The Last September

The knock came at 9:47 on a Friday night, and I knew it was her before I even got up. Three knocks, a pause, then two more. Madeleine's knock. She invented it sometime during our first month, back when we were being so careful about not being careful.

I checked the peephole anyway, because old habits. Sure enough, there she was, duffel bag slung over one shoulder, hair loose, wearing that green jacket I've teased her about for three years.

I opened the door. "You're early."

"I'm forty-seven minutes early," she said, pushing past me into the apartment. "I counted. Hi, Katherine."

"Hi yourself." God, she smelled like rain and cheap shampoo. The same cheap shampoo she's bought since I met her at that party when I was 21. I was 24 now, and still weak in the knees over a woman with a duffel bag. What does that say about me?

She set the bag down by the couch and looked around. "It's small."

"It's cozy."

"It's a shoebox, Kat."

"It's my shoebox. Wine?"

"Bring your own," she said, and pulled a bottle out of the duffel like a magician with a rabbit. "That Riesling you like. The one from the co-op."

I just stared at her. "You remembered the co-op wine?"

"I remember everything about you, you dork. Get me a corkscrew."

So that was the tone of the night. Easy. Warm. Like we'd been doing this forever instead of sneaking around forever, which, okay, we had, but usually in stolen hours, not a whole open weekend stretching out in front of us. Our last one. She flew out Monday morning for the fellowship. Arizona. Eleven hundred miles or something. I'd looked it up. Twice.

I got the corkscrew and two glasses and found her already in my bedroom, surveying the disaster. Papers everywhere. My job at the admissions office follows me home like a stray dog.

"Wow," she said. "Did the applications explode?"

"Applicants explode. Applications just sort of multiply." I swept an armful of folders off the bed and into the box on the floor. "Ignore all of it. This weekend you don't exist and neither does my job."

"That's a little dark, Kat."

"Well." I shrugged. "We've never been good at talking about it, have we?"

She didn't answer that. She just sat down on the freshly cleared bed and held out her glass. Her fingers brushed mine when I poured, and I swear that tiny contact did more to me than most people's whole evenings.

"Three years," she said, looking into the wine.

"Three years in November. We're close."

"God." She laughed, a little shaky. "We're old."

"You're 25. You're ancient. Practically a fossil."

"Shut up and sit down."

So I sat. And we clinked glasses like we were toasting something, though neither of us said what. The future? The past? The eleven hundred miles? We drank instead of saying it. That was always our move.

* * *

Here's how it started, for anyone wondering. Three years ago, that party, the one where I met her. I was 21 and freshly out to approximately four people, and I'd had exactly enough beer to be brave. She was 22, a senior, and I'd seen her in the library a hundred times and never once worked up the nerve.

That night she was standing on a porch arguing with somebody about pottery. Actual pottery. Ancient pottery, I guess, since that's her whole thing.

"You can't carbon date ceramic," the other guy said.

"You absolutely can, thermoluminescence, it's right there in the literature," she said, and I swear I stood there like an idiot just listening to her.

I butted in with something dumb. I don't even remember what. Something about how I liked pots. Pots. And she turned around and looked at me and laughed, this big unguarded laugh, and said, "Okay, you're drunk, but you're charming. Who are you?"

"Katherine. I work in admissions now, but back then I was nobody."

"You were not nobody," she'd say later, every time I told it that way.

We talked on that porch for two hours. Then somebody turned the music up and she leaned close and said, "Do you want to get out of here?" and I said yes so fast I nearly bit my tongue.

But people do not know this about our first night. It was a mess. Total mess. We went back to her dorm room, which she shared with a roommate who was, thank god, at her boyfriend's, and we sat on the edge of her twin bed fully clothed for a solid twenty minutes just talking. Nerves like you would not believe. Two adults, both clearly interested, sitting there like the bed was lava.

At some point I said, "I've never actually done this."

"Done what, kissed a girl?"

"All of it. Any of it."

She went quiet for a second and then she said, "Okay. Then we go slow, and if you hate it, we order pizza and never speak of it."

"Deal," I said, "but I'm not going to hate it."

"You don't know that."

"I know that."

And I did, somehow. I knew it the way you know a song you've never heard. She kissed me and it was soft and careful and then it wasn't, and my hands were in her hair, and she made this little sound against my mouth that I think about to this day. We fumbled. We laughed at the fumbling. She got her elbow caught in my shirt sleeve and nearly fell off the bed, and we laughed so hard we had to stop, and then we stopped laughing and started again, slower.

That was the night it stopped being a hookup and turned into whatever we were. Neither of us planned it. Neither of us said it out loud, then or maybe ever, exactly. She just pulled the blanket over both of us afterward and said, "Stay," and I stayed.

And we stayed. Three years. In secret, mostly, because she was a grad student and I worked in the same building as her advisor's wife, and because we were cowards, and because honestly? The secrecy was part of it. Our thing. Ours alone. Nobody could form judgments about us because nobody knew we existed.

* * *

"Where'd you go?" Madeleine asked, pulling me back to the shoebox bedroom, the wine, the Friday night.

"Back to the pottery argument."

"God." She groaned into her glass. "I was so insufferable."

"You were. You are. I love it."

She smiled at me over the rim. "You were terrible that night, you know. You said you liked pots."

"I've improved since then. I now like vases and urns too."

She set her glass down on the nightstand, right on top of a stack of housing forms, which was very her, and turned to face me. "Kat."

