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Duke is sixteen when Nathan Wuornos basically trips over his own enormous feet and falls on a landmine of sexy. She’s captain of the basketball team and is waiting for Penny Lapointe to graduate so she can take over the softball team, too, and Duke is too damn busy to be wondering when the hell Nathan Wuornos finally found a haircut that didn’t make him look like a child of the corn.
“Looking good, Wuornos,” Duke informs him with a leer and a set of finger-guns. The Crockers aren’t known for being especially classy. Wade is trying, bless him—Columbia, for god’s sake—but it’s a doomed effort.
“Go away,” Nathan says, his head still bent over the pile of books he’s pulling from his locker. She can see the general shape of his new haircut and it’s actually not visually offensive to her. Nathan’s got the kind of hair that always looks soft. Duke would be jealous about that if she wasn’t busy being better than Nathan in literally every other capacity.
“C’mon on, Wuornos,” Duke says lazily, propping her shoulder against her locker. “Where’s that neighborly affection gone to?”
“We neighbors now?” Nathan mumbles. He’s sorting through a stack of soft-spined Eng Lit books, maybe trying to find the one they’re supposed to be analyzing in class later today. It’s Virginia Woolf and Duke had hated it microscopically less than she’s hated everything else they’ve read this semester. Nathan probably had the time of his fucking life, though. His essay on The Bell Jar had been twelve pages long, which Duke knows because she broke into his locker to steal his lunch the day it was due.
Duke puts a hand to her chest and says, “You wound me, Wuornos. Locker neighbors since the ninth grade and you’ve never noticed?”
“I notice when my lunch goes missing,” Nathan says. The next book he pulls out of the fucking library in his locker is To the Lighthouse; he makes a happy sound in the back of his throat, nearly inaudible, and then shoves everything except for his chemistry textbook back in. In order to stuff it into his bag without showing Duke his back, that paranoid asshole, he twists at the waist and nearly head-butts her.
“You’re so skinny,” Duke observes. “You should eat more than a sandwich and an apple.”
“Says the delinquent who frequently mugs me for them,” Nathan says into his backpack. He’s struggling with his notebooks and Duke is an idiot with impulse control problems so she reaches up and grips a lock of his hair between her thumb and forefinger. It’s just as soft as advertised, like a baby’s or a supermodel’s. Duke gives it a light tug. Nathan, now reaching in and adjusting his collection of color-coded notebooks with both hands, doesn’t notice.
“You’re so lucky you’re pretty, Wuornos,” Duke tells him, and she lets go of his hair and turns on her heel so she can saunter off and annoy somebody else who will appreciate her. Nathan is such a nerd; it actually hurts to spend too much time looking at him.
Behind her, Nathan says, “Wait, what?”
~
At lunch, Natalie Kleinfelder steals one of Duke’s Doritos and says, “Have I been poisoned by the crazy shit in this town’s water or is Nathan Wuornos, like, kind of hot right now?”
Duke bats Natalie’s hand away from the rest of her Doritos and leans forward to get a good look at Nathan at the other end of the cafeteria, where he’s eating the sandwich Duke had beneficently decided not to steal (liverwurst, blech) with the rest of his sad coterie of earnest, scholarly A/V club friends. Haven High School is not big enough for there to be a lot of earnest, scholarly kids, so it’s basically just Nathan and a handful of people who all look asthmatic and anemic. Duke will stop calling Nathan a nerd when he stops being such a nerd cliché.
“Really?” Duke says, watching Nathan take a bite out of his liverwurst sandwich. “Wuornos?”
“Yeah,” Natalie says. “He’s—I don’t know. He’s so serious.”
Natalie says ‘serious’ like it’s a good thing, instead of a code word for boring. Unless Duke needs somebody to mock up a grammar diagram for a Robert Frost poem, she has no use for Nathan Wuornos.
“Nathan can’t feel anything,” Duke points out. It comes out a little desperately, so she recovers by shoving two Doritos into her mouth. “It doesn’t matter how hot you think he is, he’s not going to be able to get it up.”
“Okay, thanks, asshole,” Natalie says, rolling her eyes and knocking into Duke’s shoulder with her own. “I wasn’t going to drag him out behind the bleachers right this second or anything. It was just a thought. He’s probably the only guy in school who hasn’t slept with Denise. That’s kind of appealing.”
“I haven’t slept with Denise,” Duke reminds her, grinning at her toothily. “I mean, if that’s your only criteria, I’ve got study hall next period and it’s really easy to get a pass from Mrs. Woloschak—”
“Oh my god,” Natalie squawks, “shut up,” which is not a no.
~
On paper, Duke’s guardian is her stepmother. Thank god for pissy Upper West Side types who regret slumming it, though, because Duke had faked a tantrum at her mom’s funeral that would have made the old lady proud as hell and Meredith had dropped the idea of making Duke move back to Manhattan with her and Wade. Duke cooks for the Beaver Trap on the weekends in return for an attic room with a back entrance and she’s fine. Everything’s fine. Sometimes Meredith sends her money when there’s some to spare; Wade touches base once a month, on the first Tuesday, like he’s got “call Duke” written on a calendar above his desk.
Even if Duke can feed herself just fine and she’s got clothes on her back and all the other stuff orphans don’t have in the Charles Dickens books that Nathan Wuornos fucking loves, college isn’t happening unless she can scare up some scholarship money. Which: yeah, right. Duke charms a promise out of Joe that she can keep up her summer hours year-long once she graduates and she’s pretty sure that’ll be that until the spring of her junior year, when she (1) fucking kills the math section of the SATs—like murders it dead—and (2) the softball team wins the state championships under her exceptional captaincy.
~
“U of Maine?” Wade says skeptically. It’s the first Tuesday of October and Duke’s just gotten an under-the-table early acceptance from U of Maine personally phoned in by the softball coach. Since under-the-table is Duke’s usual modus operandi, she’s feeling good about it.
“Yeah,” Duke says. “Go Black Bears.”
“Please tell me you’re kidding,” Wade says, sounding horrified. “Duke, I can get you into Columbia. I know half of the admissions board. We have a softball team and it’s civilized.”
Duke wants to go to Columbia basically never, but Wade gets weird about his special New York City experiences. The last Christmas he’d spent in Haven, when their dad was still alive and Nathan had broken his arm like something straight out of a Friday the 13th sequel, Wade had not been able to shut up about his rec squash team. Duke doesn’t even know what squash the sport actually is, sort of like she suspects that Wade wouldn’t know what to do with squash the vegetable if ever confronted with one.
“Thanks, man,” Duke says, “but, um, I’m good. Not sure Columbia’s my speed, really.”
“Duke,” Wade says, his sigh turned into static by Joe’s shitty telephone connection, “you got a perfect quantitative score on the SAT. Columbia is your speed.”
Duke throws up in her mouth a little bit at the thought. “Ugh,” she says. “Thanks but no thanks.”
“What about NYU?” Wade suggests. “I’m sure they have a softball team.”
Since Duke wants to talk to her brother about her juvenile record never—seriously, break into one liquor store once and it’s like DEFCON 2—she decides magnanimously to just change the subject. “How’s Meredith?” she asks, although she really doesn’t care.
Diffidently, Wade says, “I don’t know, Mom’s probably fine. She went to Bruce’s place in Montauk for the foliage this month.”
Duke doesn’t remember who Bruce is, but knowing Meredith it’s probably some suave 50-year-old hedge fund manager. Dad had been a blip in Meredith’s otherwise pristine record; Duke had gotten the impression at a very young age that it was an excusable blip because Dad was hotter than 90% of the cabana boys that Meredith’s friends had slept with that year and Wade is charming and smart. Duke is charming and smart, when she wants to be, but mostly Duke is inconvenient. Meredith hadn’t exactly pressed the point about moving to Manhattan after Duke’s mom had died.
“Nice,” Duke lies. “Listen, I have homework, so I gotta scram.”
“Really?” Wade says drily, but he relents a bare second later. “Fine, I better go, too. Listen, Duke—you should really think about coming down to the city. You could stay with me for the weekend and tour NYU.”
“Yep,” Duke says. “I’ll definitely think about it, thanks.” She hangs up as soon as the words ‘good’ and ‘bye’ have escaped Wade’s mouth. Wade’s a baby grad student at right now; he’ll pull an all-nighter for one of his terrible classes and forget about her promise before his next check-in phone call. Dad had been like that.
There’s a creak of floorboards and the heavy sound of the door to the Beaver Trap slamming open. “Hey, Crocker,” Joe yells up the stairs. “You free to take over Kelsey’s shift tonight? Her twins have the chicken pox.”
