WHEN KATIE HAD PUT her coat on, she’d had to drop my hand. Now that we were walking along the sidewalk together, I wanted it back. Your only real problem is confidence, my sister had said. What would a confident guy do in this situation?
As casually as I could, I reached over and took Katie’s smooth hand in mine. She laced her fingers in mine, just like that.
Huh. Thank you, Delia.
“Your game saved me tonight,” Katie said. “But what on earth inspired it?”
“Ah,” I said, as my thumb skimmed her palm. “During the summer, I work at a boys’ sleep-away camp in the White Mountains. And we’re always having to think up games to keep them from fighting with each other before dinnertime.”
“So you counseled me, like one of your nine-year-old campers?” She was smiling again, which I loved.
“Well, they’re twelve. But, yeah.” Maybe I was a sap, but tonight I felt truly connected to someone for the first time in a long while. Katie might not remember this night except as a blip on her way toward feeling better about the shitty thing that happened to her. But I wasn’t going to forget it any time soon.
“So, you know my tale of woe,” she said. “What’s your story? No girlfriend, I guess?”
“Not at the moment,” I said, because it sounded smoother than my dry spell is as vast as the Sahara. “I’ve dated two girls at Harkness. One my frosh year, and one last year. But, um…” I chuckled, because my tale of woe was more funny than sad. “Turns out I wasn’t a good match for either girl.”
“Bad breakups?” she guessed.
“Nope. I’m still friends with both of them, actually.”
“But you got your heart broken?”
“Not exactly. There wasn’t a whole lot of spark there in the first place. That was the problem. Both of my ex-girlfriends decided — right after dating me — that they would rather be with women.”
I watched Katie’s face as she took that in, waiting for the inevitable reaction. Her eyes flicked toward mine, and she bit her lip, trying to fight off her amusement. Those pretty eyes were sparkling now. “Go ahead,” I told her. “You can laugh. Everyone else does.”
“Oh, Andy,” she giggled. “Both of them?”
“Yep.”
Her giggle became an unruly belly laugh, and we had to stop on the sidewalk while she pulled herself together. She took a deep, gasping breath and wiped her eyes. “You know that had nothing to do with you, right?” she said eventually. “You didn’t turn those girls gay.”
“Yeah, I know it. But my friends are pretty amused anyway.”
“Both girls,” she tittered.
“Yep!”
We had almost arrived at Fresh Court, and the inevitable end of the night. This was the moment when I had to screw up my courage and ask her if we could go out again some time. But how to phrase it? Some guys were smooth and could ask for anything.
I was not one of them.
“Wait.” Katie tugged on my hand just as we were about to walk underneath the Fresh Court gate. “Are you going to copy the art history notes for me?”
I paused. Did she mean tonight? “Any time. My printer makes copies.”
“Can I get them now? The test is only three days away.”
“Well, sure.” I changed direction, steering us toward Beaumont. Katie’s fingers gave mine a squeeze, which I returned. That little exchange made me ridiculously, irrationally happy. I walked on, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world to have Katie Vickery stop by my room. But inside, I was dancing a jig.
Calm down, idiot, I chided myself. The girl is just very serious about her art history exam.
Even at the pace of someone walking on high heels, the trip from the gate to my entryway only took a few minutes. But that was plenty of time to fret about the condition of my room. For once I’d made the bed. Yes! I’d straightened it out, anyway, because I needed a surface on which to lay the evidence of my not-very-masculine fashion crisis.
Wait — I’d picked all those clothes up afterwards, right?
Uh, oh. This was going to be bad.
But it was too late to worry, because we were already arriving at my entryway stairs. Katie followed me up to the second floor, where I unlocked the door. Peering into the room, I gave a split second prayer that either things weren’t as bad as I remembered, or else elves had come by to tidy up while I was gone.
No such luck. The bed was covered with my clothes. Stepping into my room behind me, my date laughed. “Looks just like my room.”
“I was in kind of a hurry,” I said, lamely.
“See? That’s what I tell Scarlet when she complains about the mess. But apparently I’m always in a hurry.”
Embarrassed, I went over to the desk to find my History of Art notebook. Flipping through the pages, I said, “The review lecture took me six pages. But it will only take a couple of minutes to copy.”
“No rush,” she said, sitting down in my desk chair, which was mercifully clean.
No rush, my brain repeated, listening for clues.
Stop, I ordered myself. Don’t fuck this up. Give the girl her notes, walk her home, ask her out and count your blessings.
