We were locked in an endless, pointless conversation about an imaginary bonfire while hockey played on the TV above the bar. I had never been so conscious of the hockey season as I was this year, the first year I’d been able to go out and drink in public. “Conscious,” in the sense I knew that hockey playoffs were underway. How long did they go on? It was spring already. April.

I looked away from the screen again and back at my roommates. We had a towering pile of newspapers in the living room back at our apartment that I was finding increasingly oppressive. I passed by it every time I went upstairs to my bedroom. Alex had noted that we could recycle the papers if we tied them up in batches with string, but with classes over all three of us were in a tunnel of hectic essay-writing and exam-studying and our routines, such as they were, had disintegrated. No one had remembered to buy string. Or, for that matter, food, which was why we were at the pub around the corner having dinner.

James revived the idea of one big fire to clear the detritus in our apartment.

“We could throw other stuff on it too. This has been kind of a shitty year overall. Just set fire to this academic year and move on.”

Big bonfires were a regular occurrence at James’s family cottage and he was confident he could control one. There was a small bricked-in yard behind the house we lived in that belonged to the apartment on the first floor, below us. James halfheartedly suggested we could ask to have a fire there. None of us thought it was likely that Bev, the gruff and highly practical side of the couple downstairs, would allow it, so James started musing about other potential locations.

“Leslie Street. The Spit. Or up near the tracks. It’s desolate. What about the Don Valley?”

This is what I found relaxing about living with two guys: these laconic conversations could go on for hours. There was no need to talk, but if you thought of something, you could toss it out, like a log onto smouldering embers that might or might not reignite a fire.

I looked down back at the bar. The clerk I’d spoken to the other night at our local bookstore was now sitting there, sipping a drink and chatting with the female bartender in a way that suggested this was not their first encounter. He also looked at the hockey game on the TV screen from time to time. It was impossible not to.

“That guy works at the bookstore,” I said during a pause in James’s random listing of open spaces in downtown Toronto. James and Alex looked down and acknowledged this with indeterminate sounds.

Eventually we needed drinks—the lengthy discussion on what an awful year it had been (I had concurred, and Alex, who had not faced as many tribulations over the past months, had tactfully remained silent) had made returning home to work seem less urgent—and I offered to go to the bar to get them. Bookstore clerk was still sitting there, now with a book open, some serious-looking Penguin Classic. His body was turned to the side of the bar rather than the front. I leaned over the bar a stool or two down and, before the bartender had returned from another corner to take my order, he noticed me.

“How’s the communication going?” he asked. I pretended to be surprised to see him and smiled.

“I actually think it’s helping. I might have to come back and buy the book sometime.”

Since classes had ended, I’d been going to the bookstore every night. It was the carrot I offered myself to focus on studying: if I did a few hours of work, I could go to the bookstore for half an hour as a break. The background music at the store varied: a particularly mournful version of Albinoni’s Adagio, but also The Replacements, and sometimes Motown. I always felt better as soon as I walked in.

There was a book on the new releases table that promised better communication between the sexes. It was cream-coloured and relatively sober looking—no embarrassing pictures of hearts and cupids on the front, just a semi-serious treatise on how men and women speak. I picked it up the first time I noticed it and flipped to the middle. The premise was that men and women were from different worlds and needed to translate to understand each other. This seemed ridiculous. Of course we were talking the same language. Also, not all women wanted to go shopping and talk about their feelings. Case in point.

I kept picking it up whenever I went back in, though, and reading random passages. There was a lengthy section about how men needed to withdraw from time to time—to their “caves”—and how women, prone to want to talk and share, should not pursue them during these retreats. This included, apparently, not following them physically as they tried to distance themselves from an interaction. I recalled several occasions on which I had tried to get a satisfactory conclusion to conversations with James by following him from room to room. It had never worked. The book sounded uncomfortably familiar.

One day I went in and it wasn’t in its usual place.

“We moved it,” a clerk said, walking toward me from the counter. He was young, within a few years of me, I guessed, with wavy dark hair that was long enough to be tucked behind his ears and a thin, slightly pinched face.

“I’m sorry?” I knew immediately what he was talking about but was perturbed that someone had been watching me come in and read the book.

“It’s over there now. Third table down.”

I nodded and pretended to be engrossed in a novel on the table in front of me. The clerk walked to the table he’d indicated and lifted a copy of the book into the air like a placard. I put down the novel and walked over to him.

“Boy trouble?” he asked, smirking.

“It’s not boy trouble. It’s my roommate.” I felt defensive. “He’s very—” I wasn’t sure how to express it, “—male.”

“And you’re very female? You like to talk?” His tone was mocking, and just light enough that it seemed like it might be good-humoured. I could feel myself blushing.

