“Well, I’d love to read some of your stuff sometime,” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Like Erykah Badu says, ‘I’m an artist, and I sensitive about my shit!’”
Her smile made me smile, and from then on I found myself mysteriously sliding into this groove, writing the same kinds of stories all week long for my workshop. The first story was about a man and a woman who met at a sex anonymous meeting and fell off the wagon soon afterward. The second story was about a guy having repeated wet dreams about the same woman every night. The third story was about a woman who caught a man jacking off at a stoplight late one night and offered to finish the job for him. It had gotten to the point that when I came to class, Mr. Cadet would have an assuming smirk on his face. One day he flat out asked if I was trying to accomplish something thematic with my collection of randy stories.
“I don’t know. I think I’m just following where my muse leads.”
He nodded. “Well, it’s good to have a muse. Stirs the creative juices.”
Creative juices? I wanted to swim in those.
But I was a little too nervous to really step up and put it out there with Meredith, so I lay low and chatted with her during the brief moments when we’d connect during the day. Nothing special. Just enough to keep my imagination sparked. Before I knew it, the last day of the workshop had arrived, and the realization that I would probably never see her again began to sink in. I had written all of these stories about being with her, all of these fantasies, and it was about to be over. Just like that.
Another realization dawned on me, too: I had spent the entire week writing out my sexual frustrations with stories that I would probably never be able to use professionally, not unless Zane found one of them worthy of publishing in an anthology. If I didn’t put it out there with Meredith, then I would have wasted a week.
That night I didn’t see her at the banquet, and when a group of my classmates decided to go out for drinks, I kept an eye out for her, hoping our paths would cross going in and out of pubs. When I didn’t see her out and about or hanging out in front of the dorm with other students, I began to question whether she had already left, headed home. When the thought that I had completely blown it set in, I promised myself that if I should see her before the program officially ended the following morning, then I would put it all on the line.
I knew that she was staying in a room at the end of the hall on the floor above mine, so in a final attempt to contact her, I went up to her dorm room a few minutes before eleven that night and knocked on the door. I could hear shuffling as the door opened slowly.
“Yeah,” she whispered, squinting her eyes against the light of the hallway. It was pitch-black in her room.
“Just wanted to see you before you dipped out tomorrow.”
“Oh, okay,” she said, barely coherent. “How are you doing?”
“I’m good. And you?”
“Just tired. I gotta catch a flight at eight in the morning, so I have to get up at
the ass crack of dawn.”
“Oh,” I said, chuckling at her joke.
She would be at the airport in a few hours, and I wanted to kick myself for not coming by her room earlier or even trying to get at her before the last day. I could just have wished her well with her writing, but I knew that if I didn’t tell her how I felt, I would never get the opportunity to. The words came out in a blur.
“Meredith, I know that this is really bad timing, but I just had to let you know that I’ve been feeling you all week. I can’t stop thinking about you. Hell, all of the stories I wrote this week were about you.”
She looked at me for a moment as if I had told her that Malcolm X was really a Baptist preacher.
I continued, “I hate that it took me this long to tell you, but I couldn’t let you leave without knowing that I am really attracted to you, your voice, your smile, your personality. On that first day when I saw you, something in me wanted to connect with you.”
The more I listened to myself, the cornier the stuff I was saying sounded. I was messing up big-time, but at least I was getting the basic idea out there. She had an expression on her face like “This nigga is crazy,” and I couldn’t blame her.
“Well. That’s all. I was hoping to talk with you a little bit before you left, but I didn’t want to cut into your sleep. I guess I should lay it down myself.”
She nodded her head.
As I started to walk away, she said, “You wrote stories about me?”
“Yes,” I said, turning around.
“Well, were they any good?”
“I don’t know if they were, but it felt good writing them.”
She smiled as she closed the door.
A half hour later, I was lying on top of the covers on my bed listening to Raheem DeVaughn on the portable boom box I had sitting on the desk in my room. Although the lights were out, I could still catch a mild glow of light through the blinds, reminding me that the city was right outside my window. I had been staring at the ceiling so long, lost in my thoughts, that I had assumed I was asleep.