Free A Hundred Summers by Beatriz Williams

so unsuccessful.”
    “Usually?” He lifts his eyebrows. They are strong eyebrows, like the rest of him: straight and dark, thick without bushiness. “And which ones weren’t?”
    “Well, there was Jimmy, the son of one of the fishing boat captains in Seaview Harbor. But he was ten that summer, and I was only eight.”
    “Older man, eh? And since then?”
    Nothing. Some dates, some holiday flirtations, petering off into indifference. No boys to meet at Miss Porter’s School, no boys here at Smith. During summers at Seaview, only a few, too familiar and too conventional to be interesting. “Oh, I don’t know,” I say, drinking my coffee. “The usual.”
    The food arrives on piping-hot plates. Dorothy arranges it all in lightning strokes of her arms, toast plates and butter, a pot of strawberry jam. She refills our coffee. The syrup rolls down the sides of Nick’s pancake stack in lazy threads. He lets go of my hand at last and closes his fingers around his knife and fork.
    “Everything all right?” asks Dorothy.
    “Perfect. Thank you.”
    Nick’s eyes have left me faithlessly, to fix in all-consuming hunger on the breakfast before him. “Thanks,” he says to Dorothy, and hesitates, politely, with a glance back at me.
    “Eat!” I tell him.
    For a moment or two, we are silent, devouring breakfast. I would say Nick shovels the food in his mouth, but he’s a little more elegant than that—not much, but then he must be famished. Efficient, perhaps, is a better word. The pancakes disappear in seconds; the eggs are obliterated. I watch him in astonished awe, hardly noticing the taste of my own food.
    “I beg your pardon,” he says, wiping his mouth. “That wasn’t very civilized, was it?”
    “I was about to charge admission.”
    He laughs. I like his laugh, easy and quiet. “Sorry. I was just about gone with hunger, with all that business yesterday and then being up most of the night.”
    I look at his broad shoulders, his solid torso, his rangy body disappearing under the table. He’s like an engine, idling in neutral, consuming vast amounts of energy even at rest. “Don’t apologize.”
    “The food’s good, too,” he says. “You come here often, I take it?”
    “I like to study here. They don’t mind if I stay for hours and spread out all my papers. Dorothy refills my coffee, brings me pie. You should try the pie.”
    “I’d like to, sometime.” He reaches for his coffee cup. “Now it’s your turn.”
    “My turn?”
    “Tell me why you’re here. Why you came downstairs, instead of having me kicked out by the housemother.” His eyes are bright and well fed. I love their color, all warm and caramelized, almost molten, hints of green streaking around the brown. I’m just happy, he said earlier, and he looks it.
    Should I tell him the truth?
    Budgie would say no. Budgie would tell me to hold my cards close to my chest, to make him work for it. I should be cagey, mercurial. I should leave him in doubt of himself.
    “It was just before you broke your leg,” I say. “You were standing there with Graham, staring into the crowd. You looked like . . . I don’t know . . . fierce and piratical. Different from everyone else, filled with fire. You leaped out at me.”
    He is pleased. His smile grows across his face, and I think again how it softens the rather blunt arrangement of his bones, the uncompromising set of his jaw and chin and cheekbones. A few curls dip sweetly into his forehead, and I want to twirl them in my fingers. “Piratical, eh?” he says. “Is that what the girls like these days? Pirates?”
    “That was the wrong word. Intent, I should say.”
    “You said piratical. That was your first word, the honest one.” He is twinkling at me, not fiery or piratical at all.
    I shift direction. “What were you thinking about, looking up like that?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. The next play, probably. You get in a fog during a game. The fog of battle, the joy of it. The rest of