“No problem, boss!” Duke shouts back. She’s not giddy about college, necessarily—Duke learned fast and early not to get attached to life plans, since they have a tendency to go sideways—but she likes the feeling of pulling one over somebody. The first time she’d successfully forged Meredith’s signature on a bunch of paperwork from the state, the first poker game she’d won with a pot over a grand—that’s what getting into U of Maine feels like. Like Duke’s won a game nobody else has realized that they’re playing.
~
Four weeks into her freshman year at U of Maine (go Black Bears!), Duke finds out that she is incredibly bad at remembering all of the emperors of Rome. She is also pretty terrible at remembering any of the emperors of Rome, other than Julius Caesar.
Four weeks and three days into her freshman year, Duke finds out that Nathan is also in her MWF section of HTY 256: Roman Empire. In her defense, Duke sits in the back of the lecture hall and spends most of class doodling angry penises on her notes. She’s not exactly paying attention to the line of overeager assholes in the first row, which is Nathan Wuornos’ natural habitat. For the first four weeks of the semester Duke has never been closer than the sixth row of seats, but at the beginning of the fifth Wednesday class she goes up to the front to collect a study guide for the upcoming midterm and nearly runs bodily into Nathan.
“Jesus, watch it,” Duke mutters, and then she looks up and says, “oh fuck me.”
“Crocker,” Nathan says tersely. “Didn’t know you were in this class.”
“Miss me, Wuornos?” Duke asks automatically, fluttering her eyelashes at Nathan like they’re butterflies.
“No,” Nathan says and he sits down in his seat, directly in front of the professor’s lectern, like their conversation is now over. Typical Nathan.
Instead of taking the hint, Duke drops her bag to her feet and sprawls into the chair to Nathan’s right. “I’m sure that isn’t right,” Duke says. “I bet you missed me so much.”
Nathan, tucking the study guide into his (blue; oh god, is he still color-coding them?) notebook, ignores her. He takes a pen out of his backpack and writes the date at the top of a fresh page in his notebook in neat capitals. One day, Nathan is going to make an exceptionally boring cop and will probably be Duke’s nemesis, but right now he’s a familiar face and Duke has a moral obligation to ruffle his feathers.
“Hey, can I borrow a pen?” Duke asks.
“No,” Nathan says. The professor is shuffling papers at the lectern and fiddling with the slide projector; when Duke opens her mouth to ask again, this time even more sweetly, Nathan adds, “Shut up, class is starting.”
Duke pinches Nathan’s thigh and hisses, “Lend me a pen, Wuornos!” and Nathan kicks his backpack in a loud crash into the lectern, upsetting the slide projector and the professor.
“Mr. Wuornos?” the professor says, looking at Nathan over the top of his enormous glasses. “Is everything all right?”
“I’m—I—yeah—sorry,” Nathan says. He looks so pale that Duke is concerned for like half a second that he’s going to start projectile vomiting or faint onto her or something, but instead he gets up and jerkily collects his backpack. The entire class is watching in the kind of silence that’s expectant and semi-hysterical. Somebody needs to laugh to break the tension, so Duke leans back in her desk and starts to clap.
“Well done, Wuornos,” she says to a spattering of receptive giggles. “That was fucking graceful.”
The professor, who seems to love Nathan just like every other authority figure on the face of the planet, turns his beady stare on Duke. “That’s enough, Miss—?”
“Crocker, sir,” Duke replies innocently.
“Yes, well, Miss Crocker, I don’t think we need any of that, do we?” The professor—Duke thinks his name is Dr. Fortescu but she wouldn’t stake any significant amount of money on that—looks pointedly at Duke’s hands.
Duke waggles her eyebrows at him and says, “Oh, Nathan’s fine with it. Right, buddy?”
“Fine,” Nathan parrots through thin, white lips. He’s sitting as far away from her as possible in his seat. If they weren’t in the front row and the entire class wasn’t watching them breathlessly she’s pretty sure Nathan would’ve bolted. What the hell is his problem, beyond his normal damage?
For obvious reasons, Duke is even more useless than usual in class and by the end of it she hasn’t taken any notes—she briefly considers stealing Nathan’s pen but she wouldn’t put it past him to try and stab her with it in his current condition—and she doesn’t care because Nathan still looks like a recently reanimated corpse. When Dr. Fortwhatsis lets them go at ten to four, Nathan grabs his notebook in one hand and his backpack in the other and books it on his giraffe stilt legs, taking the steps up to the exit in the back of the room three at a time. He forgets his pen.
Duke stuffs her shit into her bag and sprints after him, shoving his pen behind her ear. “Hey, Wuornos!” she calls. “Wait the hell up!”
Nathan does not wait for her and erupts out of the lecture hall at almost a dead run. He hadn’t been on the track team at Haven High for extremely understandable reasons and Duke is a fucking U of Maine athlete but she’s still having a hard time catching up to him and once he hits the sidewalk outside of Stevens it’s basically over.
“This isn’t done, Wuornos!” Duke bellows after him as he disappears around the corner of Little Hall. Duke wasn’t voted Most Likely to Become a Professional Criminal because of her rakish good looks. Well, not only. Nathan should know better.
~
Duke briefly considers charming one of the interns at Student Affairs but when she goes by after dinner to scope out which of them might be most receptive she discovers that the Student Affairs office has an extremely tragic security system and, well, Duke would rather take her time than rush anything.
She goes back to her dorm, fleetingly attempts to study for Roman Empire and fails miserably, then chokes down a Cup Noodle around ten. By eleven her roommate has fallen asleep and doesn’t stir when Duke casually puts on her shoes and clicks off her desk light. The roommate thing had been a particularly hard adjustment; Duke has slept in some terrible places but she’d always been alone and that’d been its own peculiar comfort. Luckily, Lucille is also on the softball team and has a scholarship that requires the kind of GPA that necessitates long hours at the library.
Breaking into Student Affairs is so easy that Duke is kind of insulted. What if somebody wants to access her records? She briefly considers checking her own file to make sure it’s secure, but that’s the kind of paranoid shit that Dad had done and Duke’s turning over a new Crocker leaf.
Nathan’s file says that he lives in Penobscot with all the other overachieving honors students. It’s only eleven-thirty and the honors kids probably never sleep, all the better to maintain their ridiculous GPAs. They probably don’t have practice at six in the morning four days a week, like Duke.
Sure enough, twenty minutes later Duke is slipping into Penobscot behind a clump of pre-meds loudly complaining about their anatomy lab and how hard it is to get the smell of formaldehyde out of their clothes, which is not a problem Duke has ever had to deal with. Nathan’s room is on the second floor and when Duke knocks on his door he shouts “Go away!” so quickly that Duke is briefly concerned that he can tell that it’s her.
Nathan’s fucking weird but even he can’t see through doors, so Duke pitches her voice to something bright and fluttery and says, “Nathan? Do you have a second?”
There follows a long second in which Duke can almost hear Nathan’s better nature winning out over his pissy mood and then the lock on the door clicks and Nathan opens the door, sighing and saying, “Sure, what’s up?”
“Hey man,” Duke says, putting a hand in the center of his chest and pushing him back into the room. She follows after him because he gives almost no resistance, his skinny chest falling backwards so easily that Duke would suspect him actually wanting her to be there (which: HA). A brief scan of the room reveals an absent roommate. “Where’s Brian?” she asks.
“Are you here for Brian?” Nathan asks incredulously, his eyebrows drawn together.
“No, idiot, I’m here for you,” she says. “I was just wondering where your roommate is.”
“How did you know that Brian’s my roommate?” Nathan says instead of answering the question. He’s inching steadily back; in about half a minute he’s going to hit the wall and not be able to get any further away from Duke. “Actually, how did you know that I live here?”
“Please,” Duke says. “I have my ways. What the hell was up with you in class earlier?”
“Nothing,” Nathan lies. He’s got the kind of face that’s stony and hard to read but his body is twitching in a very incriminating way. “Listen, Crocker, I’m a little busy. Can you go away?”
“No,” Duke says as pleasantly as possible. She steps after Nathan to test a theory and he immediately darts to the side, maintaining a two-foot distance from Duke but also trapping himself between Duke and his bed. His palm is pressed against his chest, lightly rubbing where Duke had put her hand to move him into his room, and Duke’s theory is seeming more likely by the second.
Nathan glowers at her. “Seriously?” he says. “I’m going to call my RA.”
“Go ahead,” Duke taunts, and then she decides to stop pussyfooting around, as Duke and patience have never been best friends. She launches herself at Nathan; he’s four inches taller than her but he’s still skinny as hell and Duke plays an NCAA sport that requires great thighs so her momentum carries them both back onto the bed.
In half a second Nathan is staring up at her, his whole body gone tense. He’d put his arms up, either to catch her or to fend her off, and his elbows are hooked around her upper arms. His pupils are so big that they’re almost hypnotizing. “You can feel me, can’t you?” Duke says. She’s whispering for God knows what reason; it’s probably because Nathan’s breathing so heavily and she’s got her thighs framing his hips.
