“Do you mind if I put it on speaker?” I ask Thalia, giving Charlie a dirty look.
She and Daniel, her now-husband, have been best friends since I was about eight years old, so she’s the closest thing I’ve got to an older sister. Right now, that means she’s been hassling me about my new girlfriend nonstop, along with the rest of my family.
Everyone knows that she exists and her name is Thalia.
Only a select few — Levi and Seth, and probably June since she’s engaged to Levi — know she was my student, or even that she’s an undergrad.
“Go for it,” Thalia says, and I pull my phone away from my face.
“Behave yourself,” I mutter to Charlie, before I hit the button.
“Hiiiiiii!” she says, grinning like a maniac. “He seriously won’t shut up about you. Oh, now he’s giving me a look like I wasn’t supposed to say that so he could play it cool?”
On the other end, Thalia is just laughing.
“Anyway, how was your Christmas? If you celebrate. If not, how was your Friday?”
“It was nice,” Thalia starts. “It was just my family —”
“Is that the new girlfriend?” Eli asks, suddenly darkening the kitchen door. “How come Charlie gets to talk to her first?”
“Because I found her first,” Charlie says with a mouthful of cookie, spraying a few crumbs on Thomas’s head, then brushing them off. He doesn’t move.
“Hi! Who’s that?” asks Thalia, who sounds like she’s struggling to keep up.
“Pick a name, it doesn’t matter,” I say. “Now that there’s two people here it’s gonna be like —”
“I heard we were taking to the girlfriend?” Seth asks from the doorway.
“I’m sorry,” I tell Thalia, one second before Eli grabs the phone from my hand, then spins and makes off with it.
“Hey!” I shout, but he’s gone.
I’ve tried to get things back from my brothers before. It’s never worked.
“Okay, I’m just gonna introduce you around to everyone,” he says. “I’m Eli, Caleb’s probably said a lot of really good stuff about me...”
I sigh, and Charlie pats my arm.
“Have another cookie,” she says, grabbing one for herself. “And look at the bright side: if she’s still answering your calls tomorrow, it must be true love.”* * *Winter break is three weeks long.
I last one and a half.
The first I’m in Sprucevale, with my family, before Christmas and after Christmas. I talk to Thalia every day and we text constantly, plus hanging out with my brothers and Rusty and Thomas more than keeps me occupied.
The next week, I’m back in Marysburg. I keep myself busy: working on papers for submission, making lesson plans, going out with friends, but it’s not quite the same. There’s nothing like the madness of Christmas and there’s particularly nothing like the madness of my family at Christmas, and that’s when it settles in that I miss Thalia.
It also settles in that there’s no earthly reason for me not to see her. I’ve got a car. My job becomes very freeform during winter break.
And Virginia Beach, which is right next to Norfolk, has lots of very nice hotels with great off-season rates, so I book two nights at one of them and Thalia tells her parents she’s visiting a friend.
It’s glorious. It’s glorious to be with her again, naked and gasping on the white hotel sheets while I’ve got my face buried between her legs, but it’s glorious that no one here knows who we are.
We go out for every meal, just because we like being together in public. She takes me to the Back Bay Wildlife Refuge for the day, even though it’s cold and windy because it’s the beach in January, and we hike around holding hands because we’re not going to get caught.
Then we go back to the hotel, and we have more sex. Afterwards, still tangled in the sheets, I show her the latest emails I’ve gotten from [email protected] that call me a predatory husk of a man and a shameless power-loving degenerate and an unscrupulous dirtbag, and Thalia tells me that the sender is a shallow-brained moron who doesn’t know their genitals from a bowl of cereal. Then she calls me an unscrupulous dirtbag, laughing.
Everything feels better when she’s around. We talk about who the sender is but don’t get anywhere — I’m nearly certain it’s not Seth or Levi, she’s pretty positive it’s not Bastien. She mentions that her roommates have also figured it out, but she’s adamant that they’d take their problems up with her, not send me weird emails.
That night we walk the boardwalk hand-in-hand and look out at the moon over the ocean and lights of the far-away ships, and for a moment I imagine that they’re all sea monsters, raising their heads above the water for a few moments to get a taste of the salty air before diving back for the deep.