His look was jubilant, not embarra.s.sed. Brent knew what he was doing. He pulled the briefs off and dangled them on his finger. I, of course, wasn't really focused on the underwear. Brent had been fortunate in the endowment department, and it was a pleasure to observe the length and firmness of him. So much so that I'd forgotten to keep my arms crossed.

"Finish the game?" he asked, his tone amused.

"S-Sure."

"A nine, then."

I didn't bother looking down at my hand. I knew I didn't have it. "Go fish."

He put his cards on the tile floor. "I want the rest of your clothing."

"Okay," I heard myself say. "Likewise."

We shucked whatever we were still wearing, and Brent swept the cards aside. He pressed his body against mine and his lips swooped in to taste my mouth. To consume it.

I felt like a kid sneaking chocolate bars on Halloween night. How after a busy evening of trick-or-treating, when we'd already eaten our allotment of sweets, I'd tiptoe out of bed and into the kitchen, find my stash and secretly devour another Snickers or Milky Way. It was bad for me. I knew I didn't need it. It kind of made my stomach roil. But the temptation was too strong for me to ignore. Brent Sullivan was just like that candy.

"I want you," he whispered. "I'm crazy about you. Be my girlfriend, Ellie."

I nodded and hoped, rather than believed, he was sincere in his intentions.

He didn't waste time trying to convince me further with words after that. He just used his hands and his mouth and his hips and his...well, let's just say that Brent had come prepared for safe s.e.x, and what followed wasn't at all mediocre. My body was euphoric. My heart less so.

Brent nibbled on my neck in that rare, tranquil moment of afterglow. "We've gotta return the key by midnight," he said between nips. "That gives us only another fifteen, twenty minutes. Anything special you wanna do?"

"Can we just talk?"

He shrugged and withdrew his teeth from my neck. "Sure. What do you want to talk about?"

"Our relationship."

His eyes grew wide, but he glanced away-to keep me from reading his expression, I figured.

I sat up.

"Yeah?" he said.

I picked through the clothes until I found my bra and panties. I slipped those back on, fast. "So, when you said you wanted me to be your girlfriend, did you mean just for tonight? Or were you thinking longer term? Like that we'd be, you know, exclusively dating now?"

He met my eye and beamed a bright smile at me. "The second option, Ellie."

Thank G.o.d.

"Oh, fine," I said, trying to sound nonchalant. "I was just checking."

"I don't hide out in the sauna with just anyone. I really, really like you." He paused and his look turned serious. "You feel that way about me, too, right? You're not just using me to get your jollies, are you, El?"

"Of course not. You're smart and funny and very, very s.e.xy. I really like you, too."

He exhaled heavily. "Well, that's a relief. I don't wanna play those kind of games. You know, where one person is in it only for the s.e.x. Somebody always gets hurt then."

I nodded, seeing new depths in this guy that I'd missed during our bantering sessions at the front desk. My heart started to relax a little and marriage, suddenly, didn't seem quite so much of a long shot. I mean, there we were-both twenty-two-legal and nearly self-supporting adults. Within a year and a half we'd be all set to live responsible, grown-up lives. We could realistically get married within a few weeks of grad school graduation. In a matter of seconds, I had our lives planned out until retirement.

Brent gave me an affectionate peck on the cheek. "Yeah, let's be exclusive," he said, almost to himself. Then, apparently deciding to go commando, he zipped up his jeans and expertly tucked his white briefs into his waistband. He covered it up with his jersey and slipped on his sneakers. "I'm ready to get outta here whenever you are."

I finished getting dressed and we left the sauna holding hands and grinning at each other.

I thought it was the start of a beautiful relationship.

As usual, I thought wrong.

With the exception of enjoying a couple blissful months of hot s.e.x, life went on much as it always had.

In the light of day, and with my full conscious mind open to her again, Jane, of course, tried to advise me.

She cautioned, There is, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.

She counseled, Every impulse of feeling should be guided by reason.