Nathan swallows twice; the first time is so dry that even Duke can hear his throat rasp. “Yeah,” he finally says.
“Christ,” Duke says. Her leggings are slipping against the polyester of his comforter so she adjusts her weight from back on her heels up to her knees and it pushes Nathan’s arms up, his forearm hooking around the back of her neck. He feels really warm. “When the hell did this happen?” she asks. “Have you gotten an MRI yet or something?”
“No,” Nathan says and he yanks her down and kisses her, holding her against him with his elbow around her neck and his other hand pushing up the back of her shirt. His palm against the small of her back is sweaty and burning and he’s just mashing their lips together like he’s in fucking sixth grade at his first formal.
“Christ, Wuornos,” Duke says again, muffled against his mouth. She tries to change the angle but she doesn’t have enough leverage, so she stuffs her hands into his hair and physically tugs his head the way that she wants it. His hair is still so soft and now Duke has handfuls of it and she’s able to shift their mouths so that she’s no longer in danger of cutting her lip against her teeth. Not that Duke’s diametrically opposed to a little blood but she has a feeling that Nathan Wuornos is really fucking vanilla.
Duke peels away long enough to demand, “Who the hell taught you to kiss?” Nathan blinks up at her with his big blue eyes, like a deer Duke’s just hit with her truck, and she realizes, “Right, stupid question. Listen, Wuornos, I’m hope you don't actually have brain damage right now because then I’d feel bad about this.”
“Shut up, Crocker,” Nathan tells her, and he rears up to kiss her again. This time it’s at a better angle, at least, and he’s holding her neck with his hand instead of his elbow. He moans when Duke puts her tongue in his mouth, licking out a stale, nutty taste—coffee, maybe—and he moans when Duke grinds down against his dick and he moans when he gets his hands on her breasts and Duke proceeds to almost give him a concussion when he pinches a nipple between his thumb and forefinger, the shock of it running down her belly so fast that her head goes fuzzy.
Maybe twenty seconds later, Duke is ripping Nathan’s t-shirt up over his head and biting across his collarbone, demanding, “Can you feel this?” after each nip. Nathan grabs the base of her ponytail and peels her off of his chest; “What the hell do you think?” he asks and he rolls them over so he can rub his dick between her legs.
“That’s my hip joint,” Duke tells him. “Fuck, get off for a second, lemme take off my leggings. I know you’re a visual learner.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Nathan demands. It figures that he wants to be good at sex immediately with his brand new nerve endings; it’s such a fucking guy thing.
“It means you don’t know where my vagina is, asshole,” Duke tells him. She uses her knees to push him away and then unhooks her leggings and underwear and wriggles out of them simultaneously, kicking them to the bottom of the bed. “Look,” she tells him, spreading her legs out and resting her feet flat against his comforter. “This is a clitoris, this is my hip joint. One of these is an erogenous zone, the other is—”
Nathan goes pale again, the way that he had in class, but instead of kicking out he sort of flops over and shoves his face into her groin. “Oh my fuck,” Duke can’t help shrieking; his mouth is hot and suddenly it’s kind of everywhere, his soft, sweaty hair pressed against her inner thigh. “Shit—Nathan—” To give the guy credit, he’s not being half-hearted about it; he’s eating her out with his entire mouth, even if that much continual pressure on Duke’s clit is sending her brain stuttering instead of to a sexy place. “Nathan, I need—okay, we need—shit—” Duke grabs a handful of his hair and yanks his head up. “Wuornos, you need to fucking listen, okay?”
“What,” Nathan demands. His entire chin is wet, which would be embarrassing except Duke’s pretty sure that Nathan is four seconds away from coming all over himself.
“Gently,” Duke says through her teeth. “That got way too much way too fast. For fuck’s sake, Wuornos, it’s not a Nintendo controller. Key-smashing is not how you win this level.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Nathan says.
Duke says, “I’m trying to translate this to geek for you,” and when he glares at her, she releases her grip on his hair and says, “Watch for a second. You need to accept that this is something I'm better at.” Nathan makes a predictable face at this. His whole body is shaking where his torso is pressed against her leg and he looks like he’s about to overload, which doesn’t exactly bode well for the rest of this.
“Seriously,” Duke says. “Watch.” She shows him how to peel apart the lips of her labia, how she likes to be touched—emphasis on gentle, asshole, she hopes he gets from her expression—and then she takes one of his hands and uses his newly sensitized fingers to circle around her clit, rub down to her cunt, back up again to gently skim over the top of her clit. She’s so wet, at least, but Nathan’s fingers are callused from a decade of accidents caught too late not to scar and Duke’s having a hard time keeping her hips from shuddering down, clenching on nothing.
“Get it?” Duke says through her teeth.
Nathan says, “Yeah,” absently and he leans down and seals his mouth over her cunt and licks over it in a light flick, the slightest pressure from his teeth; when Duke gasps wetly at the ceiling, he increases the pressure and she has to knee him in the head and say, “Gentle,” in a wrecked voice that may not be the best way to get Nathan Wuornos to do what she wants.
“For fuck’s sake, Crocker,” Nathan mumbles, “stop being a backseat driver.”
“Stop being bad at eating me out, then,” Duke tells him, and he pinches her thigh. They’re probably going to keep going around in circles about this so Duke puts her hands on his shoulders and pushes him back until they’re both sitting up and Nathan’s glaring at her again. His lips are so red that his eyes look very blue and Duke wants to ride his face but she also wants to get off some time this century and maybe he’ll be more pliable after he’s come.
“Where are your condoms?” she asks.
“What?” Nathan says.
“Condoms,” Duke repeats. When Nathan blinks at her blankly, she says, “Oh, of fucking course.” Even if Nathan isn’t a real boy his roommate probably is; Duke climbs out of his bed in the least graceful way possible and goes to dig in his roommate’s bedside table. In additional to an optimistic number of bottles of lube, he has a box of condoms that looks mostly full.
“Wow, this really is nerd HQ,” Duke mumbles to herself as she takes two and slams the drawer shut. “Pants off, Wuornos.”
Nathan shucks his pajama pants and boxers and Duke just puts the condom on for him; she doesn’t want to make this entire thing a case for better sex ed in American public schools. While Nathan’s lying back looking stunned at his ability to now feel things on his dick—he has Duke’s sympathy, really—she climbs up and over him, straddling him and leaning down to suck his tongue into her mouth. Duke remembers the bad sex she’d had when she was in high school and all of the kissing was wet and messy; she flicks her tongue up into his mouth and adjusts his dick with her hands, trying to get him at the right angle while he’s mostly being a sex-stupid noodle person.
“Wuornos,” she complains, and he puts his hands on her ass and helps her line everything up, his tongue still stuck inside her mouth, his mouth tasting more like her cunt now than it ever had of coffee. Duke’s so swollen that she feels like the vaginal equivalent of the Stay Puft man and she just wants to come and she takes Nathan’s dick in faster than his virginal senses can probably handle, seeing as how he almost chokes on her tongue when she does it.
“Come on, Wuornos,” she says, lifting up and then fucking down. “I showed you how to touch my clit, c’mon—”
Goading Nathan into doing what she wants is even easier with sex involved, it turns out, because Nathan rubs circles around her clit so fast that Duke’s head feels like it’s about to blow off and he lasts a surprisingly long two or three minutes until he can’t control his fingers anymore and Duke has to hold the heel of his palm down herself so she can have something to buck up against as he comes.
Nathan loses his fine motor control at just the wrong moment, just as Duke’s on the frayed edge of an orgasm, and she lets his dick slip out of her and fucks herself with her fingers as he gasps like a landed fish up at the ceiling. She comes grinding against her hand and his stomach and it saps everything out of her muscles; she flops over him and breathes into the crook of his neck for a few minutes, her thighs trembling.
“Well,” Duke finally says when she can feel her fingers again. “So, that’s sex.”
~
Duke really didn’t think this through, because at three o’clock on Friday afternoon she slips into her usual seat at the back of the lecture hall in Stevens for a fun fifty minutes of angry penis doodling and is joined three seconds later by none other than Nathan Wuornos himself.
“Hey Crocker,” he says casually, slapping his notebook out onto his desk.
“Holy shit,” Duke says, startled almost out of her chair. She hasn’t been avoiding him, since her usual patterns of movement had kept them in separate orbits for the first four weeks of the semester, but that doesn’t mean that she wants to see him. “What are you doing back here? Don’t you have somebody’s ass to kiss down in the front row?”
“It’s fine,” Nathan says diffidently. He opens his notebook and writes the date at the top of a fresh page. Duke is filled with so much rage at this that she leans over and draws an enormous angry penis over the top of the page, ejaculating onto the date.
“Wow,” Nathan says once she’s done and settled back in her chair. “Very artistic, Crocker. You thought about doing this professionally?”
