Before Ryan, before the ring and the house and the family photo album that would one day sync itself to the wrong screen at the wrong moment, there was a party on Linden Street, and there was a kitchen, and there was Marcus.
But before that, there was the version of Kate Sorensen that nobody would have written a story about.
She was nineteen and halfway through her sophomore year, and she had done everything right. She had dated Tyler Brandt from junior prom through the first semester of college because breaking up with him felt like returning a gift. Tyler kissed like he was following assembly instructions. Tyler said “love you” at the end of phone calls the way other people said “bye.” When it ended, over FaceTime, Kate cried for about forty minutes and then ate an entire sleeve of Thin Mints and felt, if she was honest, mostly relieved.
She studied in the library on the third floor, where it was quiet. She ran in the mornings. She texted her mom back. She had a five-year plan written in a notebook with a sunflower on the cover, and nowhere in that plan was there a line that said find out what you actually want.
“You’re coming,” her roommate Priya announced on a Saturday in February, standing in the doorway of their dorm room holding two tops on hangers like a lawyer presenting evidence. “Black one or the green one. Those are your options. Staying here with your stats homework is not an option.”
“The midterm is Thursday.”
“The midterm will still be Thursday tomorrow. Black one. Definitely the black one.”
The house on Linden Street was the kind of house every college town has: a sagging Victorian that had been carved into apartments by a landlord who believed in neither insulation nor God. The bottom floor was a party. The porch was a party. Somebody had strung warm white lights along the ceiling of the living room, and they swung a little every time the bass hit, so the whole room seemed to breathe.
Priya disappeared into the crowd within six minutes, absorbed by a cluster of girls from her sorority, and Kate did what she always did at parties. She found the kitchen.
Kitchens were safe. Kitchens had jobs in them. You could refill a bowl of chips or wipe up a spill and look like you belonged there.
What the kitchen had tonight was a guy standing in front of the refrigerator like a bouncer.
He was tall, with the easy, loose build of someone who played a sport for real and not just for the hoodie. His hoodie was maroon and soft-looking and pushed up at the forearms. His hair was in short twists, his skin a deep warm brown under the string lights, and he was holding a red cup in each hand, refusing them, very politely, to a pair of guys in backward caps.
“Those are for the people who live here,” he was saying. “And for people I like. You two are neither. Go get the Natty Light by the sink. I believe in you.”
The backward caps grumbled and went. He turned and caught Kate watching him, and his whole face changed. The smile came on slow and warm, like a porch light.
“Okay, you,” he said. “You look like you’re about to wipe down my counter.”
Kate, who had in fact been eyeing a sticky ring of something purple next to the toaster, felt her face go hot. “I wasn’t.”
“You were. You were thinking about it. You had the eyes.” He held out one of the cups. “Here. Real drink. Not the punch. Nobody knows what’s in the punch. A guy named Dalton made the punch, and Dalton has made some choices in his life.”
She took it. It was cold, and it smelled like lime. “What’s in this one?”
“Vodka, soda, lime, a little bit of my reputation.” He tapped his cup against hers. “Marcus. I live upstairs.”
“Kate. I live in Hollister Hall and I have a stats midterm on Thursday.”
“Wow,” Marcus said gravely. “You lead with that? That’s your opener?”
“It’s what’s on my mind.”
“I’m gonna put something else on your mind.” He said it lightly, a joke, and then he held her eyes just a half second too long for it to be only a joke, and Kate felt something low in her stomach turn over like a key.
They talked for an hour in that kitchen. Afterward Kate could not remember most of it, only how it felt, which was like stepping off a curb she hadn’t seen and finding out she could fly.
He was a sophomore too, a kinesiology major and a wide receiver who swore he was “the best guy on the team that nobody talks about.” He was from outside Atlanta. He had two little sisters he FaceTimed every Sunday, and he took out his phone to show her a video of the younger one doing a dance routine to a song about a car wash, and he watched it with a look of such open, uncomplicated pride that Kate had to look away from his face because it was doing something to her.
He was funny. That was the thing. Tyler had never once made her laugh on purpose. Marcus made her laugh so hard that a little bit of vodka soda went up her nose, and instead of laughing at her, he handed her a paper towel and said, “Okay, see, now you’ve got a reason to wipe down the counter. I set that up for you.”
“My roommate’s around here somewhere,” he said at one point, scanning the crowd. “You’d like him. Everybody likes him. He’s like a golden retriever that does his taxes early. He’s been moping all week about some girl in one of his classes he can’t work up the nerve to talk to.”
“That’s sweet.”
“It’s pathetic,” Marcus said fondly. “I love him. He’s my best friend. He’s pathetic.” He looked down at her. “I don’t have that problem.”
“Which problem?”
“Working up the nerve.”
The room was loud and hot and getting louder. Someone turned the music up. Marcus leaned down to say something and his mouth was near her ear and she smelled him: clean laundry, cedar, a little sweat, the lime from their drinks. She lost the words. She only felt his breath.
