“Jabberwocky? Better than a goddamn butterfly. Why him?”
“Jabberwocky’s my sa—” She stopped herself before she finished saying “safe word.” When she’d turned eighteen, Søren had instructed her to choose one. But that wasn’t a conversation she needed to have. “My spirit guide. You know, totem or whatever. So you like fairy tales?”
“Grimm’s fairy tales, the real ones. Not those Disney ones. The real stories.”
“The real fairy tales are incredibly violent,” Eleanor reminded him. She not only knew Grimm’s fairy tales, but she’d also read them in the original German. “In the original Cinderella the wicked stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to fit into the glass slipper.”
“I know. It’s not the Grimm’s version, but in the original French Sleeping Beauty, the sleeping princess doesn’t get kissed by the prince—”
“She gets raped. Small price to pay.”
Wyatt gaped at her.
“Rape is a small price to pay? Did you say that out loud in this school?” He glanced around wildly as if checking for spies and/or women’s studies majors.
“Sleeping Beauty has the same theme as the creation myth,” Eleanor said. “Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden so young and innocent. If they eat the forbidden fruit, they’ll have knowledge of good and evil. But they’ll also lose paradise. They give up paradise for knowledge without even knowing what that knowledge is. Sleeping Beauty loses her innocence in exchange for waking. Otherwise she’d live in a dreamland forever.”
“She didn’t consent to getting raped awake,” Wyatt reminded her.
“Adam and Eve didn’t know what they would win or what they would lose until they’d both won and lost it. It’s like that poem we read. The guy doesn’t know what the meaning is of the road he took until he got to the end of it. You choose first, then you find out what you’ve chosen after. Every choice has a price. Sometimes we don’t know what it is until after we’ve paid it.”
Wyatt leaned forward and stared at her from across the table.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Elle, but you should be a writer.”
“I am a writer.”
He nodded knowingly and tapped the table a few times as if in deep thought.
“Wyatt?”
“Give me a sec. I’m trying to figure out how to bring down a stealth bomber with a knife.”
“Don’t even try it. Do you write?”
“Yeah, but don’t tell anybody. Writing’s like masturbating. Everyone does it but no one likes to admit to it.”
“I admit to it.”
“Writing or masturbating?”
“Both.” Eleanor waggled her eyebrows at him before realizing that she was now in full-blown flirtation mode. She had to shut this down and fast.
“So what do you write?” she asked, trying to get onto a safer topic than sex.
“Mostly poetry about death and the meaninglessness of life and how you make decisions when you’re young that are arbitrary, but when you’re older you have to pretend like they meant something.”
“Holy shit. You’re Robert Frost, aren’t you?”
“Shh …” Wyatt hushed her as if she’d leaked a state secret. “Keep your voice down. I don’t want to get mobbed by the poetry groupies, which have never existed in the history of the world ever.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“And you’re beautiful and you speak German and you write and I want to move into your dorm room and sleep in your dirty clothes hamper.”
Eleanor stared blankly at him.
“The last part about the clothes hamper was too much, wasn’t it?” he asked.
“Only because I don’t have a dirty clothes hamper.”
“One date. All I ask. Your stealth bomber is in Europe. He’ll never find out. He’s too busy being smart and pissing me off by existing. We get dinner, we talk. I’ll show you my poetry. You’ll call the suicide prevention hotline on me. It’ll be amazing.”
“You are really determined, aren’t you?”
“You told Dr. Edwards she was an idiot. I want to make love to your brain. Like Marvin Gaye–style.”
“Just dinner?”
“Just dinner.”
“You won’t try anything?”
“I will try everything.”
“You’ll take no for an answer?”
“Yes. I mean no. I mean yes, I’ll take no for an answer. Wait. What’s the question?”
“If you ask me to have sex with you, I’ll say no,” Eleanor said, giving him a death stare.
“If you ask me to have sex with you, I’ll say yes.”
“I’m serious, Wyatt. No sex.”
“Agreed, sex is off the table.”
“So we can’t have sex,” she said.
“No, we can have it. Just not on the table. That’s gross, Elle. People gotta eat here.”
Eleanor sighed. She regretted this date already.
“My stealth bomber comes home in a week.”
“Then you’re safe from the shark in my pants.”
“Does your pants shark also have a red Mohawk?” she asked as she gathered her things and stood up.
Wyatt leaned back in his chair and put his arms behind his head.
“What can I say, beautiful? The curtains match the rug.”