“It’s yours,” Duke tells him. “Consider it a portrait.”
Nathan actually picks up his notebook and turns it, like he’s considering it from multiple angles. “Hmm,” he says, flicking a look at Duke out of the corner of his eye. “I think you took a few liberties, Crocker.”
“I draw only what I see, Wuornos,” Duke tells him sweetly. “Keep it and feel free to compare with the original source material.”
The corner of Nathan’s mouth turns up in a very small smile and the look of it sends a cold shudder of dread through Duke’s chest. “Thanks,” he says drily.
“You’re welcome,” Duke spits out. She pauses for a second and then asks, “Can I borrow a piece of paper?”
“No,” Nathan says and Duke, masterful liar that she is, manages to hide her relief. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.
~
“Do you need a tutor?” Nathan asks literally out of nowhere the following week. He’s still sitting next to Duke; he’d managed to wheedle her into a new set of seats in the middle row, which had resulted in lot of angry grumbling from the seats’ usual occupants. It’s a dick move but Duke sort of specializes in those and it’s always fun to see Nathan expand his asshole horizons.
“What?” Duke says. Penises had gotten boring and, to Duke’s eternal confusion and frustration, it had been hard to draw them with Nathan fucking Wuornos dutifully taking notes to her direct left. She’s now drawing cats in the margins of her beat-up study guide.
“The test on Friday,” Nathan says, tilting his head towards her study guide. There are a lot of penises and cats on it but Duke has still not been able to successfully remember all five of the Five Good Emperors. She always forgets Trajan. Hopefully the addition of a tiny sabertooth tiger around his name will help her. “You never take notes, so I didn’t know if—”
“What, I’m an idiot and you don’t trust my ability to pass this class?” Duke says. The worst part is that he’s not wrong, but Duke’s made an art form out of surviving using her own rules and she doesn’t need Nathan Wuornos in his fucking white pick-up swooping in to save her Roman Empire grade.
Nathan rolls his eyes stiffly and says, “Touchy I see, Crocker.”
“That’s me,” Duke agrees. “Anyway, don’t worry. I’m fine. I’ll manage just fine. I always do.”
She’s 80% certain that Nathan is going to take this as an opening to give some sort of speech about how she doesn’t have to do things on her own anymore—Duke had dated a guy that exact kind of deluded before and it’d been a miserable few months full of crying in the rain and emotional overinvestment—but he looks at her for a few seconds instead of saying anything cloying and then shrugs. “Suit yourself,” he says.
Nathan’s deliberately casual silence lasts until the end of class, when Duke is putting the last touches on her Trajan sabertooth and chanting “98-117 AD” under her breath.
“Hey,” he says, standing up slowly and hooking his bag over his shoulder. “Not that I think you’re going to fail and die in a pit somewhere, but—if you need somebody to study with, you know where my dorm room is.”
Duke gets as far as lifting her eyes incredulously to Nathan’s face before he says, “See you, Crocker,” and bolts. It’s slightly more graceful than his exit a week ago but not by much. Nathan has a lot of learn about how to leave a fucking conversation.
~
Duke does not, in fact, fail the Roman Empire midterm. She has to draw a bunch of stick figure cats at the top of her exam paper but she manages to remember all of the emperors and connect them to their major accomplishments and she writes her essay about Trajan, who turns out to be the only one she can talk about in any kind of detail.
Nathan is standing with some of the other front-row nerds when Duke leaves the Stevens lecture hall; they’re talking about Hadrian and Augustus and arguing about something extremely boring-sounding related to the technical aspects of their midterm. Duke tries to sidle around them but Nathan sees her and waves off his passel of dork friends.
“How’d you think it went?” he asks Duke and he actually matches their strides, like they’re going to walk off into the sunset of this chilly October Friday night together. “I was worried about the Severans.”
“Weren’t we all,” Duke deadpans. She has plans for tonight and they involve going to a house party and seducing Lucille’s friend on the gymnastics team. Not that Duke is ever going to be gross about flexible ladies but she’d vastly prefer charming her way into a nubile gymnast’s leotard over whatever passes for fun weekend conversation with Nathan Wuornos.
“What else are you taking this semester?” Nathan asks her. “I hope you care about those classes more than you care about Roman Empire.”
“Roman Empire fills my history gen ed,” Duke says. “That is literally the only reason why I’m in this class. I’m taking calculus and Japanese I. Why, do you need a calc tutor?”
Nathan ignores the mean way that Duke asks this and says, “Are you majoring in math?”
“Jesus Christ, Nathan, it’s my sixth week of college. I don’t know what the hell I’m majoring in. I bet I know what you’re doing, though—Criminal Justice and English Lit double.” She flutters her eyelashes up at him and coos, “Second-gen Chief Wuornos?”
“This campus doesn’t offer a degree in criminal justice,” Nathan says mildly. “If you aren’t careful your face is going to stick like that.”
“Gee, thanks, Mom,” Duke mutters and she leaves off on the fluttering. “Well how on earth are you going to maximize your time here if you can’t get a head start on catching and prosecuting the most dangerous of Maine’s criminal population?”
“Your knowledge of the intricate workings of Maine’s criminal justice system is astonishing,” Nathan says. “I’m going to do the training hours during the summer after I have 40 credits and then take the residential course down at the academy in Vassalboro. You have to be sponsored by a police department to do that so I’ll apply to HPD after graduation.”
“Wow,” Duke says. “Sounds very difficult. You worried about measuring up against Maine’s best and brightest, Wuornos?”
“If you were applying I would be,” Nathan says. “But otherwise I doubt I have a lot to be worried about.”
Duke says, “What a charmer, ladies and gents,” and gestures to Nathan for the benefit of a gaggle of geese wandering around the quad to their left. “You silver-tongued devil, you.”
Instead of saying anything in reply to this, Nathan raises an eyebrow and looks at Duke, expression mild and set. It takes Duke an embarrassing number of seconds to realize his point and then—this is so excruciating—she actually blushes, like she is not an adult woman with a varied and torrid sexual history that would give a priest a heart attack.
“What,” Duke finally says in something that she refuses to believe is a croak. “You offering, Wuornos?”
“You said I was terrible at oral sex,” Nathan reminds her, like Duke has forgotten last Wednesday. It had been objectively the worst sexual experience Duke’s had since her own first time but Duke still wants to climb him like a tree. Nerds like Nathan Wuornos thrive on feedback, don’t they?
“Well, you were,” Duke says.
Nathan’s other eyebrow goes up and he says, “Okay, so, we going to work on that?”
“Oh my god, Wuornos, if I’m not tutoring you in calculus I’m definitely not tutoring you in sex,” Duke squawks but at this point Nathan has tricked her into walking most of the way to Penobscot and, well. It’s really his inability to take direction that had been the problem, not an innate sexual deficiency. Duke is having a hard time looking at him and not seeing his wet mouth open against her cunt, his dark hair between her legs.
“This time,” Duke says threateningly, “you are going to listen to me.”
“Sure, Crocker,” Nathan agrees, so easily that Duke can smell how smug he is. She’s going to suck his brains out through his fucking dick the second they get to his dorm room, she decides. Try being smug then, Duke thinks at him aggressively as he strides forward and pulls the front door to Penobscot open and gestures her through. “After you,” he says.
“You have so much to learn,” Duke promises him darkly. “You don’t even know how ignorant you are.”
“Well thank god I have a sex tutor, then,” Nathan says just as they turn the corner towards the stairs and almost run head-long into the same group of pre-meds from last week. They all radiate the smell of preserved death; Duke now understands their formaldehyde concerns.
“Um,” one of them stutters, looking at Nathan and then Duke and then back to Nathan.
“Aren’t you the guy with idiopathic neuropathy?” the one in the middle in a cropped Nirvana tee asks Nathan. It’s especially funny because they’re all so short; even Duke towers over them and Nathan’s four inches taller than her.
Nathan’s face goes blank. Duke says for him, “Not anymore,” in an aggressively cheerful way. “Hey, listen, great to meet you all, but we have plans so, um, catch you never.” She grabs the sleeve of Nathan’s shirt between her fingers and bodily drags him through the pre-meds to the stairs.
“Rude,” one of them hisses to her back.
“You think she was the rude one here?” another one of them says, officially restoring at least part of Duke’s faith in the future of the medical profession. Whether or not this dissention erupts into mutiny is a mystery to Duke because she pulls Nathan into the staircase and then uses him to close the door, pressing her body against his and arching up to kiss him, open-mouthed and filthy. It’s like a graduate seminar in kissing so she hopes Nathan fucking appreciates it.