“You want some air?” he said.
She did.
The back porch was cold, February-cold, the kind that made the party lights in the window look like a fireplace you couldn’t touch. They sat on the steps. Kate was shivering inside of a minute, and without a word Marcus pulled his hoodie over his head and dropped it in her lap. Underneath he wore a black long-sleeve shirt that did nothing to hide the shape of his shoulders.
“Now you’ll be cold,” she said.
“I’m from Georgia. I’m cold no matter what. I’ve accepted it.”
She pulled the hoodie on. It was enormous on her and still warm from his body, and it smelled like him, and she pulled the cuffs over her hands and felt about fourteen kinds of stupid and also completely happy.
“Can I tell you something embarrassing?” she said.
“Please.”
“I’ve never done this.”
“Sat on a porch?”
She laughed. “Talked to a guy at a party. Like this. I had a boyfriend from high school. He was very—” she searched for the word, “—punctual.”
“Punctual,” Marcus repeated, as if tasting it. “Damn. That’s the worst thing I ever heard anybody say about a man.”
“He was nice.”
“Nice is the floor, Kate. Nice is where you start.” He turned toward her on the step, his knee against hers. “What do you actually want? Not the plan. Not the midterm. What do you want?”
No one had ever asked her that. She opened her mouth to give the safe answer and found that she didn’t have one.
So she leaned in, and she kissed him.
It was nothing like assembly instructions. His mouth was warm and patient and then, when she made a small sound she didn’t recognize as her own, not patient at all. His hand came up and cupped the back of her neck under her hair, his thumb tracing the line of her jaw, and he kissed her like he’d been thinking about it for an hour, which, she realized, he had. She’d been thinking about it too. She’d just been calling it something else.
When they broke apart her lips were buzzing. The bass from inside thudded through the boards of the steps.
“So,” Marcus said, his voice lower than before. “That’s what you want.”
“I think it’s a start.”
He smiled against her mouth. “I live upstairs,” he reminded her.
“You mentioned.”
His room was at the top of a narrow staircase that creaked on every step, and they laughed the whole way up trying to be quiet about it, which made it worse. He had a real bed, not a twin, a desk buried under textbooks and a cleat, a poster of Andre 3000, and a corkboard covered in photos she didn’t look at, because by then he had her up against the inside of the door and her hands were under his shirt.
His body was hard and warm. She ran her palms up over the ridges of his stomach, his chest, and felt his heart going as fast as hers. He made a low sound into her mouth and lifted her, actually lifted her, his hands under her thighs, and she wrapped her legs around his waist and thought, wildly, Tyler could never.
He laid her on the bed. He pulled the hoodie up and off her, slowly, and then the black top, and then he stopped and just looked at her in her plain cotton bra in the light from the streetlamp outside, and the look on his face made her feel like something rare.
“You’re shaking,” he said softly.
“I’m not scared.”
“I know.” He kissed her collarbone. “We can go slow.”
“I don’t want slow,” Kate heard herself say. “I’ve done slow my whole life.”
Something flared in his eyes. He reached behind her, unhooked her bra with one easy hand, and slid the straps down her arms, and when his mouth closed over her nipple she arched off the bed and grabbed his shoulders. He took his time anyway, despite what she’d said, his tongue circling, his teeth grazing just enough to make her gasp, moving from one breast to the other while his hand worked the button of her jeans.
He peeled her jeans and underwear down her legs together and tossed them somewhere. Then he knelt at the edge of the bed, pulled her hips toward him, and kissed the inside of her knee, then her thigh, then higher, unhurried, until she was squirming.
“Marcus—”
“Patience, Stats.”
The first stroke of his tongue made her whole body jolt. Nobody had ever done this for her, not really, not like this, like he was enjoying it, like he had nowhere else to be. He licked her slow and flat and then focused, his lips closing around her clit, his big hands pinning her hips when she bucked. She grabbed fistfuls of his comforter. She heard herself saying his name and then not words at all. When he slid two fingers inside her and curled them she came so hard and so suddenly that she clapped a hand over her own mouth, her thighs trembling around his head, the bass from the party downstairs pulsing up through the floor like a second heartbeat.
He climbed up beside her, grinning, his mouth wet. “You okay?”
“I didn’t know,” she panted. “I didn’t know it could do that.”
“Oh, we’re just getting started.”
She pushed him onto his back. She wanted to see him. She tugged his shirt over his head and kissed his chest, the flat dark coins of his nipples, the line of his stomach, and then she unbuckled his belt and pulled his jeans and boxers down, and she stopped.
“Oh,” Kate said.
He was big. Bigger than she’d known to imagine, thick and heavy and dark against his thigh, hardening further under her stare. She wrapped her hand around him and her fingers didn’t meet.
Marcus laughed softly, a little shy for the first time all night. “You can say it.”
“I’m not going to say it.”
“You’re thinking it.”
