Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [67]
“No.”
And then there was an awkward pause. A pause in which I had time to observe various Columbia College Conservative Club flyers (Go up 116th and Broadway . . . and turn right), a “Don't Mess with Texas” poster, and a framed 8 × 10 of his parents shaking hands with Bush 43 and the First Lady . . .
“Did you say something?” he asked.
“No, I just gagged.”
“What happened between us was no big deal,” he said. “Unless it was a big deal for you.” Then he broke out one of his twisted smiles.
“Wipe that look off your face!”
“What look?”
“That . . . presidential look!”
“Four. More. Years,” he replied, just to piss me off.
“Oh yes,” I said. “Four more years of war, unemployment, environmental destruction, soaring deficits, attacks on civil liberties . . .”
“You've been brainwashed by the liberal media.”
“ARRRRRGH! I didn't come here to debate politics with you!”
“That's the problem with you Democrats. You refuse to reach across the aisle in the spirit of bipartisan cooperation.”
My head was about to launch off my neck and blast into outer space. 10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . I counted down slowly. 7 . . . 6 . . . 5 . . . I'd miss my head, you know, when it was orbiting the earth as a tiny, lip-glossed satellite. 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . .
Fortunately, William got back to business. “J, everything's cool with me if it's cool with you,” he said. “You'll be treated no differently than any of my other advisees. Is that what you want to hear?”
“Well, yes,” I said, relaxing.
“This is my job, J,” he said. “I take my responsibilities very seriously.”
“Okay.”
“Besides,” he said. “It's not like we slept together.”
“Right!” I said, making my way to the door.
“And we were both under the influence.”
“Exactly!”
“We weren't thinking properly,” he said.
“Not at all!”
“Do you really think I would've hit on you if I'd been sober?” he asked, shutting the door in my face.
1 . . .
BLASTOFF!
the seventh
Being romantically unfettered is such a swell thing. See, if I was still with Marcus, I wouldn't be able to entertain and enjoy guilt-free sexual fantasies about my hot grad-student partner in the Storytelling Project. If I was with Marcus, such an act would feel like a betrayal. But I can daydream without remorse because I am totally single. If only the same could be said for my hot grad-student partner. He's married. With three kids, all five and under. Yikes.
But I'm not the other woman in my fantasies. I've conveniently made them adultery-free by getting rid of the wife and kids. I don't kill her off, of course, because any dead wife takes on a mythical perfection, and that is especially true of mommies smote down in the prime of youth. Perfection is something that I simply can't live up to, even in my own sexual fantasies.
No, in the sexual fantasies I've been having about my hot grad-student partner (whose name, Bastian, I will now use if only to stop objectifying him with pornographic anonymity), his wife and kids are disposed of via a recent divorce, one sought by Bastian because his wife has become a mirthless harpy, a sexless shrew, since the babies came along. She gets full custody of the whole brood and moves to a remote village in Antarctica, befitting her chilly nature. And he, whose only relations have been of the one-handed variety, is primed and ready for the fresh-faced coed who isn't all slunky from childbirth . . .
“So where should we go at it?” asked Bastian.
“Anywhere you want me,” I murmured, dreamily.
“Pardon?”
“Anywhere,” I said.
“Why don't we start in a familiar place, so we are not nervous our first time?”
I have to remind myself that this is real, and not part of the daydream. He's talking about the Storytelling Project. Not sex.
“Yes, nonthreatening environs,” I said, like a moron, bringing me back to reality.
“Está bien.”
Oh, did I mention that he's Spanish, as in from Spain, and that he occasionally slips into his native tongue? (Add your own sexual innuendo here. It's just too easy for me. Really.) He's from Madrid but has