Chapter 5: Grant

After a time, he squeezed her hand.

“May I see your other sketches?” he asked.

She hesitated. Her sketches spoke to her, and her alone, strangers unlikely to understand the significance of the images. But then, she’d already shared with Brady perhaps the most personal and traumatic experience in her life, triggered by the image of melancholy girl under the sheltering willow. She’d also shared a long-overdue climax with Brady, which seemed intrinsically personal. The rest seemed almost inconsequential in comparison.

“If you’d like,” she acquiesced.

“I would be honoured.”

He remained seated beside her, holding her hand, his eyes distant. After a few minutes passed, Sarah disengaged her fingers from his and slipped her legs from beneath the linen until her bare feet touched marble. As she padded naked from the room, she was acutely aware of his eyes intently watching her.

She picked up her sketchbook and pencil from the desk and returned to the bedroom, slipping smoothly between the sheets. The linen cooled her bare skin. She placed the pencil on the otherwise empty bedside table, hesitated but a moment, and placed the book in Brady’s lap. He stared at the worn and plain cover, before he grasped it and flipped it open.

The first few pages of the book contained scrawled equations. The first page posed the question: do any odd perfect numbers exist? Lines of letters and symbols followed, apparently without conclusion, or at least not a conclusion discernible by normal mortals. In the margin, the numbers 6, 28, 496 and 8128 repeated on various diagonals. Brady flipped through the next few pages of equations without comment, Sarah watching intently beside him. She doubted that he would understand the math; not many outside of university level courses would have.

The first non-numerical page showed a bottle of Smirnoff lying on its side, dripping alcohol into a fine beach. In the background, shadowy figures huddled around a bonfire, a lake behind the fire, waves crashing into the shore. A pocked full moon lit the scene.

Sarah had stolen the over-proof bottle of vodka from her mother’s cabinet. Half of the bottle sloshed in her underaged stomach and her brain misfired on all cylinders. At least the alcohol successfully blunted the memories of Uncle Patrick’s nocturnal visits. Jake had left an hour ago, probably to see another girl. Sarah cared little about the indiscretion; it wasn’t the first incident; it wouldn’t be the last. Only a handful of students, most of them as intoxicated as she, sat around the smoky beach bonfire. Some of the others smoked marijuana on the other side of the flames, the sweet scent mixing with woodsmoke to tantalize her nostrils. To her right, Mitchie and Grant made out passionately in the sand, his hand exploring under Mitchie’s shirt. Waves crashed into the beach rhythmically behind them. Sarah’s bare toes dug into the soft sand, her sand-dusted runners lying beside her thigh. Eighties rock and roll played in the background from someone’s iPhone. Idly, Sarah thought about simply walking into the waves and swimming until she couldn’t any longer. This drunk, she might have, except that drowning still seemed like a terrifying way to die.

After watching Mitchie squirm in the sand for a while, Sarah rose to her bare feet and wandered away from the welcoming glow of the fire. She halted where the waves caressed the sand. Summer waves licked her toes, summer breeze toyed with her loose ponytail. Moonlight sparkled off the dark water beyond and into infinity. She sipped again from the bottle of Smirnoff.

Fifteen sips later, she swayed unsteadily, becoming aware of another presence beside her.

“Mitchie passed out,” Grant said. His warm hand appeared on Sarah’s left shoulder.

“You two were going at it,” Sarah remarked. Her voice slurred, even to her ears.

“Left me high and dry, yeah,” Grant said. He seemed unamused.

Sarah spared a glance to her left. Grant was attractive in a boyish way, long, tall and lanky. His hair fell loose about his shoulders. If she hadn’t been drinking, Sarah might have been wary. As it was, when Grant kissed her, all she could think about: he’d just been swapping spit with Mitchie, which meant that Sarah was now swapping spit with Mitchie, too. The thought didn’t bother her, but it was vaguely interesting to her dulled mind.