“I’m thinking,” she said, stroking him slowly, watching his stomach tighten, “that Tyler owes me an apology.”
He laughed so hard the bed shook, and then stopped laughing very abruptly when she lowered her head and took him into her mouth. She couldn’t take much of him. It didn’t seem to matter. He groaned, one hand sliding into her hair, not pushing, just holding, and she licked and sucked and stroked the rest of him with her hand and felt a dizzy, brand-new kind of power at the sounds he was making because of her.
“Kate,” he finally said, rough. “Come here. Come here before I embarrass myself.”
He reached into his nightstand for a condom, rolled it on, and pulled her up to straddle him. Then he paused, his hands on her waist, his eyes on hers.
“You sure?”
She answered by reaching down, holding him, and sinking onto him.
It was a stretch, a slow, deep, almost-too-much stretch, and she had to stop halfway and breathe, her palms flat on his chest. He held perfectly still for her, his thumbs drawing circles on her hips, murmuring that she was doing so good, take her time, damn, look at you. She rocked. Took more. Rocked again. And then she was all the way down on him, full in a way she’d never been, every nerve in her body lit up and humming.
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” Marcus breathed. “Yeah.”
She started to move. Slow at first, finding it, and then less slow, riding him while he watched her with his lips parted and his hands roaming her thighs, her waist, her breasts. The headboard tapped the wall. Downstairs, someone whooped at something, and they both froze, and then dissolved into helpless laughter, him still deep inside her, the laughter making her clench around him so that his laugh turned into a groan.
He rolled them over. He hooked one of her knees over his arm and drove into her, long and deep and steady, and the angle hit something inside her that made her eyes go wide. She grabbed his back. She could feel every muscle shifting under her hands. He kissed her hard, swallowing the sounds she made, his hips moving faster now, the bed creaking, her heel digging into the back of his thigh.
“Don’t stop,” she begged. “Marcus, don’t—”
“I got you.”
He did. He reached between them and found her clit with his thumb, and the second orgasm came up from somewhere so deep it scared her, rolling through her in waves, her whole body clamping down on him, her nails in his shoulders. He swore softly and followed her over, burying his face in her neck, his hips jerking against her, saying her name into her skin like it was something he wanted to remember.
Afterward they lay tangled together and sweaty while the party wound down beneath them. Kate stared at the ceiling. She felt like she’d been living in a house her whole life and had just discovered it had a second floor.
“So,” Marcus murmured into her hair. “How’s the five-year plan looking?”
“I’m going to need to revise it.”
“Good,” he said, and fell asleep with his arm across her waist.
She woke to gray winter light and the smell of coffee and, for a few seconds, no idea where she was. Then she remembered all of it at once and pulled the comforter over her face and laughed into it.
She found her jeans under the desk and her top hanging off the lamp, and after a moment’s thought she pulled on his maroon hoodie instead of her top, because she wanted to. She sat on the edge of the bed. Her phone, face-down on the nightstand, had seventeen texts from Priya, escalating from where r u to KATHERINE ANNE to a single eggplant emoji followed by proud of u.
And one from a number she didn’t know.
Hey, it’s Ryan, from Stats 2010. I sit two rows behind you. I got your number off the study group sheet, sorry if that’s weird. I’ve been trying to work up the nerve to ask you this all week, so I’m just going to do it: would you want to get dinner sometime? Maybe Friday, after the midterm? No pressure at all. Have a good weekend.
Kate read it twice. She pictured him, vaguely: a sandy-haired boy with a kind face, always early, who had once lent her a pencil and then seemed embarrassed about it.
Working up the nerve to talk to a girl in one of his classes.
A slow, cold, impossible feeling crept up the back of her neck.
She looked up. Her eyes landed, for the first time, on the corkboard above Marcus’s desk. Photos, a dozen of them. Marcus in pads with his helmet under his arm. Marcus at a lake. Marcus at a Braves game with his arm slung around the neck of a sandy-haired boy with a kind face, both of them grinning, both of them sunburned.
The floor creaked. Marcus was leaning in the doorway in a gray t-shirt, holding two mugs of coffee, watching her with that slow porch-light smile.
“Morning, Stats,” he said. “You look good in my hoodie.”
Kate held up her phone with the screen toward him. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.
He read it. She watched the smile change into something she couldn’t name: surprise, then understanding, then something quieter and more complicated that flickered behind his eyes and was gone.
“Huh,” Marcus said. He set her coffee down on the nightstand beside her, very carefully, like it might go off. “That’s my roommate.”
Down the hall, a door opened. Footsteps. A cheerful, sleepy voice called out, “Yo, Marcus, did you make coffee? Hey, you’ll never guess. I finally did it. I texted her.”
Kate stared at Marcus. Marcus stared at Kate.
And very slowly, as the footsteps came closer, he reached over and pulled his bedroom door shut.
To be continued in Chapter 2: The Wrong Roommate.
