Read Online Loner by Teddy Wayne - Free Book Online Page B

then blow my entire semester’s petty cash on a high-thread-count upgrade). Sara turned on a white-noise machine. “You mind?” she asked. “It’s kind of loud, but I need it to fall asleep.”
    We lay on our backs on the narrow mattress, our shoulders but nothing else touching, her body an environmentally friendly space heater. The white-noise machine was, indeed, loud; I would never hear anything in your room over it. As it thrummed, our stomachs produced gurgly video game sounds. Neither of us was making a move, two disoriented and jet-lagged travelers stepping off a plane in a foreign country, unsure if we had to go first to customs or the baggage claim.
    Then, imagining the warmth next to me was radiating from you, I grew hard and found myself, almost without any conscious self-­direction, turning to kiss Sara. We continued for several minutes in an uncomfortable, torqued position until I rotated on top of her, hoping you’d come in, inconsiderately flip the switch, and view me in a newly sexual light.
    I reached for the hem of her shirt. (Oh, Ohio’s minimum-wagemovement, if only you knew how your lofty ideals would someday be corrupted.) We were in college, far from watchful parents. It might actually happen. I could reply to Daniel Hallman’s stupid message.
    Her fingers interlaced with mine with a cheerful squeeze, as if hand-holding were what I was really after. I brought my other hand down and was likewise rejected. Now all four were clasped as I bodysurfed on top of her with our legs braided together, a two-headed octopus in coitus interceptus.
    I took the double hint and lifted our tentacles out of harm’s way. Without any demarcating biological event, it was up to one of us to call a ceasefire. I let my kissing subside and parallel parked myself on the wall side of the bed. We spoke only about practical matters: if I wanted water, what time to set the alarm on her phone.
    â€œIs your roommate going to wake us up?” I asked.
    â€œNo,” Sara said. “If she comes home, she knows not to turn on the lights anymore.”
    â€œ If she comes home? Where would she be?”
    â€œYou do the math,” she said.
    We spooned amateurishly, my body acclimating to the alien sensation of sustained contact with someone else’s, my forearm losing circulation under her upper back, my other arm unsure what to do with itself, until I retracted both and flipped over. Sara’s breathing slowed to sleeping pace as I listened for any sound of the door opening, pondering your whereabouts, sorting through the male regulars at your Annenberg table: the one with landscaped stubble (Andy Tweedy), the black guy who favored scarves (Christopher Banks), the rumored Italian baron (Marco Lazzarini).
    I stayed awake until dawn pressed through the window shade, and woke up when Sara’s phone tinkled at eight and she took a birth control pill. “To regulate my period,” she explained awkwardly. No signs of your wee-hours entrance, if there’d been one.
    A few nights later, after a documentary about migrant laborers in the Southwest, we went back to her room again. Sara talked about how she wanted to see more documentaries, how easy it was to get into an academic bubble here and forget how unjust the world was.
    â€œWell,” I said, “in the long run we’re all dead.”
    She squinted at me. “So it’s all right if there are inequalities now, because eventually we’re all dead anyway?”
    I smoothed out her comforter with my hand.
    â€œThat’s a pretty cynical sentiment,” she said. “There are a lot of people whose lives are almost exclusively hardship. Just because we all die at the end doesn’t make it even.”
    â€œI was only trying to lighten the mood,” I said.
    â€œI know.” She reached for her copy of Anti-Imperialist Marxism in Latin America and handed it to me. “But check this out when you