King stared at me. I didn’t look at him, but I could feel his eyes on me, marking every inch of my body, memorizing me because he knew I was about to walk out the door.
“Don’t do it,” he warned.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I repeated, already turning away, the panic in my throat so hot and bitter, I knew I needed to get out of there so I could throw up. “I know you’ll be better off without me, King, You need a real Queen by your side. I’m smart enough to know, that’s not me.”
I turned and ran out the front door, knowing Tayline would be there waiting to take me home because she already knew me well enough to know she’d have to.
King didn’t follow.
Air echoed through the empty cavern of my chest each time I drew breath, ricocheting off the hollow cavity where my heart used to be. I felt like everyone could hear the sound of my heartbreak, could see it like a dead thing in my eyes, but no one commented on it, not even Tayline, who only watched me with deep, dark eyes while we drank our morning coffees in the teacher’s lounge that morning.
My students felt it even though they didn’t know what it was. It made them quiet and slightly loopy as they breathed in the noxious fumes that flowed between King and me. He sat at his desk right before me but did not look at me, not once through the first forty minutes of history class. I found myself dropping things just to make a clatter that might draw his eyes, talking loudly so the volume would magnetize his eyes to me. Nothing worked and as the class drew on, I could feel myself becoming more despondent, my soul crushing into dust under the heel of his disregard.
It grew more impossible to believe I had done the right thing by giving him up with every moment that passed that I wasn’t in his arms. It had started as soon as he’d left my house and the now beautiful-to-me sound of his motorcycle disappeared.
Now, I hated myself so much I felt sick with it, nauseated and feverish, constantly about to faint. Every time I caught sight of his beautiful face, the breadth of his shoulders strong enough to hold up my sky as it threatened to come down around my ears and the halo of hair that crowned him like the king he was, I ached with such ferocity, I lost my breath midway through my lesson.
There were only ten minutes left, I told myself as bile surged over my tongue, and then I was going to go to the bathroom and throw up the little lunch I’d eaten.
“Did Eve do the right thing by giving into temptation?” Margaret asked as we reviewed their Paradise Lost papers.
“Of course,” Benny answered before I could. “If she hadn’t eaten the apple, she would have been Adam’s slave for ever. When she chose to eat the apple, she made her first autonomous decision from Adam.”
I pursed my lips, finally drawn into the conversation in a real way, both because he’d made an interesting point and because Benny had been back in class since the start of term but I couldn’t get used to my joy at seeing him there, sitting healthy and, unbelievably, happy.
“No, she switched one man for another and listened to Satan,” Carson said. It had taken him a while after the fight to get back into class discussions, but he always sat beside Benny now, and his boyfriend was excellent at drawing him into the conversation just as he was now.
“Sure, Satan influenced her, but Adam was her master and even in choosing to obey Satan and not him, she became independent. She did a bad thing and was, ironically, freed by it,” Benny said, his eyes on Carson’s, his thumb swiping back and forth of their joined hands.
It was obvious he was speaking allegorically about their relationship.
It was also obvious that I could do the same for myself. I’d been held to William by invisible social shackles I’d worn since birth, with no idea that I wore them but for the vague sense that I didn’t fit properly in my own life. Then King had appeared in the parking lot, bright, dangerous and shiny as a forbidden fruit and, unbeknownst to me, I’d take that first, delicious bite. By the time I knew how taboo it was, what repercussions that act would reap, it was too late. I’d tasted the kind of life and freedom I’d always wanted to have and just as it was for Eve, there was no turning back
I turned sharply to look at King who, for the first time all class, was staring at me. Our eyes locked with the vibration of a thunder strike and I rocked back on my heels as it resonated through me. I opened my mouth and I knew exactly what I was going to say (that I loved him more than my next breath) and what that would mean (my immediate dismissal from EBA, the instant dissolution of my impeccable reputation) and I did not care.