mommy was a sick muse (part ii)
[part i]
~
ii. | all the blinds are fantasies
The first day of Michaelmas term, Mary wakes up early, pours coffee down her throat, and has begun her reading for her clinical course by 9am, listening to the entire body of work of Metric to get her into the mood of studying for 18 hours of every day.
Her position of solitude underneath her chosen tree is invaded midafternoon by a long-limbed shadow. “Do you mind?” asks Mary, not looking up. “I’m attempting to read and your body is inhibiting that.” She hates the new first years.
Mary’s headphones muffle the reply of the irritating person in question, so she rips them out and demands, “What?”
“I said, nice to see you out in the sunlight. I wasn’t aware vampires could brave the outside at this time of day.”
Of course. “Go away, Crawford.”
“I see you’re still stuck on your hostile setting,” he continues, settling down next to her. He immediately leans into her personal space to read the title of her textbook. “Is that for McDaniel’s class? I’m in that.”
Mary recoils from him, vaguely appalled. “Why the hell did they let you in? It’s a specialized seminar.”
“I believe my grades were acceptable and I wrote a truly superb email to McDaniel about my academic qualifications.” Crawford preens, but it’s slightly ironic. Mary hadn’t known that Crawford was self-aware enough for irony; she finds it disturbingly attractive.
“Yes, well, I’m sure you can reflect on your perfection somewhere that’s not here.” Mary makes a shooing motion. “Don’t you have a room in King’s where you can think about it?”
“This level of sun-kissed beauty isn’t possible without constant maintenance.” Crawford shows no sign of going away, and in fact rearranges his limbs so that they are even more akimbo and more pointedly invading Mary’s personal space. He tilts his head against the tree trunk and closes his eyes.
Mary’s fingers spasm against her textbook. “Crawford.”
“Bennet,” he says, not opening his eyes, “I want to enjoy a pleasant October afternoon. I promise not to antagonize you if you’ll just shut up and read.”
“Ha!” huffs Mary, but after carefully examining his expression she can’t see any indication that he’ll go back on his word. “Fine.”
She hates Crawford, but she’d rather carve out her own eyeballs than show him any weakness, so she reopens her textbook and finds her place. It’s difficult to concentrate with his arm pressed against her thigh. His skin-which, sadly, does indeed deserve the qualifier “sun-kissed”-is warm through the thin linen of her pants. Whenever she tries to focus on her the words, all she can feel is the long line of Crawford’s arm against her thigh.
“Don’t think so hard,” he says abruptly. “You’re still annoying as fuck, Bennet.”
Mary makes an offended noise high in her throat and snaps her eyes back to the two-page figure she’s ostensibly studying. “You’re one to talk, Crawford.”
He peels open one eyelid long enough to display an iris almost blinding in its blueness. It is remarkably unfair how compelling he is, considering that Dr. Fitzwilliam is about 40 times more traditionally attractive. “I’m not the one who tosses my bedmate’s clothes out the window.” He closes his eyelid and tilts his face so the sunlight streams over the crooked line of his nose. “After receiving some truly stellar cunnilingus, no less.”
Mary gives up on serenity and hits Crawford in the chest with all the force her puny arms can muster. With the weight of the textbook added, it’s an impressive effort, but Crawford has rowed for the last three years and is built like a gorilla; he absorbs the blow with only a small grunt. “Trust me,” she snarls, “that was not the most impressive cunnilingus I’ve ever received.”
She says it to have words coming out of her mouth, the necessary back-and-forth that keeps her head above the water in conversations with Henry “My Grandfather Is a Marquis, You Know” Crawford, and it’s not until she finishes that she realizes it’s true. She has had better cunnilingus, from the girlfriend that her mother is never going to hear about.
Smelling her honesty like a bloodhound, Crawford’s eyes snap open. “What?” he says.
Mary shrugs. She’s won, so there’s not much point in sticking around. She clambers to her feet, smoothing the folds and blades of grass out of her pants, and says, “I suppose I can’t avoid seeing you in class tomorrow. Please do me a favor and don’t engage me in conversation.”
