anymore. We’re done, and I think I may ask you to give up the use of my name without being accused of gratuitous cruelty.”
“But why do you have to advertise it all over campus?” She sounds more annoyed with him about this than about anything else so far. Frankly, I can see her point.
“What, our divorce or your adultery?”
“Oh, stop wallowing in self-pity just because you’re the wronged party in this, Giles!”
“I am not wallowing! I just want to be free of it!” he says stubbornly. “The whole bloody thing! And I don’t want people to think I’m married.”
“People? You mean students! So now you are going to—”
“Fuck,” he says. “Go on. Am I now going to fuck our attention-seeking little snowflakes? No, I’m not. But anyone who looks up Cleveland and Ardrossan on the Internet will find us both and assume we’re married, and that irks me. So if you wouldn’t mind, I want to see Amanda Saunders on that door next time I look.”
“Giles, what is wrong with you?” Her voice, remarkably calm so far, rises in pitch. “You wouldn’t just be harming me but also yourself! Everyone would know!”
“No, they wouldn’t,” he says, ignoring her tone. “The last thing Holly and Elizabeth want is to besmirch Nick’s fair name any further. They wouldn’t blab. Nor Dancey, if he must know. Dancey least of all, no matter how much he’d like to drop me in it. They’ve been amazingly generous about my leaves of absence, so I need them to understand why I’m not going to help extinguish this fire.”
“Give me time to think. I need to—to talk to Daddy about this.”
“There is nothing for you to think about, and I don’t care what Robert says. I am merely here to give you warning that I am going to do this. Complain to Nick about it, not to me. This isn’t about revenge. I don’t give a flying toss about the whole thing anymore.”
“The breakup was your fault! I never wanted a divorce! If my parents hadn’t made me—”
“My fault?” There is a loud thump; I think it was his fist on a table top. “You suck the campus dick in your office, and I’m supposed to take that on the chin and shut up about it, just to save appearances? You always did take me for a blundering idiot, didn’t you? Is that why you married me, Amanda?”
Instinctively I check Liz’s silhouette through the glass pane in the door. She can’t not have heard Cleveland’s flare-up. Her head turns, she peers through the glass, sees me sitting on the sofa where she left me. For one tense second we stare at each other, and with all my might I will her to sit down again. No such luck.
“What’s going on here? Where’s Ms. Cleveland?”
“Ms. Saunders,” I correct her weakly. I’m toast anyway, so it doesn’t matter. Hurried murmurs from the next room, the sound of a chair scraping along the floor.
Giles stops in his tracks as if he had collided with an invisible barrier.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
The mysteries of sexual attraction. How—how on earth—could any woman even contemplate sex with Nick Hornberger when she can have this man? It’s clearly not true that he doesn’t care anymore. His blood is up, and it is shocking to me how intensely I respond to that. I expected to be mortified with embarrassment, and I am. Embarrassed, a little afraid, and mightily turned on. Giles Cleveland has come out of his shell.
“Don’t let ’em screw you!” He darts his finger at me as if he wanted to recruit me for military service.
I nod obediently at this harsh order and—while I am still looking up at him, half startled, half playing at being startled—the air congeals between us.
Will you?
No, I didn’t say it out loud. But I might as well, because he heard it, and it flusters him terribly. His chest is heaving with emotion, and he is staring at me as if panicked by what he read in my face.
This time I am sure. I am calm. Not physically—my hands are cold with sweat, my chest hurts with excitement—but in my mind I am calm. I mean it.
If you want, I will make you forget your humiliation at the hands of a silly woman and a man who thinks with his cock. Oblivion may only last for a few minutes, but I promise you it will be sweet and intense.