She said, hopefully, You are too sensible a girl to fall in love merely because you are warned against it.

But I wasn't sensible. I was a fool. And I let her words of wisdom float in and out of my l.u.s.t-crazed brain, until one afternoon when I went to visit my friend Erica in another dorm.

Erica was an undergrad, a senior, but only a year younger than me and in one of the lit cla.s.ses that could be taken by both grads and undergrads.

Like me, she was an English geek.

Unlike me, she'd set her sights on a somewhat more ill.u.s.trious career path than that of a high-school librarian. She wanted to become a famous poet and-for income until the fame kicked in-a professor at a Big Ten university. When we got together we liked to talk Cla.s.sics.

That day, with the help of pa.s.sages from a variety of mournful poets, we were discussing her feelings toward her high-school boyfriend Dylan, who died in a tragic car accident back then.

"I don't think it's wrong for those memories to dim, Erica. I doubt Dylan would want you to stop living. To still be thinking only of him."

"I know he wouldn't. But I feel odd about letting go completely. It's as though I'm losing a sensitivity I'd had. I'm afraid if I really put my love for Dylan in the past, then I'm not feeling enough somehow. That a real poet would never recover. Do you know what I mean?" She squinted at me.

I squinted back and nodded. "I think so. That someone else might think you don't have the heart of a poet or that you're incapable of really getting literature if you move on from this tragedy that shaped your youth."

"Yes!" She paced the dorm-room floor. "And that's a stupid, selfish motive, I know." She paused. "Do you think I'm repressing things?"

At this I laughed. "n.o.body I know dissects thoughts and emotions like you do. If you're suddenly repressing your grief, you'd need someone a whole lot more skilled in psychotherapy than I am to figure it out. I think maybe you're just finally healing."

"But so soon?"

"Soon? It's been six years."

She wrinkled her nose. "Yeah."

As my friend took this in, I thought about what I'd lost in high school. True, not a literal death, but the demise of an innocence, a hopefulness. And, yeah, my virginity, too, but who was counting?

Okay, so it was cliched.

All of it.

I wasn't a completely unaware idiot despite this latest lapse into melodrama. But-I had to say it-being with Brent, despite Jane's disapproval, was bringing me back to life.

"Did you ever read-" Erica said as she riffled through one of her lit texts. Most of our conversations began with that phrase. "Oh. Here it is. This pa.s.sage by Elizabeth Barrett Browning?" She handed me the book, and I'd just begun skimming the lines she pointed to, when Erica's door banged open and her roommate waltzed in.

Disappointment surged through me. "Hey, Roch.e.l.le, how are you?" I said, striving for friendly but detached. I hoped the dopey senior would grab a granola bar and leave again, but she dropped down beside us and exhaled breathily.

Conversations were always reduced to the lowest common denominator and, in this case, I knew we'd turn from Cla.s.sic Poetry to Campus Gossip in a matter of nanoseconds. Roch.e.l.le didn't prove me wrong.

"Lord, did I ever hear the stupidest thing today!" she said, shaking her shoulder-length hair and getting comfortable on Erica's bed. "Some boys are soooo obvious. Trish's boyfriend is here again."

Erica groaned. "That guy has to be such a sleaze. I've never met him, but she talks constantly about what they do together. It's nauseating."

Roch.e.l.le twisted a lock of her streaked hair and sent us a smirk. "Well, now he's gotten her into stripping during card games. She was jabbering about it before he showed up. Then they disappeared into the sauna."

I felt a blush begin at the base of my neck and knew it was creeping its way upward. "The sauna? Really?"

"Yeah, because Trish's roommate studies a lot in their room and Trish's boyfriend isn't from this dorm. He's a grad student," Roch.e.l.le explained with a roll of her eyes. "But he hangs out here often enough. Like practically every afternoon for hours. I try to avoid him."

"Oh," I said. "Um, what's his name?"

Roch.e.l.le bit her lower lip. "Brad-"

I felt a tiny swell of relief.

