“I got in.”
“You did?”
He looked slightly sheepish. He cracked his fortune cookie in quarters and then eighths, and then it was a crumble.
“That’s so great! I knew you would. How could you not?”
Ever since Brian had hatched the idea of transferring to NYU from the University of Maryland, his grades had been faultless.
“I just want to sleep beside you every night,” he had told her back in December. “That’s all I want.”
She knew he would get in. She knew he would make it work. That was how he was.
“What does it say?” he asked, pointing to the fortune in her hand.
“ ‘Beware the prevalence of ideas,’ ” she read. She crunched on her cookie. “My lucky numbers are 4 and 237. How about yours?”
“ ‘You are sexy,’ ” he read.
“No way! It doesn’t say that. Let me see it!”
He smiled suggestively and handed it over.
It actually did say that. How unfair. “So what about the money?” she asked, tossing her fortune into the remains of the plum sauce.
“Well.”
“Not good?” She felt the sesame noodles climbing back up her esophagus.
“I got six thousand.”
“Oh.” She swallowed. “Dollars?”
“Dollars.”
She tried to think. The waiter slapped the bill down on their table without stopping.
“Out of twenty-two thousand.”
“Oh.”
“Not including room and board.”
“Oh.” She flicked her chopsticks around. “How come not more?”
“My stepfather has more money than you’d think.”
“But he doesn’t give you any of it,” Tibby burst out. In her world, parents paid for college, and if they couldn’t cover it, they helped you get the loans to pay the difference.
Brian didn’t look bitter in the least. He didn’t even look irritated. What Tibby thought of as a right, Brian didn’t hope for. “I know. Yeah. But that’s how it works.”
“It’s not fair that they count his money against you. Can you explain that he’s not going to pay anything?”
Brian shrugged. “I’m saving.”
“How much have you got?”
“One hundred and seventy-nine.” He picked up the bill.
She grabbed it from him. “I’ve got this.”
“No. I want to.”
“You’re saving.”
“I know. But I can save and also buy you dinner.”
“And take the bus up here almost every weekend and buy me CDs?” She didn’t mean to sound mad at him.
He took out his wallet. She saw a corner of the condom he’d stashed there three or four months ago. “So we’re ready, when we’re ready,” he’d told her when she’d first noticed it. He fished out a bill—a twenty, crumpled and weary, as though it were the last of its kind.
“Come on. Please let me.” She got her wallet out too.
“Next time,” he said, getting up, leaving her clutching her extraneous wallet.
He always said that. His arms were around her as soon as they made it to the sidewalk. It surprised her that they could walk in that degree of embrace.
On the way up in the elevator they took advantage of being alone. As soon as they were inside her room, Brian went to his duffel bag and unzipped it. “To celebrate,” he said, pulling out a bottle of wine.
“Where did you get that?” she asked. Brian was not your fake-ID type.
He tried to look mysterious. “I found it someplace.”
“Like in your house?”
He laughed. “It was sitting around. It’s old.”
She picked it up and looked at it. It was red wine from 1997. “Very funny.”
“Hang on.” He disappeared down the hall and came back with a corkscrew and two plastic cups from the communal kitchen. He didn’t really know how to use the corkscrew and neither did she. At last, laughing, they poked the cork into the wine bottle. First he poured two cups and then he put on a Beethoven CD, the fifth concerto for piano, which he knew she loved.
“It’s loud,” she said.
“Nobody’s here,” he said.
“Oh, yeah.”
They sat cross-legged, facing each other on the floor. When they touched cups, the soft plastic gave, making no sound.
“To us together,” she said, knowing how happy it made him by the flush of his skin. She felt shy all of a sudden. She wanted to say something ironic, but nothing came. She took a long drink of wine.
“Is it good?” he asked, pulling her feet to get her to come closer.
“I don’t know. Is it?”
He drank some more. “Tastes kind of old.”
“I think I like it,” she said. She liked all the things about that moment, and the wine went along with them.
“Here’s more.”
“You have some too.”
She turned and lay back against him, wine in her blood and music in her ears. She guessed there were people who lived their whole lives without getting to be this happy. That thought was the single note of unhappiness in her happiness.
He whistled along with the violins for a few bars. “I think this is the best night ever,” he said in a quiet voice, thinking her thoughts, as he often did.
“Except maybe the night of the pool.”
“Right.” He considered. “But I didn’t know you as much then. I thought I did, but now I know I didn’t. And imagine how it will feel next year or the one after?”
Brian was unafraid to think of the future, believing she was in it. He talked about them when they were thirty as easily as when they were twenty. He talked about babies and who would get Tibby’s extra-long second toe. He wanted all of it. He wasn’t afraid of saying so.
He liked to tell her his dreams, and he always dreamed in we. “Who’s we?” she asked the first time he recounted to her a long, complicated scenario.
He looked at her, perplexed, as though she was kidding around with him for no good reason. “You and me.”
It couldn’t keep getting better, Tibby decided. It just couldn’t. There was a law of physics that prohibited it. Seriously, there was some kind of law. Conservation of joy. No joy could be added to the sum in the universe without some being taken away. They were taking more than their share as it was.
He poured more wine. She realized in an indistinct way that she was getting drunk. She realized it on one level and felt it on another.
The bottle and the plastic cups were somehow shoved out of the way and now they were kissing on the linoleum floor.
The second movement of the concerto began, too beautiful for anything. “How about the bed?” she suggested faintly.
Usually she was the one who kept guard in these situations. She’d made the decision that they weren’t supposed to make love yet. They were both virgins. He was more than ready, but she still wasn’t sure. And as much as he pleaded, he didn’t push; he was a gentleman.
Now she pressed against him, her hips seeming to know what to do without even bothering with her brain. Her shirt was off, without her quite noticing. Some time ago, Brian had gotten the knack of her front-fastening bra.
She managed to free him of his shirt. There was nothing better than feeling his bare skin against hers, and those few fine hairs in the middle of his chest.
If he was doing this, she wondered vaguely, and she was doing that, then who exactly was minding the store?
They were hurtling forward now, doing the things they often did, but faster and more. Her body wasn’t consulting her at all anymore. She wanted to be closer to him; she wanted him inside her.
She meant to stop. To say hang on, wait up. Just to think, at least. To get her whole self on board. But she couldn’t say stop. She didn’t want to. She wanted to feel him inside. He was so close now.
“Do we have…?” she began faintly.