He sinks down to meet her, mouth to mouth and chest to chest, his hands going to her hips. He still hasn’t figured out what to do with his head while doing this but he’ll find out what works with practice. Duke pulls back and then buries her face in his throat, latching her teeth around a pale stretch of his absurd giraffe neck. The half-hearted hickeys Duke had given him last week have mostly faded but Duke goes in with the intent of leaving a reminder with an ache, one that Nathan will be able to feel every time he touches his neck.
“That’s a hickey,” Duke announces when she lets go. “Gimme your hand.” Nathan’s watching her with his mouth slick and half-open; he dutifully gives her his hand. She folds all of his fingers except the index and middle into a loose fist and presses those two against the middle of the red spot she’s left. “You feel that?” she asks him quietly, watching the way his eyes narrow and the blue of them seems to get darker. “Sometimes the best part of sex is what you feel after it’s over.”
“Lesson one?” Nathan asks; it comes out more or less steadily.
“No, idiot, lesson one was how to eat me out,” Duke says irritably. “That was like lesson seven.”
Nathan actually laughs at this, and then he turns his hand around so he’s gripping Duke’s wrist instead of vice versa and he books it for the stairs, taking them two at a time. “For fuck’s sake, Wuornos,” Duke gripes behind him, her backpack hanging off of one shoulder and banging against her ass as she leaps to the landing to avoid having her arm yanked out of its socket. “It’s called patience.”
“You can’t lecture anybody on patience,” Nathan throws over his shoulder, and then he’s scrambling with the key to his room and Duke takes the opportunity to slip her hands around his waist and under his shirt, flicking quickly down the line of buttons on the fly of his jeans. Duke’s a champion sex chicken player, so she hope Nathan realizes that she will actually do this in the hallway if he doesn’t hurry the hell up.
They burst through the door as Duke opens the last button and slips her hand inside his jeans, groping for the slit in his boxers. “Oh my god,” yells Nathan at the same time somebody—the mysterious roommate Brian, presumably—shrieks like a little girl and pulls a textbook over their face so quickly that Duke can hear it collide with something in an ugly crunch.
“Fuck,” says Brian. “Fuck, I think I just broke my fucking nose.”
“Shit,” Nathan says.
Duke peels her hand out from inside Nathan’s jeans and shuffles into the room. “Hey, I’m Duke.”
Brian lowers his textbook and glowers at her; he’s bleeding pretty profusely down over his lip and it’s splattering onto what looks like a diagram of a capacitor. “Condom thief,” he says accusingly.
“Guilty,” Duke says. “I can take a look at your nose if you want.”
“I saw where those hands just were, so, no thanks,” Brian points out, not unreasonably. “I think I’m just going to go to Student Health. I made him buy his own damn condoms so if you two could avoid actually having sex on any of my belongings I would really appreciate it.”
“Hey man, no problem,” Duke agrees cheerfully. “Nice to meet you!” she calls after him as he shoves his feet into a pair of boots and stomps out of the door. “He seems like a nice guy,” she tells Nathan, turning to face him. He’s red with embarrassment but it’s mostly in his cheeks and the flush has done really great things to his neck. Duke’s eyes drop in an automatic up-and-down motion and his jeans are barely clinging to his narrow hips, the fly splayed. “Hey,” Duke says almost involuntarily.
“Hey,” Nathan says, and it only takes Duke reaching out and putting a hand on his wrist for him to be back in the right mindset. “Hey,” Nathan says again, and then, “shit,” as Duke sinks to her knees and puts her hands back inside his pants.
“You’re going to like lesson eight a lot,” Duke promises him.
~
Nathan is in Duke’s Calc II class in the spring.
“Seriously?” Duke says, standing in front of his desk because the ones on either side of him have been claimed by his fellow overachievers. “Do you even need to be taking this class? Aren’t you an English major?”
“It’s a pre-req for a forensics class I want to take in Augusta this summer,” Nathan says. “How was your Christmas, Crocker?”
Duke had gotten some extra cash working at the Beaver Trap for three weeks and then she’d gone in on a poker game on New Year’s Eve and doubled her haul by taking a bunch of skiing tourists to the cleaners. It’d been the best Christmas she’d had since Mom died.
“Great,” Duke says. “I didn’t have to see you, that was particularly awesome.”
“I bet,” Nathan says. He turns to the kid to his left and says, “Do you mind moving so she can sit here?”
The kid blinks at Nathan and then up at Duke; with a protracted sigh, he says, “Fine,” and moves his vast number of belongings over one seat.
“Maybe I don’t want to sit with you,” Duke says to Nathan as she sits down. “Did you even take Calc I? Do you know how basic math works?”
“No,” Nathan says drily; he opens his notebook—this one’s red—and writes the date at the top of the page. “But I know a really great tutor, so I think I’m probably going to be okay.”
~
It’s not like Duke and Nathan are dating; it becomes something like a very chill friends with benefits arrangement, with most of the benefits happening during the school year. Once they’re back in Haven during breaks Duke almost never sees Nathan; he spends the summers interning at the station or taking classes down at the U of Maine campus in Augusta. Duke fucks Lucille’s gymnast friend a few times, beats up a guy on the baseball team who tries to feel her up at a party, and talks Nathan into trying pegging.
Nathan’s basically the only person that Duke sleeps with who is capable of keeping things low-key, which she appreciates. It’s probably why their thing lasts so long even when they fight all the damn time.
“It’s always the fucking tacks,” Duke tells him as she’s pulling on her leggings. “Seriously, Nathan, you need to forget about that.”
“Why do I need to forget it?” Nathan demands. He’s naked in bed, the covers tugged up around his waist because he’d been asleep until two minutes ago. Duke is usually really good at sneaking out post-coitus without being caught, but Nathan’s recovery from his neuropathy also came with absurdly delicate sensory awareness. “It’s not like you’ve ever apologized for doing it.”
“Oh, I’m sorry I played a prank when we were eight,” Duke says, rolling her eyes and almost tripping over her tangled leggings in the process. “It’s been twelve years, Nathan. You’re almost done with your sophomore year of college; you really need to let that go.”
“I will when you apologize,” Nathan retorts and Duke pulls her sweatshirt on without bothering with a bra or her shirt. Nathan can keep them; maybe they’ll soothe his sad and battered ego.
Duke tells him, “Good luck with that,” and slams his door behind her as she leaves.
~
They don’t talk again before classes end for the semester and the dorms clear out. Presumably Nathan makes it back to Haven but Duke’s only been in town for a few days when she gets approached about joining some sketchy motherfucker named Monty and his crew for the summer as they head out across the Atlantic; apparently they’d gotten her name from one of her dad’s old buddies.
“You speak Japanese, right?” Monty asks her. “We need somebody who can translate and we heard you’re a good cook. Solid to have on board.”
“Sure thing,” Duke agrees easily. She doesn’t have a lot of shit and Joe agrees to store it in the back of Beaver Trap, provided he can rent out the room above the bar to somebody else. Duke buys a new sleeping bag and a gun as a just-in-case measure—these guys knew her dad, after all; Duke hadn’t trusted him very much and she shared half of his DNA—and is on board the Lady Macabre by the end of her second week of summer break.
Duke learns a lot about smuggling that summer, and also about how to threaten people without ever actually having to shoot them. She gets very good at cooking eggs right before they go bad and invents fourteen new things to do with oatmeal, only ten of which involve cooking it. Duke’s Japanese goes from stiff and academic to laconic and vulgar and she picks up some pieces of conversational Russian.
It’s a good summer. Duke comes back browned by the sun, with new wrinkles by her eyes and a handful of tattoos up her arms. It’s hard not to feel strengthened by the sea, when she steps off of the Lady Macabre in late August and accepts the duffle of cash that Monty throws after her. She feels tougher than she had even after her most grueling practices for softball, and even though Duke’s been anticipating returning to solid ground she wants more than anything to be back on the water.
“It was good having you on board,” Monty says gruffly, gripping her arm firmly up near the elbow and giving it a shake when Duke does the same. Duke had seen him corner a Russian mobster and nearly put a knife through his eye when the Lady Macabre was being threatened but—Duke’s seen a lot of shit and Monty’s been solid. Duke can appreciate that.
“Thanks for having me,” Duke says, grinning at him, and they part ways. Duke collects her stuff from the back room of the Beaver Trap and buys her truck back from the high school kid she’d sold it to for the summer. She drives back to Orono with the windows rolled down, listening to what’s become popular on her favorite alternative station since she left. Everything feels like it’s being passed through a different filter to reach her but Duke thinks that’s probably normal after the kind of summer she’s had. Crockers roll with the punches; they have to, what with the crazy shit they do. Duke doesn’t want a lot of Dad’s legacy, but she’ll take the adaptability.
~
Duke moves into Cumberland with a bunch of other student athletes along the fringe of campus, says hi to the other girls on the team that have become familiar faces; she actually hugs Lucille, who hugs her back. Even if Duke’s body feels different she has to make it fit into the mold that is paying for her degree and expects a NCAA championship at the end of the year.