“No. Not exactly.”

“Huh,” said the clerk. “Well, people love the book. We keep running out. Let me know if it works.”

***

At the bar, the clerk now introduced himself to me. His name was Lyle. He said he wasn’t sure how the book could help with my roommate problems, since he had flipped through it and did not recognize himself in the description of men’s behaviour.

“I didn’t think I fit the description of what women act like either, but we all have parts of both, right?” I said.

I told him my name and that I was there with my roommates on a break from studying. We chatted for a few more minutes and he told me I should come by the store when it was closing one day that week and maybe we could go out for a drink and talk more about how men and women communicate.

As I walked back toward our table, James rose to his feet and gestured widely back to the bar. “The drinks?”

“Oh.” I blushed. “Can you go back and get them? I don’t want to talk to that guy again now. We kind of wrapped up.”

“That guy?” asked James, nodding his head in the direction of Lyle.

“Why not that guy?”

James shrugged. “He looks like kind of a douche. What did you guys talk about?”

Somehow this had become our pattern over the last year. I never asked James any questions about the many girls who passed through our apartment, but told him everything about my love life.

“Male-female communication,” I said.

James laughed. “That sounds like a euphemism for something.”

***

I went by the bookstore a couple of days later and hung around until they were starting to close. Lyle had said something to his co-workers so they knew not to chase me out and I hid out in the magazine section while they turned up the music and shooed away the other browsing customers. Lyle found me as they were starting to flick the lights on and off and said he could leave.

We walked back to the same bar. He asked about the exam I’d had that day and then told me about the book’s sales.

“It’s mostly women who buy it,” he noted. “But usually older women who look like they’re divorced. Not like you.”

Lyle asked which of the two guys was the roommate I had problems communicating with. He told me he’d looked over to see where I’d been sitting and saw Alex come to the bar.

“It’s the other one,” I told him. “Let’s not talk about my roommates though.”

He quizzed me about my English classes and I told him how disappointed I was by them. He was trying to write fiction, but had avoided studying English for many of the reasons I didn’t like it, and also because none of the classes taught the writers he found interesting, most of whom I’d never heard of, and none of whom I’d read. He asked what I liked to read and I'd been reading so many endless books that I drew a blank. I said I didn’t really know anymore.

“I could give you something to read,” he suggested. I agreed, though I hated when people gave me book recommendations. Sometimes if a friend pressed a book on me I’d just take it home and put it on my shelf and give it back after a reasonable amount of time, unopened. Also, the way he’d suggested it made it sound like an assignment, and I’d had enough of those for a while.

Lyle got the check after one drink. I wasn’t sure what the parameters of meeting for a drink at 10 o’clock were—unexplored territory for me, somewhere between the somewhat-trodden ground of a dinner or a movie date and leaving a bar with someone at the end of the night, which I’d done precisely once before. I wasn’t even completely sure we were on a date. Lyle was less flirtatious now that we were sitting across from each other, and though I was trying to be cheerful and engaged and was not sitting with my arms crossed, all the things you are supposed to do on a date, he seemed remote, like he was only half-there.

But then he suggested that in order to lend me a book we stop by his place and then he would walk me back home. He lived in the opposite direction of my apartment, and further south. I took it as a good sign that he wanted to add extra time onto this brief introductory meeting.

As we left the bar I looked up and saw one bright blueish star, fairly low in the sky. I pointed it out.

“I think it’s a planet,” said Lyle.

We talked about the neighbourhood while we walked. One thing I liked was that many houses had no curtains in the front and though some houses were already dark and asleep you could still see activity in some of the others—people watching TV, or cleaning the kitchen, or reading. I always liked walking home and seeing what other households were doing.

Lyle lived in the basement of a house with an entrance down steps from the backyard, lit only by light shining down from the neighbour’s upstairs windows. The door opened into a tiny kitchen with open shelves. I followed him down the narrow corridor past a living room that had furniture clustered all to one side. At the other end, the door to the bedroom was open, revealing a duvet drawn neatly over a tall bed.

“Let’s see,” said Lyle, looking at a large bookshelf on the wall along the length of the room. He put his finger on top of the spine of one book and coaxed it out. He handed it to me.

I hadn’t taken off my coat, since the stop had been positioned as a brief detour, but as we walked back through the kitchen, Lyle suddenly asked whether I smoked weed.

“Sometimes,” I said. I was surprised more than interested.

Lyle repositioned his question. “Do you want to now?”

