Deanna Roy - Forever Innocent

She looked right into my face. “Gavin, what are you doing?”

“You’re here for me, aren’t you?”

A couple of the other students turned around at my tone.

“Robert has your assignment,” Amy said to them. “Go on out.”

I pressed against the wall and let the others pass. Amy no longer made a show of checking them off.

“I’m going out there,” I said.

Amy stood in front of the door. “This is serious, Gavin. It’s stalking. We’re prepared to write you up to the dean.”

Like I gave a shit about that. “Do what you have to do.”

She held out her hand. “Gavin, you know I don’t want to do that. Can’t you two settle this outside of class? Not involve us?”

“I’ve been trying that. She won’t listen to me.”

Amy waited for a couple more students to cross between us and go out onto the roof. “She’s really upset. I don’t know what happened between you two but —”

“A baby.”

“What?” she sputtered, her eyes sparking.

“We had a baby. We were going to get married. Then the baby — Finn — died. There’s way more here than I can explain in two minutes, but I have to see her. She’s naturally very reluctant, but I want that chance to help her through this.”

I knew I was saying too much to Jenny, to everybody. But I didn’t want to hide all of this anymore. If we didn’t talk about it, who would?

Amy clutched her clipboard to her chest. “Five minutes, Gavin. And if I see her upset, I’m calling campus security.”

“Works for me.” I shoved through the door. Robert stood in the cone of light, handing papers out to the students who had been before me. He never even glanced my way, probably not expecting me to get by Amy.

Corabelle sat on the ledge where I’d been at the first party, gazing up at the moon. Lines of undergrads snaked from the two telescopes, and I cut through them to get to her. Jenny was peering through the eyepiece, so I didn’t have to worry about her trying to stop me for the moment. Everyone thought they were safe.

Corabelle saw me and jumped up. “What are you doing here?”

“I had to see you.”

Corabelle grabbed my hand and pulled me around to the far corner in the dark. “They will write a disciplinary report if they see you!” she whispered.

“Too late. I negotiated five minutes with you.”

Corabelle dropped my hand. “You knew I didn’t want to see you. I have skipped class — twice! I haven’t gone home or answered your texts. I had to share my personal business to everyone just to keep you away.”

I spread out my hands. “Why? Am I that horrible now?”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “No.”

“Is this about my phone?”

She pinched the bridge of her nose and shook her head. “Yes. No. I don’t know. Seeing those pictures was just a dose of reality. I needed to clear my head. You were already planning our future together.”

“I want to plan our future together.”

“But I don’t know anything about you.”

I reached for her hand and tugged it away from her face. “You do too know me. You’ve known me since I could say my first words.”

“I didn’t know you had a taste for…” She trailed off.

“Prostitutes. Yes. I’ve been with a few. But not now. Not anymore.”

She turned away and headed for a ledge. I thought for a terrible second that she intended to jump the rail, but as I ran for her, she just sat down.

I knelt in front of her. “Corabelle, I just had to stay away from normal girls. I had broken the heart of the only girl who mattered to me, and I didn’t want to be in a relationship, maybe never.”

“Those girls are girls too.”

“Yes, but they were pros. Company. Paid company. They were…” I didn’t know how to say it. I couldn’t say I was with them because of her. I didn’t know how to lay bare what they were to me.

“What were they, Gavin? And God knows how well you protected yourself.”

I swallowed. “I always wore protection. And I took tests every so often, just to be sure. I just didn’t want ties. Expectations. I didn’t want emotion in it.”

“She said you tried to get her away from her pimp. That sounds like emotion.”

Damn. She’d read a lot of the messages. I had to make her understand. “I hate pimps,” I said. “I didn’t like them beating up on these girls. It’s common decency, and I wanted them to get out.”

She got quiet, and I hoped I’d made some headway.

“What else do I not know?” she asked quietly.

“Nothing!” I said, then cut myself off. Of course there wasn’t nothing. There was the big huge something. Once more, the moment had come to tell her. I tried to make myself say it. To just blurt it out. But she talked first.

“I’m going to the doctor tomorrow,” she said. “The one on campus.”

“You that worried I gave you something?”