The dissonance makes it hard for Duke to get back into the right mindset. She needs to be jarred back into the correct place but she feels like she’s still bobbing with the motions of the sea. Duke had always heard the men in Haven talk about the ocean like a lady and figured they were being alcoholic poets, but she gets the draw, now. There was a part of Duke that rubbed raw against the rest of the Haven townsfolk—Nathan especially—and that’s the part that made her great out on the water.
“What you need,” Lucille slurs at her during a house party in early October, “is a really good fuck, to tether you. What happened to that guy? Not Dating Him guy?”
“Wuornos?” Duke says. If she was sober she’d probably put more effort into sounding dismayed, but her voice comes out weird and flat. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since April.”
“April?” Lucille squawks. “April? Oh my god. Please tell me you’ve slept with somebody since then.”
“Yeah,” Duke says absently. “This girl—well. Once, at least. Anyway, Nathan and I—we kind of fought the last time we saw each other.”
“You always fight,” Lucille says. “Where’s he? Still in Penobscot?”
“How the hell do you know that?” Duke asks but Lucille is already activating the gymnastics team gossip vine and checking if anybody knows where Nathan Wuornos is living this year.
“Third year Eng Lit?” one of the rhythmic gymnasts says. “Yeah, he’s in Penobscot. Fifth floor RA. Wait, do you know Nathan? Do you know if he’s seeing anybody? Because wow, talk about cheekbones.”
“He’s sleeping with Duke,” Lucille tells her.
The rhythmic gymnast makes an exaggerated sad face in Duke’s direction and says, “Figures. He has that sad look. You know. Pining.”
“That’s just his standard expression,” Duke says. “He’s bad at using his facial muscles.” She draws a circle in the air in front of her face.
“Uh-huh,” the rhythmic gymnast says. “I’m sure that’s it.”
Duke is too drunk to protest this but she’s not so drunk that she thinks that tracking Nathan down right this very moment is a good idea; she goes home with Lucille to Cumberland and sleeps off the worst of the vodka before making a decision. The next morning, even though she is incredibly hung-over and starving and nauseated by the very thought of consuming food, she grabs an egg and cheese sandwich from a kiosk by the library and walks to Penobscot. The air doesn’t smell right as she carefully chews through various layers of terrible beige food-adjacent product. The salt’s gone.
The door to Penobscot is still unlocked because the honors students have always been and will always be morons. Duke just walks up to the fifth floor and wanders around until she finds a tiny single that has NATHAN WUORNOS, RA, printed on green construction paper taped to an open door.
“What happened to Brian?” Duke asks and Nathan, hunched over his desk, jumps about seven inches in the air and badly smothers a bellow.
“Dammit, Crocker,” he says through his teeth.
“Is he still around?” Duke continues. “RA on the fourth floor or something?”
“He moved into the engineering frat’s house,” Nathan says. He’s talking in Duke’s general direction, his torso twisted around in his desk chair, but Duke gets the impression that he’s talking to something over her shoulder instead of her directly.
“Bummer,” Duke says.
“I’ll be sure to tell him you said hello,” Nathan says. “If you’re done, though, I have an essay I need to write for Tuesday, so.” He gestures to the door in a sweeping motion with the flat of his hand. “See you, Crocker.”
Duke leans against the doorjamb and says, “Wow, we are really fighting, aren’t we?”
“What gave you that impression?” Nathan asks. “Maybe the way you disappeared off the face of the planet in May? Because that’s when I got a clue.”
“I didn’t ‘disappear,’ you fucking drama queen,” Duke says, unfolding her arms long enough to hook air quotes in front of her. “I got a job as a cook on a boat for the summer. The Lady Macabre. I'm sure your dad’s tried to arrest Monty a million times so presumably you’re familiar with it.”
“I know what the Lady Macabre is,” Nathan says. He’d relaxed when she’d said that she was a cook but the tension comes back now. “Was math too boring, so now you’re a smuggler?”
“Wow, way to jump to conclusions,” Duke replies. “Have I said anything about math being boring? I wouldn’t be majoring in it if it were. Virginia Woolf, though...” She trails off deliberately, hoping that Nathan will take the bait.
“Yeah, Mrs. Dalloway probably can’t compare to being an amoral scourge of the high seas, can it?” Nathan says, borderline nasty for him. There’s more of a sneer on his face than Duke has seen since they were in elementary school. This is the Nathan who made Duke so angry that she put tacks in his back and laughed at him for it, the Nathan who was prickly and smug all the time—probably to hide the fact that he’s an enormous fucking dork with the emotional range of an episode of Full House.
“I didn’t come here because I wanted your opinion on my personal code of ethics,” Duke tells him. She straightens up and kicks his door shut.
“Do you have any idea what ‘open hours’ means?” Nathan asks and Duke ignores him, slipping out of her sweater and then yanking her shirt over her head. “Oh, for—god dammit, Duke,” Nathan says and Duke unbuttons her jeans and kicks them off with her shoes and socks in a single, vaguely graceful motion. Nathan’s still just sitting in his desk chair, scowling at her like he’s forty-five and John Proctor all of a sudden.
“What?” Duke says. “If you don’t want this, just tell me. No hard feelings, Wuornos.”
Nathan stands up and crosses the room in two long steps; he’s gotten taller since the last time Duke saw him, maybe an inch or two, and his shoulders have broadened. Duke’s entire lower body clenches when Nathan bends and scoops, hands curving around the back of her thighs and lifting and separating. They hit the wall hard enough to hurt Duke’s back and he’s right there, his shoulders knotted and curved under Duke’s teeth. The blood’s all gone from Duke’s head now and it feels light, like her knees after her first week at sea.
Nathan’s always been a quiet guy but he’s completely silent as he starts kissing Duke—quick, close-mouthed pecks at first, and then biting at the corner of her mouth, and then sucking her lower lip into his mouth, until Duke’s chasing his mouth and they’re grappling back towards his bed, shedding his clothes. He has the same button-fly jeans and Duke still could undo them in her sleep.
“C’mon,” Duke breathes into Nathan’s neck wetly when they hit the bed, Nathan twisted up under her. “C’mon, Wuornos, come on—”
Nathan flips her onto her back and peels off of her to go searching for condoms, still silent, so Duke spreads her legs as far apart as they’ll go and starts fucking herself with one, two fingers, pressing the heel of her palm against her clit with every thrust. She does it as loudly as she can, timing the moans so that he can still hear the wet sounds of her fingers between them. It starts out vicious and a little fake but then he comes back and he’s watching her with his stupid fucking eyes and it gets real very fast, Duke coming apart under her own hands.
“Are you done?” Nathan asks when she’s still gently fucking herself through the aftershocks.
“No thanks to you, Wuornos,” Duke says. “Do I still have to do everything around here?”
“You’re the expert, Crocker,” Nathan says. He rips the top off of a condom packet and rolls it onto himself, taking his time with it. Duke’s not exactly in a hurry to come again right this second but a little actual fucking enthusiasm on his part would be nice.
“Ugh,” Duke groans disgustedly and she turns onto her stomach in a frustrated flop. “I came here for sex and instead it’s just upmarket masturbation. Thanks for nothing.” She puts her wet hand right in the middle of Nathan’s pillow—well, it’s there—and wipes her fingers clean. Maybe he can get cleaning tips from the pre-meds, if he doesn't want to sleep with the smell of her right up against his face.
One of Nathan’s hands, hot and big, lands on her thigh and urges it up till she has a knee crooked nearly under her chest. He follows through with the motion of it, until he’s draped on top of her and his forehead is against the mattress next to hers. Duke’s barely recovered from coming and he pushes in with very little resistance, sinking into her cunt like he has all the time in the world. Duke lacks the vocabulary for all the ways she hates Nathan Wuornos right now.
Sex tutoring has spoiled him; he still dances like a drunk toddler on acid but he fucks into her in a slow, steady, deep way, all of his control in his hips and lower back, the way Duke had directed him to do when he was constantly shuddering and overwhelmed every time something touched his dick. Duke’s hands are stretched out, curled into his pillow above her head somewhere, and she can only clench and unclench her fingers as he keeps going. It begins to feel endless very quickly, but not in the terrible way that the sex had when they’d first started; this is the kind of endless that feels like building up a galaxy full of stars in your head. Duke is like a million light-years away from bored right now; she just keeps making choked noises, Nathan’s hand moving from her trapped thigh down to press flat over her clit.
Please, Duke says silently, over and over, waiting for the thrusting to get harder and his palm to scrape against her clit in anything other than a teasing brush.
“Oh my god, Wuornos,” she finally says. “What the fuck.” It’s choked and deep, caught back in her throat; Duke’s knuckles hurt but she can’t untangle her fingers from his pillow.
