Theodora
was both relieved and devastated to find I was only sharing a single class with Zachary.
Relieved because Zachary’s presence is a distraction—a complication—which becomes harder to ignore with each passing year. Devastated because I would miss our conversations, our debates, and, yes, our rivalry. Mostly, though, I would miss him.
Zachary is unlike anybody else at Spearcrest—unlike anybody else I’ve ever met. And being around him is like being in the presence of some sort of ineffable being. Being around him gives me the same breath-catching sense of consecration one might get from entering a magnificent cathedral or an ancient shrine.
As it turns out, I never need have worried at all.
Now that we are in the upper school, students have a lot more freedom, especially those of us with powerful parents. My friend group is the female equivalent of Zachary’s group—the hyperbolically titled Young Kings—and so instead of barely seeing each other, we end up seeing each other all the time.
Parties are a strange social obligation. They come with the crushing pressure of needing to look beautiful and having to socialise even when I’m not in the mood.
But now I know my own limits better, I can drink a little more, and alcohol gives me the fuel I need to make it through the long evenings in crowded places and dimly lit clubs. Alcohol gives me a reprieve from the pressure, the crushing loneliness, the numbness that makes me feel cold from the inside out.
Alcohol also allows the wall between Zachary and me to blur and transform, becoming glass-like—invisible but impenetrable. During those parties, with the burn of alcohol searing away our inhibitions, we meet each other carefully in the middle of the neutral no-man’s-land.
“How are you getting on with the metaphysical poetry essay?” Zachary launches in one night at the Cyprian.
I’m sitting in one of the booths, nursing a glass of wine and waiting for my head to stop spinning after dancing a little too hard with a perfectly wasted Kayana.
I look up at the sound of Zachary’s voice, which has become deeper and more melodic over time. He slides into the booth and sits down facing me, half collapsing into the dark leather of the curved seat.
He’s more than a little tipsy: his eyes have a glaze like sugar, his eyelids droop heavily, and his mouth stretches in a frank, open smile, displaying those dazzling white teeth. In a room full of men in expensive clothes, he still manages to appear over-dressed, but the top three buttons of his shirt are undone, and his neck and collarbones gleam with sweat.
I take a sip of my wine and drag my gaze back up to his face.
“I’ve not started yet,” I answer.
His eyes brighten.
“Oh? Struggling with it? The great Theodora Dorokhova, the patron saint of perfect grades, stumped?”
I am, but I could never admit it. It would only disappoint him if I did. “Never. I’ve just been putting it off.”
“How come? You’re the”—he waves his arm in a sweeping flourish—“mistress of poetry, are you not?”
I purse my mouth to hide a smile. “I’m not the mistress of poetry. More like poetry’s secret admirer. I just lurk and admire it from afar. But metaphysical poetry just isn’t setting my heart racing like I thought it would.”
“I didn’t know there was anything capable of setting your heart racing,” Zachary says, a wicked edge to his widening grin. “I thought your heart was a thing of marble, not of flesh and blood.”
This is Zachary’s way of drawing me out into unknown, dangerous territory. I ignore it and veer safely away.
“Thank you, Zachary.” I lift my glass and tip it towards him. “You always know how to compliment me.”
He laughs. “You’re exceedingly easy to compliment.”
“Is that so?” I can’t help but be tempted. “What makes me so easy to compliment, then?”
“Where to begin?” He speaks in a ponderous tone, his gaze bold and unashamed. “Your dazzling intelligence, of course. Your brilliant use of rhetorical devices in debates. Your exquisite beauty and the tantalising way your body looks in that green dress.”
I tilt my head and give him a look of warning. “Your flirting is in excellent form tonight. You shouldn’t waste it on me.”
I’m giving him an easy way out: all he needs to do now is deny he was flirting with me.
But Zachary doesn’t take the easy way out.
He never does.
“It’s not wasted at all,” he says instead, with that easy Blackwood confidence. “I could spend a fortune of flirtation on you, Theodora, and it would still not be a waste. I could lay treasures of compliments and tenderness at your feet like offerings to a cruel goddess, and you could ignore them all, and I would never once regret any of it.”
He’s definitely drunk—drunk and in a rather sensuous mood. There’s a glowering desire inside him that he’s not even bothering to hide.
It’s hard not to be tempted by the heat of him, especially when I feel so cold.
If only I was free to do so.
I shake my head and fix him with a prim look as I stir the conversation back to safer ground. “You are a natural poet, Zachary. Maybe that’s why you’re enjoying all that metaphysical poetry and I’m not.”
He leans forward, drawn in. “Why are you not enjoying it? What is it you dislike about it?”
“It’s a little… overwrought. Laboured.”
“And your soft boy Keats? Is his poetry not overwrought and laboured?”
