I can’t just—just because we—this is all new to me!” Another ironic snort, and I blush but persevere. “No, I mean being here, the place, the work, and it’s hard, well, you know that. But I love what I do, and I want…I have to make it work! So how can I start fucking a professor in my department? You heard what Hornberger said, and I’m sorry, but he’s right! ‘New hire accused of sexual harassment and caught having sex with a colleague on campus!’ I’d be finished! You said I must have a clean slate or I won’t get tenure!”
Saying the words confronts me with the enormity of my actions, and my voice becomes shrill with panic.
“Is it the danger that does it for you?” he suddenly wonders. “Do you get off on the risk that someone might walk in and catch us at it? Never time for tenderness. When we have time, a whole night, you hold me off and run away, but when I jump you, you hurl yourself toward me as if your life depended on it. I can’t figure you out, Anna. Not at all.”
“There’s nothing to figure out! I do not want this!” I’m scared, and so I shout. I’m scared I’ll be fired. I’m scared Giles is right about me. I am scared of tenderness.
“Right. Well, I’ll remember that from now on.”
And then he storms out. His footsteps echo down the stairs and then the corridor; he’s walking fast, almost running.
A passionate man, this Englishman. What a lovely, wonderful, unbelievably sexy, passionate man he is, this man I’ve just rejected. Again. Sensitive, too. Touchy.
When I finally get home, I am shivering with cold and nerves so badly that I can hardly fit the key into the lock of the cottage door. The living room is strewn with the evidence of my preparation for the day, including shoe polish and brush. Would he have pounced on me if I had been wearing slacks and loafers, instead of a skirt and Mountie boots? A moot point, now. He did pounce, and I hurled myself at him as if my life depended on it.
Maybe it does.
I’ve never heard that love-sickness can be cured by hot water bottles, but I definitely need one. And a drink. While the water is heating up I rifle my extremely modest liquor cabinet, which offers me a choice of Bordeaux and a complimentary box of mini-bottles of liqueur that was left by the previous tenants: cherry, apricot, peach, and plum. I opt for the red wine and drink it straight from the bottle in large gulps. I thought the bottle was almost full; I opened it the other day to take a few spoonfuls to cook with. Maybe I have started tippling in my sleep, because now it is little more than half full. That’ll do me, though.
Ten minutes later I am sitting in my bed, under the covers—still in my tweed skirt and blouse, though I have discarded the damp panties and the boots—with a bottle of hot water in my lap and a bottle of Bordeaux in my hand. The shivering appears to ease up a little. But the longing doesn’t. I know in a corner of my head somewhere that what I said to Giles was just and reasonable. Heartrendingly painful, but reasonable and necessary. But my head stops at my throat, which is tight with tears, and below that there is only heartache and desire.
I fall asleep. It feels like three minutes, but it is really three hours; my watch on the nightstand says it is ten o’clock. The shivering has almost stopped, but I feel very peculiar. Woozy, yes, after half a bottle of red wine and some apricot cordial, and little nauseous, but that isn’t it. When I get up to go to the bathroom, I feel very woozy, and when I pull on my pajama pants, my skin feels very odd. I run my hands along my naked stomach, and it clicks. My skin is burning because I have a fever.
I used to get fevers regularly when I was a kid. Whenever something was too exciting or upsetting, I was sure to start shaking and my temperature would climb very fast. “She’s too thin-skinned,” my father would tell my mother.
The weekend passes in a daze of memories, dreams, and nightmares. I still feel Giles’s hands and mouth on my body so vividly that I wake up several times thinking he is in bed with