Unfortunately, Crawford and Lydia attended the same school of advanced war tactics; he comes in the next morning-and the one after that, and after that, and the clinical practicum they apparently also share, as well as a frankly useless literature seminar that makes Mary want to peel out the relevant sections of her brain and set them on fire-and takes a seat next to her, slinging his leather satchel onto the table and crossing his feet at the ankle, lounging negligently.
“Heya, Bennet,” he says casually.
The pencil that Mary is holding groans right before it breaks in half. The girl sitting next to Mary stops staring at Crawford long enough to get a slightly frightened look on her face and she promptly gathers her belongings and moves down a row.
“Crawford,” replies Mary, lethal and low.
“I was thinking,” he continues, “that we were rather remarkable partners last year, and maybe we should revise our arrangement.”
“I am going to fuck you when hell starts crying kittens,” Mary assures him.
Crawford grins and bites the end of his pen. It would be devastating if Mary cared, which she doesn’t, because he’s an arsehole and a prick with daddy issues and she wouldn’t suck his mangy, inbred cock if she were poisoned and his semen was the antidote.
“But how will I improve?” he purrs. The girl now a row down from Mary audibly sighs. “I need your tutelage, clearly.”
“I don’t know where your mouth has been,” Mary tells him. “For all I know, you’ve been sticking it into anything with a clit for the past six months.”
Thankfully, McDaniel chooses that moment to swirl dramatically into the room, white hair whipped into a frenzy above his rumpled suit. “Students!” he bellows. “Welcome, welcome.”
Mary is distracted by scrambling to open her notebook, so she almost misses how Crawford leans forward and whispers in her ear, “Fighting’s only foreplay, sweet.”
DO YOU KNOW WHAT ‘NO’ MEANS? she writes in the upper corner of her notebook. BECAUSE THIS IS HARRASSMENT.
Crawford doesn’t reply during class-McDaniel is too terrifying for that-but as Mary pushes her way out of the room at the end of the seminar, she finds a note crumpled in the pocket of her cardigan. You’ve never told me to stop. Say it and I will.
~
It’s stupid. It’s so stupid.
But Mary crumples up his note and throws it away and she lets the sexual tension leak all of her memories of the eminently fanciable and completely unsuitable Dr. Fitzwilliam out of her head. Henry Crawford is a bad idea the same way that no one telling Hitler about the quality of Russian winters was a bad idea. Still: He’s got gorgeous eyes and he’s the second best sex she’s ever had, after Marianne her second year, and there’s no rule saying she can’t fuck someone she hates.
This is probably how Lydia ended up pregnant.
Well, sex is definitely how Lydia ended up pregnant, but Mary consoles herself with the fact that she is never going to be blind to Henry Crawford’s faults the way that Lydia was to George Wickham’s.
At the beginning of November, as midterms loom threateningly in the close future and Mary’s studying reaches such a frenzied pitch that she turns off her phone and locks down Internet access on her computer, she accepts Crawford’s invitation to study together. It’s inevitable that they end up in the back of the library, in a rarely dusted section devoted to the Portuguese naval influence on the Napoleonic Wars, with Mary’s legs locked around Crawford’s waist as he licks his way up her neck.
“Fuck,” she mutters. “This goes against my moral code.
“Bennet,” Crawford mouths into the slick skin of her neck, “shut the bloody fuck up.” To accentuate this, he bites her so hard that she arches off of the shelf onto which she’s propped herself. He’s now holding the entirety of her weight with twin palms pressed on the bottom of her thighs, but it’s apparently not too much for Rowing Champion Crawford.
“I’m going to accept your challenge,” he says, licking the spot of his bite, “but not right now.”
It has always been one of Mary’s more sordid dreams to be thoroughly fucked in the abandoned stacks of the UL, but she hadn’t exactly expected Henry Crawford to be playing a starring role. For one thing, she hates him. It’s hard to remember why when he’s devoting most of his energy to getting her off, but the relevant data returns as Mary twists her hand in the back of his jumper and the expensive cashmere slides as slickly as Crawford’s two fingers inside of her.
Right. He’s an arsehole whose entire existence can be summed up by his sister, who married the third-richest man in Britain with a title, excluding the Prince of Wales and his offspring.
“Oh, Christ,” Mary moans, “Crawford, you’re getting better at this.”
“Practice, Bennet,” he says. “And it’s easy when you’re so fucking enthusiastic. I should’ve guessed about the books.”