“But his poetry comes from a place of genuine emotion and beliefs,” I explain. “Overwrought or not, it rings true. And it’s beautiful.”
“If his poetry comes from a place of truth, then metaphysical poetry seeks the truth. Is that not beautiful in its own way?”
I finally allow myself to smile. “I didn’t realise you were such a fan. You don’t normally like poetry. Am I to assume your own essay is written and of the highest quality imaginable? Are you about to finally gain the upper hand on the battlefield of our literature class?”
Zachary leans forward, lacing his fingers together with adorable formality. He answers with perfect sincerity.
“I’ve actually not started either.” He holds my gaze. “I’ll be working on it tomorrow in the library. Join me, if you like.”
“I don’t need your help.”
He nods. “Good—I wasn’t offering it. I’m just being tactical. Keeping my enemies close and my rivals closest.”
I laugh. “Don’t you mean closer?”
“No, that’s not what I mean.” Reaching across the table, he takes my fingers in his and lifts my hand to brush a light kiss over my knuckles. “I know exactly where I ought to keep you.”
Taking my hand back, I cast him another warning look. “Tread carefully, Blackwood.”
“I always do, Dorokhova.” He stands and gestures to the dance floor. “Dance with me?”
Reason tells me to say no.
Desire begs me to say yes.
I do my best to compromise.
“One song only.”
“Perfect,” he says and leads me to the dance floor.
We dance the next three songs together. I let him wrap his arm around my waist, and I let my head rest against his shoulder. The mingled scent of his cologne and sweat are a heady perfume, and my body feels hot all over against his.
Kiss me, I want to whisper in his ear. Kiss me, Zachary Blackwood, and hold me tight and never let me go. Please.
He doesn’t kiss me, but I’m sure I feel his lips brush the top of my head one time. After the third song, I pull away from him, but he catches my hand, stopping me. I meet his gaze. His eyes are a dark glitter, a sensuous promise. I pull away with a breathless laugh, and he follows me off the dancefloor.
I send him to get me a cup of ice to press against my flushed throat, and after that, we spend the rest of the night arguing about everything and anything.
It’s the only way to relieve the unbearable tension.
And it’s barely a relief at all.
sit side by side in the library, the green banker’s lamp lit between us, our books and laptops open in front of us. We take turns reading stanzas from Andrew Marvell’s “The Definition of Love”, swapping annotations as we go.
When we finish, we swap poems to compare annotations. My poem is a spectrum of colour-coded pastel lines of highlighter, the annotations matching each colour; Zachary’s poem is underlined and annotated with the same smooth black ink, every inch of the page covered with his fine, spidery handwriting. I’m taking notes of some of his observations on Post-its to add to mine when Zachary reads a line out loud.
“As lines, so loves oblique may well themselves in every angle greet; but ours so truly parallel, though infinite, can never meet.” His tone is low and ponderous. “That’s just like us.”
I stare at him. His chin rests in the palm of his hand; his eyes are still fixed on the page.
“How is it like us?” I ask.
He looks up and gestures elegantly towards the page as if I don’t know he’s talking about the poem. “Two perfect parallels that can never meet—that’s us.”
There’s a sudden lump in my throat I struggle to swallow back. “He’s talking about love.”
“Obviously.” Zach raises his eyebrow, a dark, amused arch. “Don’t look so surprised. You’re quite intelligent, and for all your angelic features and forget-me-not eyes, you’re not naive either. You know perfectly well that I love you.”
It’s a Saturday afternoon in the middle of the school year. Outside, cold rain drizzles from the ashen sky. In the corners of the library, other students sit alone or in pairs, stooped over their books and laptops. The library is silent but for the white noise of raindrops hitting the glass cupola far above our heads.
It’s an entirely ordinary day—or rather, it was an entirely ordinary day.
Now, it’s anything but ordinary.
Now, tension swirls around us in a great glimmering whirlpool with us at the centre. Zachary, with his brown eyes and black curls and the silk sheen of his skin and the assured curl of his smile, which seems to exist only for me.
Only Zachary Blackwood could have uttered something so outrageously reckless with such serenity. Like an archer certain of his aim, he drew his bow strong and shot his arrow straight into my chest and watched it take my breath away with the most tender of smiles.
I look into his eyes and speak in a breathless murmur. “You don’t love me.”
His eyes soften in a way that’s almost unbearable to watch. He sighs, his entire body melting with a longing so tangible it wraps around me like the folding of warm wings. He pierces me with the softness of his gaze, with the naked desire in his expression.
“Ah, of course I do. I love you atrociously.” He smiles, the hue of desire in his expression shifting, darkening into a sort of yearning melancholy. “I love you with every atom of my being, and I love every atom of yours. I love you desperately, like a starving man. I love you to distraction. And I think maybe you love me too, Theodora Dorokhova. You just aren’t quite ready to say it yet.”
