She stared boldly into his piercing blue eyes, but he was not a man to be daunted by feminine fire and he stared right back, his gaze suggesting X-ray vision that could look right through her blouse and see the rapidly beating heart that lay beneath.
His jeans were so tight they could barely contain him, and she trembled with fear and ecstasy at the thought that he might burst out of them at any moment.
She tossed her head, and wished she could do the same with her emotions.
‘Will you just come?’ He impatiently pushed the door open and gestured her through.
‘Make me,’ she replied, saucily.
He had always been a man to rise to a challenge.
When I finally stopped reading, even Jake, who had come into the crowded room halfway through and was slouching in the door frame, was shaking his head in amusement, though the evening before I’d walked out on him in the dining hall while he was in the middle of yet another rant about how little time the two of us spent together, alone. I had told him he just didn’t understand Pakistani attitudes towards friendship, and he’d sneered. That was, I had to admit to myself, entirely an appropriate reaction. I put the romance novel down. Between the body heat, central heating, cocoa and fleece I was beginning to feel a little hot. I turned to look outside, wondered exactly when it had stopped raining, and opened the window.
That smell in the air. The aftermath of rain. I let the book fall from my hands. Tawdry. Cheap and tawdry. I could hear Jake’s voice, but I didn’t want to have to deal with him, so I continued looking outside at the autumn leaves, vibrant reds and oranges, scattered across paths, plastered on to buildings. A breeze blew up and I came so close to telling everyone in the room to be quiet, just be quiet, so that I could hear the sound of leaves being blown about. Russet rustle. Almost the sound of waves breaking on pebbled sand.
In Karachi, I would never have been able to hold court for as long as I had just done. Hold court or play the jester, whatever it was that I had been doing. One or more of my friends would have sat down beside me, leaned an elbow on my shoulder, scanned ahead of where I was reading to some further point on the page and taken the book from my hands to read aloud the next absurd lines in exaggerated tones, at once competing and collaborating with me. I leaned my head against the window screen. Rain had tinged the mesh with the smell of rust. Not true, not true, that in Karachi I felt my world was perfect, although sometimes I deluded myself into thinking that when I was far from home. But even in Karachi I’d feel this need to turn away from people whose company, just seconds earlier, I had delighted in. Sonia sometimes told me off for my ‘mood swings’, in Sonia’s way of telling people off, which was not to rebuke or reprimand but merely to ask what was wrong. Once, not so long ago, I had finally said, ‘Even when I’m with everyone whom I could possibly want to be with, I feel like something’s absent,’ and Sonia, showing no signs of being hurt by this remark, nodded, and asked, ‘Absent or lost?’
There was a cobweb between the window and the ledge outside. Jake closed the window, and I turned back to my friends, wanting them gone, wanting him gone too.
‘Break over,’ I said.
Almost everyone stood up instantly, as though I had issued a military order, except for the guy who was supposed to be reading War and Peace. ‘But we haven’t even finished drinking our…’ he said.
Tamara nudged him. ‘Come on, finish it in my room.’ Behind Jake’s back she mouthed to me, ‘Should I take him with me?’ and I was about to nod, when Jake said, ‘Tamara, I can see your reflection in the mirror. Goodbye.’
After everyone had left, Jake stepped off the bed, and leaned against my desk, hands stuffed in the pockets of his jeans. ‘You know, after you walked out on me at dinner last night—’
‘Oh, Jacob, for heaven’s sake, I didn’t walk out; I just said I had work to do and couldn’t stay to watch you sip your coffee.’
He scuffed the carpet with the toe of his sneakers. ‘Don’t call me Jacob.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘OK, after I walked out on you…what?’
‘I decided it’s over between us.’ He was looking down at his hands. They were somewhat too soft, Jake’s hands.
I nodded. ‘I understand.’
He raised his head and looked at me. ‘I was about to add, “but then I changed my mind”.’
‘Oh.’
We looked at each other for a few seconds, and then he said, ‘It really makes no difference to you either way, does it?’
A spider was picking its way to the centre of the web, sidestepping the drops of water. The sky cerulean once more. Cerulean is an anagram of acne rule. Imagine a pimply, pustular sky, Ra! I stood up so quickly I banged my head against the potted plant hanging from the ceiling near the foot of my bed. The pot tipped and loose soil showered down my jumper and on to my bed.
‘You OK?’ Jake moved forward, but I held my hands up to tell him to keep his distance. Tears in my eyes, and none of them because of him. I put my hand to my scalp and was almost disappointed to find no trickle of blood, nor even a bump. Jake stepped back and watched me scoop soil from the duvet into a cup and pour it back into the plant-holder.
‘Soiled sheets. Dirt on your fingers. Talk about a break-up scene heavy in symbolism.’ Jake made a sound that might have been laughter had it contained the slightest suggestion of amusement. ‘You know, I finally figured out last night what all of us have in common. Ricardo, Amit, myself. Couldn’t find any common denominator in all your boyfriends before. But it’s this: we’re the kind of guys you’ll always stop short of loving. And that makes life easy, doesn’t it?’
I didn’t want to think too hard about what he had said, so I looked around for tissue to wipe my fingers with. Jake offered the sleeve of his shirt, but I brushed the dirt off against a corner of my duvet instead. Don’t touch him, and this will be easier.
‘Actually, the common denominator, Jake, is that you all have really sexy wrists. Call me shallow.’
I sat on the window ledge again, pressed the nib of my fountain pen through the mesh of the screen, and unscrewed the bottom of the pen. Jake came to stand beside me as I gently squeezed the ink cartridge and a rain drop turned blue.
‘You really have this ability to find beauty in weird places.’
There was a tone of reconciliation in his voice, but when he had said it was over between us my heart had lurched ever so slightly, and if we were to stay together now perhaps it would lurch even more next week, next month or whenever that inevitable ending came. It would lurch especially if the ending didn’t come until early next summer when we would graduate and I would head home to Karachi. I looked beyond him to the mirror. There was a crack in the glass, right at eye level, and for a second I half-fancied I saw a splinter lodged in one of my absurdly large eyes, slashing its darkness.
‘I have work to do, Jake.’
‘So do I. Can I stay?’
I shook my head, without turning to look at him.
He was all the way to the door before he stopped and said, ‘Ever wonder how other people see you?’
I turned round. ‘Is this the cruel parting blow, Jake? You going to — what’s that funny expression? — hold up a mirror to my eyes?’
‘Your friends adore you, Raheen, because at the end of the day you’ll always forgive them no matter how hideously they’ve behaved. They adore you because they think you offer up your friendship and ask for nothing in return. But that’s not true—’ He took a deep breath. ‘You do ask for something. You ask that we never expect you to need us.’