“Yes, Duke?” Nathan says. His voice is controlled and pleasant but she can hear the effort it takes for him to do it.
“Are you going to fuck me until the next Ice Age?” Duke asks. “Just, you know”—here her breath hitches—“wondering.”
“I don’t know,” Nathan says. She can hear most of his words where he’s speaking them into her ear but she can feel his chest against her back, pressed together so tightly that his heartbeat is hitting her spine. “Are you going to ask me?”
After three or four incredulous seconds, Duke says, “To come? Are you kidding?”
Nathan shifts his hand; the next thrust, he keeps his dick pressed into her and rocks back and forth and all of the pressure on Duke’s clit is completely gone. She wants to strangle him, fuck.
“Oh great, you’re not kidding,” Duke mumbles.
“C’mon, Duke,” Nathan says, closer to her ear now. He licks the skin under her hairline and says, “Just say it.” His palm’s back against her clit and he’s just a little bit faster, fast enough that Duke can feel an orgasm like a frantic knocking against her pelvic bone and then his fucking hand is fucking gone again and Duke’s are trapped by her own fucking destroyed motor control.
“Please,” Duke says, extremely quietly. Well, he was the one that was already whispering.
“Louder,” Nathan says. He bites her earlobe this time, tongues at it. “You can do it, Duke. You’re so close.”
“Please,” Duke says, louder, and just as his fingers are rubbing her wet slick against her clit she realizes that all of his baby freshman honor students can probably hear her through the thin walls and she says, “please, Nathan, please,” in her loudest, most gasping voice. The volume falters over the hard consonants in his name and his control begins to break against her; his thrusts get short and jerky and they hurt and she keeps at it, “Please, Nathan,” almost shouting now as he grinds her clit down onto his hand with the force of his hips.
Duke comes first but Nathan’s not longer after her; her whole body’s shaking when he pulls out of her, the muscles in her thigh so tight that she’s not sure she’ll be able to straighten her leg any time soon. She can’t even feel the other one, not when her entire cunt is throbbing.
Nathan comes back and shoves her under his comforter, which is basically one huge wet spot. He’s warm enough that her thigh feels better and Duke falls asleep in Nathan’s tiny RA extra-long single, which is not actually long enough to keep Nathan’s feet from falling off of the end of the mattress. Duke finds this out when she wakes up at three in the morning and Nathan is wedged back against the wall, his knobby ankles sticking out into free air.
The sight of his stupid pale crooked feet scares Duke so much that she dresses in the dark in a hodgepodge tragedy of both of their clothes—her jeans, Nathan’s sweater, one of each of their socks—and bails in the middle of the night like a Shakespearean heroine. She leaves a Post-It on his pillow that says HAVE YR CLOTHES, which seems appropriately non-committed to returning them.
“Better?” Lucille asks sleepily when Duke crawls into the top bunk at quarter to four. She’d peeled off her jeans but she’s still in the sweater. It’s scratchy against Duke’s bare breasts but she’s very cold.
“Yeah,” Duke rasps. It might be a lie; she’s asleep before she can tell.
~
Duke runs in the morning five days a week, mostly against her will, with a pack of other softball players. Running is something Duke has to do because otherwise they’ll kick her lazy ass off of the softball team and her scholarship will go caput, but that doesn’t mean she enjoys it.
A week after the sex that Duke isn’t thinking about, Lucille and half of their floor wake up with a wet, brutal cough and Duke ends up on a five-mile trek of horror without the usual accompaniment of half a dozen softball players warbling along to the Spice Girls.
She’s halfway up Heart Attack Hill, trying to think about the breathless way it feels to stand at the prow of a boat cutting through the Atlantic, how it had made her feel expansive and thin-spread—distinctly different from how Duke feels on, say, mile three of her daily five—when her Walkman stutters over the intro of “Semi-Charmed Life” four times in a row. It’s a piece of shit that she’d gotten for a dollar-fifty at a garage sale so it’s not exactly surprising that it’s broken and hates going on runs with Duke as much as she hates them herself, but it still sucks.
Duke pulls to a stop in the middle of the path and unclips her Walkman from the waistband of her shorts. She pulls out the Third Eye Blind CD, blows on it, blows on the inside of her Walkman, and has clicked the whole thing shut again when somebody comes up behind her and yells, “Watch it!”
“You watch it!” Duke shouts back reflexively.
“Oh,” says Nathan Wuornos, pulling short and almost tripping over a tree root like the human disaster that he is. “Crocker.”
“Wuornos,” Duke says. She adjusts her headphones and clips her Walkman back on as slowly as possible, trying for a combination of nonchalance and social ease that she probably isn’t actually managing. Nathan is wearing running shorts cut high on his spindly chicken thighs and a U of Maine sweatshirt that catches across his shoulders and hangs loosely around his waist. He looks like—a joke, or something.
“You have my sweater,” Nathan says, jogging in place like an asshole. How the hell is he getting away with those shorts? Duke’s wearing leggings under hers because it’s like forty degrees out and she’s still freezing whenever she isn’t directly moving.
“Yeah?” Duke asks, raising an eyebrow. She presses play and scans forward three songs. “Well, good luck with that.” She gives Nathan a lazy salute and takes off, forcing herself not to sprint. She can feel Nathan’s footfalls behind her even if she can’t hear them, but she turns up the volume anyway. If she controls her breathing, feels it eek out of her in sharp, steady waves, then it’s like she’s in control of everything happening here.
Nathan catches up to her in less than a minute, his pale legs flashing in and out of the corner of her eye. He’s so much taller than her and easily 50% leg so Duke knows that trying to match stride is doomed to failure, but she lets herself be goaded into it anyway. Her breath gets less and less even the further they go, passing down the side of the hill and turning in unison to take the route back to middle campus. If Nathan’s mad he’s hiding it behind his usual blank expression; his eyebrows are drawn low over his eyes and he’s staring straight ahead like he’s going to laser through the next tree root with nothing but his own strength of will.
It’s not hot, Duke tells herself. It’s just so fucking classic Nathan Wuornos.
Duke’s normal five-mile route ends around the back of Cumberland and she starts to slow down on the last half mile, feeling the hot pull of her muscles cross from irritating to actually painful. God, she hates running. Nathan pulls ahead of her for a bit before he realizes what she’s doing; then he slows down, too, even though Duke has no idea what his normal routine is. She doesn’t want him to cool down with her, or stretch out against the bike racks with her outside of Cumberland. She doesn’t want him to follow her back to her dorm room under the pretense of getting back his sweater and then, if Lucille is out, push her down onto her bed and eat her out with his fingers digging into her aching thighs. She doesn’t want anything from Nathan Wuornos, who thinks that nobody can see that he’s just—so available, for any kind of hurt.
So, as they pull through the last turn before Cumberland, Duke gathers up the last of her energy reserve—minimal amount that it is—and says, “See you, Wuornos,” and sprints across the parking lot to the back entrance of her dorm. She hurdles a line of shrubs and yanks the lanyard with her key on it from around her neck so she can hit the door and slam the key into the lock at the same time.
She doesn’t look back as she kicks the door shut behind her, the muscles in her legs pulled tight and burning hot and trembling.
~
Duke spends the entirety of winter break in Haven in the kitchen at the Beaver Trap. She drinks so much eggnog that her coach is going to skin her alive when practice starts in January and she cooks burgers and fries and vats of clam chowder with the rum like a layer of blubber right under her skin, keeping her insulated.
~
There are many parts of the math major curriculum that are not dumb as hell, but the Intro to Stats class isn’t one of them. Duke’s been putting off taking it because Statistics is the closest humanity has gotten to witch magic outside of whatever the hell happens in Haven every couple decades, but it catches up to her junior year.
The first Thursday of spring semester, as Duke is trying to stuff her Walkman into her backpack and get into Neville Hall at the same time, she sees Nathan. He’s about twelve feet in front of her, holding the front door open for a passel of Sweet Valley High blondes, and Duke knows with a horrible certainty that he’s taking Intro to Stats this semester.
In all likelihood, there’s a brown-nosing future-cop reason for why Nathan suddenly felt the need to improve his knowledge of basic statistics, but Duke can’t help feeling personally victimized. They went to Haven High School with two hundred other students and Duke definitely saw him less frequently then than she does now amongst eleven thousand U of Maine undergrads.
Duke doesn’t even make it to class. It’s the first day, so she’s just missing a very dry syllabus-reading and probably some kind of ice-breaking social nightmare. While it’s hilarious to imagine Nathan struggling to come up with something he likes that begins with the letter N, Duke would much rather just not be in the same room with him again, possibly ever.
~
The next day is Duke’s birthday—the big old 2-1, yay, like Duke hasn’t been a functional adult since she was fifteen—so she preemptively calls Wade. It seems a more effective use of her time than waiting for him to call the floor’s phone. Wade’s working at some stockbroker’s office as a grunt with a desk in a bullpen, according to their monthly phone calls, so Duke calls his work number before she has Discrete Mathematics at ten.
