crooked. I was smitten. I used the bathroom and came out to find him in discourse about the writing of Anaïs Nin and how it compared to present-day erotica. I didn’t leave the kitchen for the rest of the night.

It was the first time I ever got drunk.

Later, stumbling home, Donna asked me who he was.

“I don’t know,” I said with beer-bleary lips. “But I’m going to marry him.”

Two weeks later, as I left my room to go to class, I saw him leaving a message on the door of Rachael Levine, my resident assistant. Rachael was fond of lecturing the rest of us on the dangers of drinking too much and having indiscriminate sex. She didn’t seem much good at applying the same lectures to herself, though, even at twenty-two still hitting the frat parties and making a point of leaving her ample supply of condoms out in her room for anyone to see. She also liked bragging about her “brilliant” boyfriend.

His name was Adam Danning.

He turned and flashed me the smile that had so intoxicated me. “Hey. I know you.”

Between one heartbeat and the next, my entire life changed.

“You’re Sadie.”

He knew my name.

How did I talk to him? Tall, handsome Adam. Brilliant lecturer on the differences between erotica and pornography. Drinker of Straub beer and smoker of Marlboro. Boyfriend of Rachael.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to talk much. He walked me to class and spoke about his work in the English department. About the University. About a movie he’d seen the night before. He made it easy to be silent, and I drank his words with more enthusiasm than I’d consumed the beer.

“Lit house party this weekend,” he said as we parted ways at the top of the hill, he to work and I to my introduction to psychology class. “Will you be there?”

Oh, yes. I’d be there.

Six weeks into my first semester, we were eating lunch together three or four times a week and walking to class more often than that. We talked about everything. Politics, movies, art, books, sex, drugs and rock and roll. He recited poetry to me. Adam introduced me to the power of words.

He never talked about Rachael, though she spoke of him, often, to anyone who’d listen and anyone who didn’t. Though Adam and I made no secret of the time we spent together, she didn’t seem to consider me a threat. She went out of her way, in fact, to take me under her wing. She gave me advice, unsolicited, and kept back rolls of toilet paper for me during rush week when the fraternity pledges were ordered to steal it from the dorms and all the stalls went empty. She treated me like an amusing, perhaps slightly retarded, younger sister. She didn’t view me as a threat, probably because I’d carried my “smart” façade along with me from high school. If I’d been “the pretty one,” she might have worried more.

Adam quickly became the mirror in which I saw reflected the woman I wanted to become. He didn’t tell me what to do or think, nothing as crass as that. He just made it easy to like what he liked. Adam led me to discover places in myself I’d never known. I didn’t know what I wanted to study; he was already beginning his graduate work in English literature. He was a devout agnostic and I still went to Sunday mass. He liked the Sex Pistols and I listened to Top 40 radio. There were five years between us, which at the time seemed like an eternity. He was more mature than the boys in my dorm. He had his own apartment, a car, a job. Adam thought and fought with passion burning bright. He was vibrant and alive in a way I envied, admired and coveted. He smoked. He drank. He rode a motorcycle fast on dark roads and had insane hobbies like bungee jumping.

He was brilliant and wild, my Lord Byron, whom Lady Caroline Lamb had called “mad, bad and dangerous to know.”

While playing the part of the brainiac, my sexual experience had been limited to one high school boyfriend who’d been a fan of receiving but not giving oral sex. I’d held onto my virginity more by circumstance than determination. Most of my friends had already taken the plunge into “womanhood,” few with stories compelling enough to make me want to consider it myself. I’d dated a few boys but never tumbled head over heels into the crazy tempestuousness of adolescence so many of my friends had undergone. It might have been better if I had. A sort of training. As it was, I’d never felt the depths of emotion that sent me soaring and plummeting within minutes of each other.

Until I met Adam.

I told nobody of this internal roller coaster. Not Donna, who’d become my best friend. Not my sister Katie, who, two years younger than I, had her high school dramas to keep her busy. I kept the secret of my love inside and turned it over and over constantly, seeking a way to either break it up or figure it out. Like a Rubik’s Cube, or one of those pictures with the hidden images not everyone can see. I’d never been so confused, despairing, desperate and so elated and infused with joy.

I was in love with Adam Danning, and I had no idea of how he felt about me.

I should’ve been ashamed of asking Rachael to give me some of the condoms she was so proud of displaying when I knew I meant to use them to seduce her boyfriend. But when you’re mad, bad and dangerously in love, many things seem excusable that normally wouldn’t.

My first semester had passed unbearably fast. Faced with a month of distance in which Adam would be spending his time with Rachael, I could wait no longer. The day before I was supposed to go home, I armed myself with brand-new panties and the handful of condoms, and I went to Adam’s apartment under the pretense of dropping off the gift I’d bought for him.

He opened the door, shirtless, hair wet from a shower. My throat clutched. Every nerve thrummed. My heart beat in my wrists, the hollow of my throat. Between my legs.

“You got me a present?” He seemed pleased and took the package, which I’d been careful to wrap in nondenominational paper. “Sadie, wow. What is it?”

“Open it.”

Standing in his living room, my knees shaking and my palms sweating, I felt I’d reached a precipice. I wasn’t one for leaping, but I was ready to jump, no parachute necessary and no bungee cord, either. I was going to leap, and I was going to fly.

Adam hefted the volume in both his hands, his grin all the thanks I needed. “e.e. cummings, the Complete Poems.”

“You don’t have it, do you?”

He shook his head and leafed through the pages with the reverence every true book lover has when touching a new volume for the first time.

I’d marked one page with a ribbon of scarlet silk, and as I watched his fingers turning page after page on the way to revealing it, I forgot to breathe. I waited, each moment like drops of honey dripped from a spoon, every one its own universe but tied to all the rest by the thin strands of time.

He stopped when he found the ribbon, and his eyes scanned the words on the page, top to bottom, before he looked up to me. I remembered to breathe, sipping oxygen like wine. My pulse pounded in my ears, similar to the rush and crush of waves.

“Any illimitable star,” he said, and I knew at once I hadn’t made a mistake.

Adam put the book aside. We stared at each other without words but needing none. He held out a hand, and I took it. Our fingers linked, his hand warm and mine cold.

He pulled me onto his lap, straddling him. His shoulders beneath my palms were warm, his skin smooth. My groin snugged up against his bare stomach, and his hands fit naturally on my hips, as if they’d always meant to be there.

We kissed for a long time, sitting that way. His hands moved up and down my body. His erection nudged my rear until we shifted and it pressed up between us. I explored the lines and curves of his body every place I could reach without leaving his mouth or his lap. I traced the lines of his ribs, the bulges of his biceps. I circled the twin round spots of his nipples and counted the bumps of his spine with my fingertips.

By the time we moved toward the bedroom, I was wetter than I’d ever been. My nipples were taut and aching. Sensation crackled along my nerves like Independence Day sparklers, and everything had gone slow and languid, petroleum jelly smeared on the camera lens. Soft and out of focus.

Adam pushed aside the covers on his rumpled bed to lay me down on sheets that smelled of him, his mouth never leaving mine. We stretched out, my legs opening to cradle him against my body. His lips left mine to find the sensitive places on my jaw and throat, then lower as he unbuttoned my blouse to reveal my breasts in my new black lace bra.

He unwrapped me like a package, with slow fingers and low murmurs of appreciation. His hands passed over my skin as he unhooked, unbuttoned, unzipped. When I was naked, he bent to kiss my mouth again and his body aligned with mine, a puzzle with only two pieces. Adam and me. Fitting.