It would embarrassing that he can tell how badly she wants him, but Mary decided two years ago to stop being embarrassed by her enthusiasm for sex, right around when she found herself snogging Marianne Dashwood after a pro-con discussion of the use of menstrual cups. “Crawford, if you don’t-” Mary’s threat dies unspoken in a thick, high keen that Crawford smothers with a warm, wet kiss, his fingers tight across the back of her neck.
~
“Still room to improve,” Mary gasps when she has her breathing under control.
Crawford rolls away and tries unsuccessfully to brush the dust off of his slacks. “Oh, pull the other one, Bennet.”
The sight of his finger shaking on his zipper imbues her with enough confidence to raise an eyebrow and lazily lift herself to her elbows. “Crawford, just because you know what a clitoris is doesn’t mean you’re a god of sex.”
He stops fussing with his slacks and glares at her through narrowed eyes. “Oh, really?”
~
Through a system of mutual goading and orgasm denial, the sex rapidly becomes fantastic. It’s too bad that Crawford’s personality is nowhere near fantastic. Other than being charming and having a Neanderthal-like strength that is strangely appealing, he’s still a gigantic prick and clearly only set on becoming a doctor to eventually practice expensive surgery somewhere that will keep him in bespoke suits and supermodels for the rest of his life. When he’s not setting all of his focus on becoming the best shag Mary has ever had, he’s still annoying as fuck.
They don’t have an exclusivity clause because they’re not dating, but the other girls at Girton seem to think that Mary’s just in denial about the seriousness of their relationship. Through Girton’s impressively vast gossip network, they give her details about Crawford’s movements that are akin to a particularly obsessive Twitter feed.
“He’s laying siege to Maria Bertram,” Isabella Thorpe tells Mary in the corridor between their rooms on a Thursday afternoon in late December.
“I don’t care,” Mary throws over her shoulder, occupied in half-scanning an email update on things in Finchley from Kitty. “He’s not my boyfriend and I don’t interfere in his affairs.”
Mary honestly follows that philosophy-she’s too busy for a boyfriend, and she doesn’t care what Crawford does with his free time as long as they use protection during their biweekly hate-shag sessions-until Shreya Govindarajulu stops her before their literature review seminar and says in a low voice, “He’s dropped Maria Bertram for Fanny Price.”
“Jesus, Crawford,” Mary says, slamming her books onto the table that they still share. “Fanny Price? She’s a saint and everyone knows that she’s in love with Edmund Bertram, the blind git.” Crawford, surprisingly, colors red and then purple.
“It’s not like that,” he blusters. “And keep your voice down, Bennet.”
Mary sinks into the seat next to him. “I can’t believe you,” she hisses. “I don’t give two fucks about Maria, as everyone is well aware of the state of her morals, but Fanny Price thinks everyone is as kind-hearted as she is. And, I reiterate, some day very soon Edmund Bertram is going to get his head out of his arse and make Fanny very happy. You just have to look at them to know that in three years they’re going to be married with a throng of nauseating infants.”
“Why should she have to wait?” Crawford’s voice is oddly pitched, more frustrated than the situation would seem to warrant. He can’t actually want Fanny, can he? Charming pricks like Crawford aren’t built to appreciate saints like Fanny Price, although they can probably seduce them with enough effort. He avoids making eye contact in classic textbook fashion, fixing his gaze on his pen and employing some Olympic-grade fiddling.
Mary finds herself, strangely enough, overcome by sympathy. “Crawford, you don’t deserve Fanny Price. You’re a terrible person.”
Crawford frowns and straightens, finally looking at Mary. “My sister says that a good woman will be the making of me.” The tightness in his mouth and tension in the corner of his eyes tell her that Crawford is upset, and for some reason he apparently thinks Fanny Price will soothe the tremors of his soul.
God, he’s so much of a moron that it’s rather breathtaking. “That will only work,” Mary explains gently, “if you’re willing to become a better person for Fanny. Pretending to be nice doesn’t cut it.”
Mary makes it clear that if he’s pursuing Fanny Price she doesn’t want to see any sign of his arse, sun-kissed or not, until after the matter has been resolved. Crawford laughs it off, but he must be serious; he doesn’t text Mary again about meeting to deplete the stress that McDaniel’s seminar builds in their bones, and she occasionally sees him in town, framed in the front window of Fanny’s favorite teashop, earnestly discussing Fordyce or whatever it is people reading theology spend their time doing.
