Page 73

“I just figured you’d have forgotten me. It was a long time ago.”
“Trust me, I haven’t forgotten you.”
They were silent again, looking at each other, and Thom knew that they were going to sleep together that weekend, that it was preordained. In some ways it was as though it had already happened. And he felt himself reflexively shoving the thought of Maggie, his sweet, trusting girlfriend, to the back of his mind, preparing himself for this betrayal, telling himself he had no choice in the matter.
“Where are you staying?”
“One of the dorms. Isn’t everyone?”
“I think so. I am.”
Wendy was fiddling with her name tag, which had come prepackaged, as had his, in a clear plastic case on a lanyard. “Our room number and combo are supposed to be behind our name tag.” She pulled out a slip of paper. “Benchley, Room 22.”
Thom looked behind his own name tag and found a similar slip of paper. He remembered the woman at the check-in desk saying something about where to find the information about his housing,but he’d already developed his lifelong habit of never listening to instructions the first time they’d been given.
“I’m in a dorm called Robinson. Room 331.”
“Let’s go look at the wayfinding map and figure out where to go,” Wendy said, turning and walking, apparently aware of what a wayfinding map was, and where it was located.
Thom followed her.
They were together the entire afternoon. After dropping off their luggage in their respective dorm rooms they wandered the campus together, steering clear of the conference’s other participants. They found a bench down by a murky pond and sat on either end.
“Why didn’t you write me?” Thom said.
Wendy pressed her lips together in an amused smile. “You’re talking about when we were fifteen? You do rememberyoutold me not to write to you.”
“I didn’tmeanit. I was very dramatic back then.”
“If you didn’t mean it, you shouldn’t have said it.”
“Probably not, but I just figured you wouldn’t listen to me. I wouldn’t have, if our situations were reversed.”
“I did write you. A lot. All the time. I just didn’t send the letters. We lived too far apart. There was so much going on in my life, and the truth was that I believed what you told me, that we shouldn’t write, that we should only remember one another on our birthdays.”
“I was a pretentious little shit. I’m sorry about that. But did you...”
“Remember you on our birthday? Of course. How about you?”
“I did. Every one of them I thought of you.”
Clouds were gathering in the sky and the air was charged, a rainstorm imminent, but they sat and recounted their birthdays and where they’d been and what they’d done to celebrate. When the first fat drops began to fall, they ran back toward the student union, but it was too late. The skies had opened up and they were drenched by the time they were standing underneath the awning, hand in hand.
“We should go to the opening events, you know,” Wendy said.
“We should.”
By the time Thom was back at his dormitory, the rain had ceased, and the air was thick with humidity. He took a cold shower then changed for the cocktail party. He no longer had any interest in the conference, in the other writers, in his career. He was only interested in seeing Wendy again, even just seeing her across the room. It didn’t matter. She was back in his life.
That night, in the hubbub of the party, they were actually introduced. The moderator of Wendy’s workshop—she had signed up for the poetry concentration, while Thom was registered for short fiction—had actually been a professor of Thom’s at Mather College, and he introduced the two of them.
“Did you bring a story to workshop this weekend?” Wendy said as the moderator slid away into the crowd.
“I have two possibilities, but I reread them on the train coming here and now I’m in a panic.”
“No good?”
“I don’t think so,” Thom said. “But what do I know? That’s why I’m here, I guess.”