"-or maybe it's Brett. I don't remember exactly, but it's something like that. Anyway, he told her they were going to play Strip Go Fish today. Can you believe it?" Roch.e.l.le rolled her eyes again.

I closed mine and tried to rein in the tears fighting to escape.

Duped again.

An idiot after all.

How much more proof did I need?

I heard Jane sigh deep inside my mind, but she didn't berate me. She had to know my days of being naively trusting of men were over.

OVER.

"You okay?" Erica asked me, tilting her head to one side and studying my face.

"Yep." I blinked and began gathering my things. "But I need to get to the library to finish a project for one of my MLS cla.s.ses." I forced a bright smile at both of them. "Good talking to you two. See you in lit, Erica."

I waved and walked out the door fast, still grinning like the mentally deficient person I was.

And, of course I didn't go to the library.

I clomped down four flights of stairs and camped out in their dorm's bas.e.m.e.nt, in the little study right across from their sauna room. Clearly, I was a glutton for humiliation, but I needed to be absolutely, positively certain.

After all, it wasn't impossible that some other guy could use the same s.e.x-getting tactics as Brent.

There might actually be a Brad or a Brett.

Maybe there was a group of grad-school guys who strategized together-as part of some morally decrepit team or something-and they'd come up with foolproof lines to use on their unsuspecting girlfriends.

It didn't mean Brent cheated on me. Not for sure. Not yet.

I pretended to read one of my MLS books. The Dewey Decimal System: Selected Readings in Theory, Organization and Application. Second edition. Written by Someone Very Pretentious, PhD, and penned with all the humor and insight of a text on dental flossing techniques.

An hour and seventeen minutes dragged on. Then the door to the sauna swung open. I heard female giggling first, followed by a male laugh.

Brent.

So, all hope for our Happily Ever After ended right there.

The pain of betrayal burned down my throat as I swallowed, but I didn't plug my ears or close my eyes. I didn't run and hide. I listened. I watched.

I had my book open, its spine cracking, and I peered over its creased pages as Brent and a blonde I figured must be Trish walked out of the steamy room and into the hall. He was framed through both doorways, The Other Woman by his side. What a picture. What a con.

His gaze met mine, initially friendly, not comprehending. And then the eyes grew wide as recognition dawned. Four seconds, at most, split into subdivisions of time like an atom in a nuclear reactor, and equally explosive. Melodramatic emotions detonated in my brain.

"I-I gotta talk to someone," I heard him say to Trish as he bid her a quick farewell. But not before she kissed him hard on the lips and grinned at him. He smiled tightly at her. His next glance in my direction was sheepish and utterly vulnerable.

That was when I closed my eyes.

When Trish was safely out of sight, he bolted into the study and stood by me, looking hurt and, unbelievably, like he was the one who'd been wronged.

"What are you doing here, Ellie?" He shifted his weight between his feet a time or two, then ended up leaning against the back of one of the chairs. "I mean, this dorm...it's, um...I didn't think you ever came here. Is it something you do often?"

I looked at the seven other people studying in the room, their gazes ranging from seemingly absorbed by their own stuff to obviously irritated by our distracting conversation.

I sighed. "If I didn't already know the answer, Brent, I'd ask you the same." I got up and pushed my way past him to get to the door.

He chased after me. Down the hallway, up the stairs, through the first floor corridor to the dorm's back exit (I couldn't fathom walking through the crowded lobby) and outside into the winter chill.

As I stepped onto the wet sidewalk, avoiding the clumps of snow clinging to the pavement, he called, "Please, Ellie. Stop. I'm sorry."

I stopped.

I swiveled toward him, my heart and my fingers already numb, and I realized with a clarity I'd never before experienced that I had no idea what I was doing.

I didn't know who I was.

I didn't know who I wanted to be with. h.e.l.l, after the past couple of hours, maybe n.o.body.

I didn't know where I was going in life or even where I was walking to in the next few minutes.