It seemed like it might be fun, at least more fun than the date so far. I said yes. I sat down at the tiny table in the kitchen. Lyle hung his coat on a hook next to the entrance door but didn’t take mine, which remained dangling off the back of my chair. He took a canister labelled Medaglio d’Oro coffee off a shelf above the sink and opened it on the table. The weed was in a sticky ball rather than dried leaves.

“BC bud. It’s good stuff,” he said as he pulled some off and mixed it with tobacco.

It was good. It was incredibly strong. I was quickly past any high I had reached so far in my limited experience of dope-smoking. Except for the occasional passed joint at a party I really only smoked with James, who policed my intake—“you’ve had enough”—and monitored my status in a mildly irritating way, like I imagined an older brother might.

Everything was funny. I couldn’t stop laughing, and Lyle was laughing too, and when we caught each other’s eyes, we’d again burst out in gales of laughter. But then I did stop, and I felt almost catatonic. It took effort to move. We went to lie down on his bed and when I got up to go to the washroom and looked in the mirror I tilted my head to one side and then the other just to check that I was really seeing my own reflection. I looked unfamiliar to myself. I looked into my eyes and tried to figure out what I was thinking.

When I came back into the bedroom I lay back down and looked at the ceiling. Lyle had put an album by one of those electronic bands, Massive Attack or something, on the CD player sometime between when he’d pulled out the Medaglio d’Oro can and now, and I had a feeling I was hearing the same song for the third or fifth time already. I started trying to figure out what time it was based on how long the album might be. 2 am? Later? If each song was about 3 and a half minutes and there were 10 songs, that was 30 minutes plus half times 10 which was 5 which meant 35, and then if we’d spent an hour at the bar we’d left at 11 and so it was pretty late, no matter how many times the album had played.

I felt Lyle’s hand under my waistband and I automatically grabbed his wrist and pulled the hand out. He paused for a second, and then was on all fours kneeling over me, pinning my arms above my head. He kissed me forcefully, and as I looked up at him, kind of in shock, more softly. I tried to pull one of my arms out from where it was pinned. Lyle tightened his grip.

“Oww,” I said. It didn’t really hurt, but that was the sound that emerged from my mouth.

His hand was back under the waistband of my jeans and now my underwear, less gently, and this time I didn’t move at all. He undid the button of the jeans and yanked down the zipper. The sound was startling. My body was betraying my mind; I now wanted to go home and not be high anymore and go to bed but my body was still relaxed, and I was trembling slightly, with adrenalin that was not the pleasant anticipatory kind but maybe looked the same.

Lyle ran his hand under my panties and crooked a finger up and inside. He shoved it further up so I squirmed, then he swirled it around. He brought the finger up to my lips and wiped it on them with pressure that felt angry.

“You’re wet.”

“Lyle, I’m really stoned,” I said, in a voice that sounded much more calm than I was feeling. He let go of my arms suddenly and I quickly sat up.

“I have to go home,” I said, pulling myself from under him and off one side of the bed. He sat on the edge watching me with an expression I couldn’t identify.

“I can walk you.”

“I’m fine.” I grabbed my jacket from the chair and slid my shoes on without lacing them. I scrambled up the stairs from his apartment to the backyard. The latch of the door in the fence was high and I could hear myself breathing impatiently as I fumbled around trying to open it. It clicked free at last and I dashed out, leaving the door to swing behind me.

Streetlamps sent strobing light along the street as the wind swayed the still-bare tree branches. Most of the houses were dark now. I started walking in the wrong direction, then turned around and began running. The light was green at the only stoplight on the way home and I ran through that too. I was jogging in the middle of the road and looking straight ahead and there was no time to worry about being out on my own at whatever early hour of the morning it was. I didn’t feel high anymore.

When I got into the house I poured myself some water from the pitcher in the fridge and stood with my back against the sink, listening as the sound of my heartbeat faded from my eardrums. I set the glass in the sink quietly. Had he really offered to walk me home?

We all went through the motions, said the things we were supposed to say.

Light snoring from one of my roommates travelled down the hallway. I was relieved they hadn’t woken up. By the time I saw them in the morning I’d be able to pretend I just hadn’t liked him.

Stepping lightly, cringing at the sound of creaking floorboards, I picked up my jacket and hung it on the rack in the hallway. That’s when I noticed that the book Lyle had assigned had travelled home with me in one of the pockets.

I pulled the book out and tiptoed into the living room. The pile stood against the far wall, an unstable Jenga tower of newspaper so tall we’d started tracking its height with pencil marks. I jammed the book deep between some layers until it disappeared. A page of newspaper slid off the top down to the floor as the pile shifted. I waited to make sure it stabilized, and then I went up to bed.

Molly McCarron is a writer in Toronto.

Image by Maciej Chwirot @mchwrt