Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere 3)

“Let me see these e-mails.” Will’s tone was murderous, and even through my stress and agitation, the warmth of his anger on my behalf settled comfortingly in my stomach.

I showed Will the e-mails, in which Clark had sent comments on the drafts of my proposal where he asked questions that I was really sure most students in an introductory class shouldn’t be expected to know the answers to. And I showed him the comments Clark had written where he gave me totally contradictory feedback. I started to get freaked out all over again, and Will squeezed my shoulder as he peered furiously at the screen.

“I’m gonna kill this fucker! This petty, ineffectual little limp-dicked asshole has nothing better to do than lord his power over students like that makes him someone.” He devolved into muttering and then flopped back. I smiled at him and kissed the corner of his mouth where his lips turned down in a scowl. To my surprise, he flushed a little and shrugged like his shirt was suddenly too tight.

“Okay. Okay, tell me the rest, and then we’ll get back to that fucking guy.”

I walked Will through my whole schedule and he wrote it down on the graph paper in that neat all-caps handwriting I associated with architecture schematics. Even rendered in neat rows and tidy handwriting, it was a lot.

“I don’t think I can—”

“No, no commentary yet. Commentary is the seed of doubt. Doubt is the breeding ground for wasting time.”

Will tore off the page and recopied everything on a fresh sheet of paper, every task with a bullet point, every deadline in order of the date it was due, the chaos of my entire finals schedule neatly organized by the calming blue lines of the graph paper as if there weren’t a single thing that couldn’t be contained, ordered, made achievable. He outlined a box to the left of each task to check off when it had been completed. At the top he wrote Leo’s Guide To Kicking First Semester Finals In the Ass, which made me crack up to see in his neat handwriting.

It’s possible that my laughter was somewhat hysterical because the next thing I knew, Will was squeezing my shoulders and rubbing a hand up and down my back calmingly.

“Okay,” he said finally. He pointed to the schedule where he’d put a 1, a 2, and a 3 next to my tasks for the evening. “You start on this stuff.”

He pulled me up from the couch, sat me down at the desk, and tacked the schedule to the wall in front of me. While I was still trying to figure out how I’d ended up with a life coach and also wondering how I could make him do this every finals period, Will put a glass of water and a bowl of cashews on the desk.

“Protein. Good for energy. Stay hydrated.” Then he squeezed the back of my neck and left me to it.

Later, Will showed me the message he’d drafted to Clark from my e-mail account. It clearly laid out the work I’d already done, the changes he’d requested, and asked for clarification about several points, all of which were numbered. It was written so incisively that I couldn’t imagine how anyone could read it and not just agree to everything it said.

“Oh my god, you’re a genius.”

With Will’s eyes on me, I clicked the Send button without changing a word and closed my laptop in relief.

“Thank you.” I twined my arms around his neck, holding on tightly. Will’s arms tightened around me and he sighed deeply into my hair.

“You can’t let people push you around,” he said.

“Except for you, right?”

He huffed a breath out against my neck, but didn’t disagree.

OVER THE next five days, I only went back to the dorms once, to grab a bag of clothes and the rest of my books. I told Charles I was staying at Will’s, and he barely spared me a glance, just muttered something about the role of local politics in the Salem witch trials and nodded at himself as he typed furiously.

When Will went to work, he left me a pot of coffee on the counter and a Post-it note reminder to FOLLOW THE SCHEDULE AND DO NOT PANIC. Even on a Post-it, his handwriting was perfect.

He brought Thai food with him when he came home from work and we ate on the couch. The spicy smells of curry, peanut sauce, and ginger combined with the musky smell of Will’s body wash and the clean, bright smell of his shampoo and I wanted to stay here forever.

He was wearing a white T-shirt and gray sweatpants, but they weren’t normal—they were some kind of perfectly fitted versions of these staples, just like all his clothes, even the most casual ones, looked like they’d been tailored to fit him. When I asked him about it, he looked at me strangely and said they were just white T-shirts, but it seemed impossible.