“Hey Duke,” he says when he answers, which is a dangerous game for a professional bullshitter.
“How’d you know it was me?” Duke asks. The floor phone is in the middle of the building, near the elevators and emergency stairs, and there’s a cluster of girls from Duke’s softball team eating cereal in their bathrobes and watching an episode of The Real World on the television in the lounge.
“I made an educated guess,” Wade says drily. “Also, caller ID helped.”
“Ooh,” Duke says, “caller ID, sounds real fancy.”
“Only the best for us Wall Street types,” Wade agrees. He sounds happy—suspiciously so, even for a Friday, because Wade hates his job.
Duke says, “What the hell is up with you?” One of the girls—Pihuna, left fielder, staunchly heterosexual until her fourth vodka cranberry—looks up, concerned, at this. Duke shakes her head at her and turns so she’s facing away from the lounge.
“Nothing,” Wade replies too quickly.
“Did you get fired?” Duke asks.
“No,” Wade hisses. “No, it’s—look. I’m seeing somebody.”
“Yeah, okay?” Duke says. Wade is always seeing people; they’re inevitably short, thin brunettes with trust funds and family houses in Newport or Sagaponack. They like squash and gin & tonics and stock portfolios and Wade’s luscious hair, probably. Meredith barely has two pennies to rub together but she’s always been beautiful and traded on that to make the best connections for her and Wade. Duke completely understands. Duke trades on her unusual qualities, too; hers just involve breaking the law.
“Yeah, okay,” Wade echoes, making the two words sound more aggressive. “Her name is Amy. She’s a lawyer with Smith, Klein, & Anderssen.”
“Great,” Duke says. “I’ve heard nothing but good things about them from the folks of Orono.”
“Shut up,” Wade says, almost affectionately. “Her family invited Mom and I to spend Christmas with them in Greenwich—do you remember? I called you from there, but seeing as how you barely sounded sober, I can understand if you don’t.”
“No judgment from you,” Duke chides. “I’m a bar rat, remember? I’m supposed to be drunk all the time. It really sells the persona.”
“Right, the persona,” Wade says. “Anyway, I’ve been seeing her for a while. So.”
“So,” Duke repeats, tugging on the receiver cord. “So?” She wraps one of the curls of the cord around her thumb and then stares at it in horrified realization. “So,” she yelps, “you asked her to marry you?”
“Yes,” Wade replies. “I asked her to marry me.”
“Are you insane?” Duke yells. “What is wrong with you? How long have you know this lady?”
“We’ve been seeing each other for six months,” Wade says. He doesn’t sound exactly shocked that Duke is taking this poorly, which maybe means he’s been paying better attention for the last three months’ worth of phone calls than Duke might’ve expected. It’s kind of galling, since Wade and Meredith are total idiots when it comes to a lot of the nuances of Duke’s life. “She said yes, Duke.”
“Of course she said yes,” Duke tells him. “You have a full head of hair and nice teeth. You’re basically trophy husband material. For fuck’s sake, Wade. Why would you—” Duke bites away the rest of it. Why would you make the same mistakes as Dad. “Sorry. You just. Uh. Really shocked me.”
Wade sighs and says, “I can tell. Will you be able to pretend to be happy long enough to come be in the wedding, or is that asking too much?”
“Of course I’ll come be in your wedding and drink all your booze,” Duke says. She tries to inject as much expansive cheer into it as possible. “You didn’t even need to ask.” The phone cord is digging so deeply into her thumb that she has to unwind it and flex her fingers to restore full circulation.
“Yes, I did,” Wade says. “I really appreciate this, Duke. Even if you didn’t actually congratulate me.”
“Congratulations,” Duke says, so full of false happiness that her teeth feel rotten. “That’s so great. Give my best to Annie.”
“Amy,” Wade says.
“Amy!” Duke corrects. “Give my best to Amy! My sister from another mother.”
“Please don’t—ever say that again,” Wade says.
Duke makes a Girl Scout promise with the salute and everything and then she says good-bye and gets the hell off of the phone. It’s 9:55 and she has five minutes to cross campus and make it to her class. She can probably make it—Duke’s changed her running route but she still goes five days a week without fail, trying to get rid of the eggnog weight before coach can notice and yell at her about it—but the motivation is almost completely gone.
Mostly, of course, Duke can’t believe that Wade would fall into the same trap that gets so many people. He’d seen what Dad and Meredith had done to each other first-hand, and then what Dad had done to Duke’s mom from a distance. Wade went to Columbia and has his masters and is generally considered to be not an idiot. Judging by the drunken shit he’d said about his mom, even Nathan Wuornos knows that marriage is a crapshoot made even worse when you’ve only known the other person for a half a fucking year, and he’s the stupidest person that Duke knows.
Amy. What a fucking mess. Houses in Greenwich and swank lawyer jobs are great but they’re really just more shit to pack up when you leave; they don’t tether people to you any better than a crap apartment and the collected works of Kurt Vonnegut, which is what had been left of Dad after the funeral. Duke knows this for a fact because, right after the funeral, her mom had taken the urn of Dad’s ashes and the Vonnegut books out to the beach and lit them on fire with the help of a bottle of Old Thompson.
Wade had been there. Meredith had sent him up on the train and Mom had collected him from the station; she’d asked about how school was going and whether he’d started thinking about colleges as the Hancock County NPR station had played the Saturday matinee at the Metropolitan Opera. Wade had watched her burn Dad again, and the books, and now Wade wants to get married to Greenwich Amy.
What a fucking mess.
~
“Hey, Crocker,” somebody says, distorted, and Duke—who’s given up on classes and is in her room, listening to No Need to Argue on her bed with her eyes closed, trying to see if she can approximate an out-of-body-experience—sits up to see Pihuna, still in her bathrobe, leaning in the open doorframe. “Somebody’s on the phone for you.” Pihuna waggles her eyebrows. “Joe of Joe’s Beaver Trap, apparently.”
~
The buy-in is $500, which is not all but a considerable chunk of Duke’s food money for the rest of the semester. She’s lived off of Cup Noodle before and not died of scurvy but overdosing on sodium is not an experience she’s eager to relive. Ergo, Duke has a reason to want to win a significant chunk of change, beyond the fact that it’s her birthday and she’s twenty-one and Wade’s getting fucking married to fucking Annie.
There’s a lot of booze—beer and whiskey, of course, because they’re playing poker and Duke’s the only chick—so even though Joe drops off a bag of burgers when he comes by to gruffly say happy birthday in the general direction of Duke’s left ear, Duke is far from sober when she’s managed to paint Craig O’Riley into the kind of corner where the only way out is property.
“My firstborn,” he jokes, holding a pen over the back of a Walgreens receipt for nail polish remover and Werthers that had been Duke’s coat pocket.
“Christ, no,” Duke says. “Who do you think I am? Babies. Christ.”
The guy to Duke’s left—she thinks his introduced himself as Hank, but everyone’s been calling him Greenie—leans over to clink his bottle of Heineken with Duke’s mug of Jack. “Amen,” he says. Across the table, Dwight makes a noise of protest.
“Yeah, yeah, you’re shacked up and loving it,” Craig says. “We get it. Shut up about your damn perfect kid already.”
Dwight preens as much as a drunk army ranger can preen about their little princess and rather watch any of that go down, Duke lifts her mug to her mouth and swallows the rest of her whiskey. “Any day now, O’Riley,” she says. “Nut up or shut up.”
“Children these days have no fucking respect,” Craig mumbles to himself, just loud enough to be pointed. “In my day we didn’t sass our betters.”
“Say that to me after this hand,” Duke suggests, grinning at him. “What’s it gonna be? I don’t want your fucking kid.”
“Fuck you,” Craig says. He scribbles something down and then lifts the receipt and holds it up so they can all see. “The Cape. I’m putting up the Cape.”
Duke nearly fumbles her whiskey mug and has to put it down before she breaks it. “Uh,” she says.
“Unless you have the deed, it’s no good,” Hank says. “Nobody here is dumb enough to accept an IOU from you.”
Craig makes a lot of noise about being offended that his word isn’t gold, but eventually he owns up that the deed’s in the lockbox in his truck and goes to get it. Duke takes the opportunity to fill her mug with some surreptitious water. It’s too late for actual sobriety but—Duke wants the Cape. More than just winning back her grocery money and bragging rights and a few favors from Hank, who apparently works for the Haven harbormaster, Duke wants the Cape Rouge.
~
Duke will get the tattoo later, an old-fashioned frigate across her collarbone flying a flag with parallel lines of hearts, diamonds, and clubs. Motherfucking three of a kind. Three of a kind of threes. Of all the freaking luck.