She glared at me a moment, then sighed. “Yes and no. Yes, I want that checked. But also, I have not been well.”

My belly flipped. “What do you mean, not well?” I remembered her in the stairwell, almost fainting, and again, when I first went to her apartment, how she’d been so weak and shaky. If something happened to her, I couldn’t stand it.

“I’ve been sick. I can’t eat.”

“You’re going through a lot.”

She nodded. “That’s probably all it is. But it’s how it started last time.”

“How what started?”

She hesitated. “With Finn.”

My face burned like a bomb had exploded. Corabelle thought she was pregnant. She couldn’t possibly be. I had to tell her. I had to calm that fear in her, the one that blazed in her eyes.

“Did you take a test?”

“Several, all negative. But still. I just feel off. So I’m going.” She stood up. “I’ll let you know how that goes.”

I jumped in front of her. “Let me go with you.”

She shook her head. “No. I don’t want you there. I need to talk to him myself.”

“Will you tell me what time?”

“No, you’ll just camp out there. I’m asking you to please let me be.” She pushed on my chest. “And please don’t come to my work anymore, or drive by my apartment.”

“You knew about that?”

“I know you.”

I couldn’t let her go so easily. “On one condition.”

She turned her face up to me, pale in the moonlight, ashen, and I could see why she thought she was sick. “What condition?”

I leaned in and kissed her, gently, just grazing her lips. I couldn’t let her forget what we were, what drove us together, what made us work. When she didn’t pull away, I touched her face, my thumb on her cheek, and parted her lips with my tongue.

She stayed with me, so I drove the kiss harder, deeper, pulling her tight against me. When she found out she wasn’t pregnant, and hadn’t been exposed to anything, I wanted her to remember this, and to want it back, and to seek me out. I had to put everything I felt into the kiss.

Corabelle made a sound, a terrible sad sound deep in her throat, and I knew she got my message. She pulled away and pressed her forehead against my chest. “Let me go, Gavin.”

I gripped her even tighter. “I can’t do that.”

“You have to.”

“Tell me when I can talk to you about the doctor.”

“Tomorrow night.”

“Can I come over?”

“No. I will text you.”

“Then can I come over?”

She looked up at me, anguished in ways I didn’t understand, maybe ways I’d never understood. “I have to go now.” She pulled away and I released her this time. I turned to watch her go around to the other side of the roof, back to the light and the class, and disappear from view.

The moon glowed from its resting place in the sky, almost but not quite full. It looked forlorn, a piece of it shaved off, and I knew that as each day passed, it would get smaller and smaller, until it disappeared into the black. 

The walkway to the Student Health Center wasn’t any different from all the other concrete paths that crisscrossed campus, but this one felt like a bridge to hell. My leaden feet dragged as I approached the glass door, and when my sweaty hand slipped on the metal handle, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know anything after all.

The receptionist gave me a form to fill out, and I sat in a brown-cushioned chair against the wall. A few other students waited in the small room. A sniffling freshman looked to be wearing her pajamas. A couple impatient guys in rugby outfits looked around, tapping their legs and shifting constantly. A panicked woman in her late twenties picked at the bottom of her marine-blue sweater, creating a pile of fuzz.

I brought a book to study, but instead I pulled out my phone and scrolled through all the messages Gavin had sent me since I ran from his apartment almost a week ago. He wrote me throughout each day, short encouraging lines like “I hope your lit class keeps you awake today,” or “Don’t let the morning coffee rush get to you.” He wished me good night every evening. In between, he sometimes asked if he could see me, or said he missed me. I hadn’t responded to any, even the one this morning that said, “I’m thinking of you as you see the doctor.”

I felt like holding him at arm’s length was the best course for the moment. It gave me the ability to function, when otherwise I could easily succumb to embarrassing crying jags or fits of fury that we’d come to this dysfunctional part of our lives.

Today would probably be the last astronomy class I could skip. I’d taken my two free days, and I purposefully scheduled this appointment during class so I would have a doctor’s note. Robert and Amy seemed on my side, but I knew the professor himself could step in. Then I would have screwed up my grade over Gavin after all.