"Yeah?"

"This weekend. I don't want to waste any of it being sad. Can we just... not? Can we just be us for two days?"

My chest did something complicated. "Yeah. Yeah, we can do that."

"Good." She reached over and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, the way she does, the way she's done a thousand times, and my eyes closed on their own. "Because I have plans for you, admissions girl."

"Oh yeah? What kind of plans?"

"Classified. Archaeological. I have to excavate you very carefully."

"That was awful," I said, laughing.

"That was terrible," she agreed, and kissed me, wine-sweet, familiar as coming home, and the box of housing forms got knocked to the floor and neither of us bent to pick it up.

The weekend had started. Two days, one shoebox apartment, and a woman who remembered the co-op wine. I decided right then I wasn't going to think about Monday until Monday made me.

I woke up to sunlight coming through the blinds in stripes across the bed, and Madeleine's hair everywhere. I mean everywhere. In my mouth, across my pillow, one long strand stuck to my cheek like she'd glued it there on purpose.

"Good morning," she mumbled, not opening her eyes.

"It's morning? Already?"

"Mm. You were the one who kept me up."

"Me? You're the one with the classified archaeological plans, remember?"

That got one eye open. "Those plans required multiple sessions. For thoroughness."

I laughed and got up, and I mean got up, because the floor was cold and my apartment is the size of a parking space. I put the coffee on and stood there in one of her old t-shirts, listening to the machine gurgle, feeling that specific Friday-in-reverse happiness you get when the whole day is still yours.

She came shuffling out in my bathrobe, which was too short on her and looked ridiculous, holding the field guide she'd brought in her bag. Southwestern Ceramic Typology. A real page turner.

"Read me something," I said, handing her a mug.

"Really?"

"Sure. I like pots now. Character growth."

So we did this thing we do. She sat cross-legged on the couch with her coffee and read me paragraphs about corrugated ware and slip patterns, and I sat on the floor with my head against her knee, and it was the most domestic half hour of my whole life. Which is a weird thing to say about pottery, but there it was.

"Listen to this," she said, tapping the page. "Tuzigoot Gaines. They could date a shard to within twenty years by the paint recipe. Isn't that wild? Somebody a thousand years ago had a recipe."

"Like a cookie recipe."

"Exactly like a cookie recipe! And we can still read it. You dip a brush in the right minerals, and a thousand years later some woman in a trench in Arizona goes, ah, yes, 1275, give or take."

"Some woman," I said, and I felt her knee go still under my cheek.

"Yeah," she said, quieter. "Some woman."

I got up and refilled both mugs so I had something to do with my hands. That's a habit of mine, I know. When a feeling gets too big I go make coffee. My mother calls me the world's most caffeinated avoider, which, fair.

"Hey." Madeleine caught my wrist as I set her mug down. "I wasn't being sad. I was being awed. Those are different."

"I know."

"They're different, Kat."

"I know! Sit there and read me about the cookie recipes."

She read me about the cookie recipes. And when she got to a boring part about temper inclusions she skipped ahead, because she knew I didn't care, and that's intimacy too, if you ask me. Knowing which paragraphs to skip.

* * *

By noon we'd showered, separately, because together we'd never have left, and we were walking across campus. It was one of those perfect September days where the light comes down all gold and the sorority girls are wearing scarves for no reason. Madeleine had the green jacket on. Obviously.

"Three years," I said, "and you still wear that jacket."

"It's a good jacket!"

"It's the color of pond scum, Maddie."

"It's forest. It says forest. And it was twelve dollars, so it says something else too."

We walked with a careful two feet of air between us, which is its own fluency at this point. Three years of practice. We cut behind the science building instead of going through the main square, because the main square is where her advisor eats lunch when the weather's nice, and down the block instead of past the graduate library, because the graduate library is where every archaeology grad student within a quarter mile goes to be seen pretending to work.

"You know what's funny?" she said as we crossed the little footbridge over the creek. "In two days none of this will matter. I could hold your hand in the main square in Arizona and nobody would know either of us."

"So hold my hand now."

"Kat."

"I'm serious. Nobody's around. It's Saturday. Even the pretentious grad students take Saturday off."

She looked ahead, then back, then slid her hand into mine so fast and casual you'd think we'd done it a hundred times. We had not. In three years, on this campus, we had not.

"See?" I said. "The world didn't end."

"Shut up, I'm nervous."

"Your hand is totally calm."

"My hand is a professional. The rest of me is a wreck." But she didn't let go, all the way across the bridge and up the hill past the bell tower, and when a guy with a bike walked by she only squeezed tighter, which made me absurdly happy. Like winning something.

We got sandwiches from the place on Elm and carried them to the benches by the arboretum, the far ones, behind the hedge where the maintenance guys park their carts. I'd never sat there with her before. I'd sat there alone plenty of lunch hours, eating and reading and trying not to think about how she was two buildings away.

"Do you remember," she said, unwrapping her sandwich, "when we made the schedule?"

"Our little rotation. How could I forget."

Because we really did have a schedule. Tuesdays she had seminar until eight, so I'd come to her place and we'd eat at nine. Thursdays I closed the admissions office at five, so she'd meet me at The Stag and we'd have one drink, two stools apart like strangers. Sundays were laundry, at the laundromat on Fifth, the one with the broken dryer number six that everyone knew to avoid, and we'd fold each other's towels as if it were ordinary, because to anyone watching it was ordinary.