the world to talk about Hornberger and the rape allegation, but my instinct tells me to steer clear of the subject. Tim, Erin, and Eugenia descend upon us, but the elephant in the room is making all of us tongue-tied.
“That carrot cake will be the death of me,” Eugenia groans and nods at my plate with that slightly false note of exaggeration that betrays her effort to fill the awkward silence.
“I know what you mean.” I grin. “Wanna bite?”
“Ah, no, best not—”
“Going, going…gone!” I push the last piece into my mouth and earn a burst of laughter for this lame bit of clownery.
“What do you make of the food here, Anna?” Erin picks up the cue. “Better than at NYU? Worse?”
“Wee-e-ell.” I hurl myself into an answer. “You really want to try and compete with the variety of food available in Manhattan? No gluten-free, lactose-free, low-cal cookies in the Eatery, and there must be a place to get decent cawffee, because this potation here is undrinkable. And not for nothing, but the only pizza I’ve had so far tasted like cardboard with bits of tomato on it—honestly, how do you people survive?”
Cleveland, grinning with appreciation, leans forward on his elbow and rests his chin in his cupped hand.
“On pork and peanuts,” he says earnestly.
“This coffee isn’t so bad?” Erin looks round for corroboration. “I never found it so bad.”
“Oh, I don’t eat peanuts.” I force myself to look into the seawater eyes and affect regret. “They’re very high in cholesterol…”
Tim snorts his derision, while Erin and Eugenia wave over Kristen Thomason and Brenda Dampier and make them sit down at their end of the table.
“Do you eat pork?” Cleveland asks. “I’m just wondering.”
I bite my lip.
“I don’t eat any meat at all, if I can help it. I was kidding about the peanuts, though.”
He grins and glances down at his plate.
“People here find vegetarians very…New York…”
“I’m not actually all that good at being a New Yorker, I think.”
“That’s true,” Tim butts in. “She’s a sweetie.”
I pull a face at Tim, and Cleveland ponders Tim’s assessment of my character.
“But you are a vegetarian,” he says.
“Mm. My landlord showed admirable composure the other day when I wouldn’t eat fried chicken.”
“Your landlord—” He looks up, very intent all of a sudden; and I can see that he is on the brink of further questions.
“You’d love Anna’s place, Cleve,” Tim says. “She lives in a cottage by the woods. Think Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Didn’t you say there is even a patch of bluebells?”
“N-No, they can’t have been bluebells,” I stutter. “It’s too late in the year, my landlord says.”
“You’ll have to wait for the wild daffodils in spring.” Cleveland isn’t teasing me anymore. His bagel lies half eaten on his plate and he is watching me, holding onto his mug as if his hands were cold. “The wild daffs…and the forget-me-nots.”
“Well, if I’ve ever been tempted to run around naked in the rain, it is in this place, that’s for sure.” I know we are both thinking it, so I decide—foolishly—that spelling it out might still the frisson between us. It doesn’t.
“Now this is a surprise,” he admits. “I would have bet any sort of money that you despise D. H. Lawrence.”
“I do despise him. Any woman must. But I also love him. It. The novel.”
“I hope you realize,” Tim supplies sotto voce, his eyes trained on our chatting colleagues, “that the female focalizer in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is merely a tool to allow Lawrence to describe male beauty. What he’s surreptitiously doing there is rewriting Forster’s Maurice with the sex left in.”
“Well, the author is dead,” I say dryly, “and I don’t care what motivated him to describe male beauty like that. I’m a heterosexual female, and I think it’s a lovely book. And if you quote me on this, I shall swear I was drunk!”
Both men burst out laughing, and his hilarity does nothing to disperse the warm glow that surrounds Cleveland whenever I glance at him.
The events that follow do.
The Sperm Room is still locked when we arrive, so I decide to make a dash for the john while someone goes for the key. When I return I have no choice but to take the seat Tim has kept for me between himself and Cleveland, who is sitting several seats further down than last time. Our hands are resting on the table top with less than the length of a sheet of paper between them, his fingers twiddling with a university