Of course, the whole situation is going to blow up in his face. Edmund Bertram is quiet and reading theology but that doesn’t negate that he plays rugby and has fists the size of dinner plates. Exactly two days before the end of the term, the entirety of Girton pours out onto the green to watch Edmund Bertram plant a facer on Henry Crawford over the honor of Fanny Price.
“This is beautiful,” Isabella says when Mary joins her. “Look at his form. We haven’t had anything this riveting since George Nyugen throttled Elton for trying to molest Emma in the backseat of his car.”
Since no one in Girton has any sympathy for her or her antics, Maria Bertram, disheveled and half-dressed, is crying alone off to one side of the green; on the other, Fanny Price is wringing her hands and looking confused and apologetic. Mary doesn’t need Isabella’s blathering to infer what’s happened. “You’re a moron, Henry Crawford,” she says under her breath.
For a few long seconds, as Edmund Bertram grips Crawford’s collar and lifts him clear off of the ground, she contemplates not intervening and leaving everyone to their assorted fates. It’s Crawford’s own damn fault that he got bored with Fanny Price and decided to fuck Maria on the side.
Mary has no obligation to clean up his mess. Mary chants in her mind, It’s his fault, he shouldn’t have so thoroughly pursued someone he was going to end up hurting, and still finds herself elbowing her way to the front of the crowd and waiting for a good moment to latch onto Maria Bertram’s half-bared shoulders.
“You should go and apologize to Fanny,” she says to Maria.
“What the bloody hell-” begins Maria, but Mary cuts her off.
“Trust me, Crawford is going to drop you the second that he peels himself off of the grass. If you want any chance of saving your relationship with your brother, you should do it through Fanny.” Mary turns Maria’s frail shoulders so that she is pointed towards Fanny. “Look at her. She’ll forgive you in half a second if you’re at least 70% sincere.”
“Oh, fuck off,” says Maria, but she squares her shoulders after wrenching them out of Mary’s grasp and goes to stand next to Fanny. She waits for her brother to reel backwards from Crawford’s swing to his jaw and then begins a conversation that is so awkward Mary can smell it from eighteen feet away.
Once Edmund Bertram has finished wringing a good quantity of blood from Crawford’s nose, he collects Fanny Price from the clammy embrace of his teary sister (79% sincerity; she’ll be fine) and they disappear in the general direction of Corpus Christi, where Fanny will presumably soothe his ills with her sweet loving. The rest of Girton loses interest and returns to their rooms for revision. Mary, who commits 100% when she wants to do something, stands above Crawford’s crumpled body and says, “At the risk of sounding like a cunt, I want to say: I told you so.”
“Fffufuf,” says Crawford through what is definitely broken zygomatic arch.
“We better get you to A&E,” Mary says. “Up you go, come on. Christ, Crawford, you’ve got at least seventy pounds of muscle on me, you need to give me a hand here.” Crawford drunkenly scrambles to his feet and sways dangerously before achieving stable footing.
Getting to the hospital takes forever with Crawford listing heavily away from Mary and blinking blood out of his face. After he’s been plugged into an IV and the A&E doctor has signed him up for a surgery date, Mary nicks his mobile and calls his sister, whose entry in his phone’s contacts is BITCH SISTER FROM HELL. “I can’t possibly come out now,” she tells Mary. “Nicky’s got a very important appearance tomorrow that I can’t miss.”
“I have final exams,” Mary explains in a voice that she hopes is friendlier over the phone line than it sounds in her head. “I can’t possibly stay with him.”
“He’ll be fine alone,” says Crawford’s sister. “I’ll be up on Friday. Tell him that.”
Mary hangs up, more shocked than she should be that there is a meaner Crawford sibling than Henry, and returns to Crawford’s bedside. “Your sister can’t get away until Friday, but she’ll come as soon as she can.”
Crawford snorts derisively and immediately regrets it, to judge by his low moan of agony. “Of course she can’t. Right. Well, off with you then. Have you still got any exams left?”
“Two,” Mary admits. She slowly pulls on her coat, lingering by his bedside, and wonders why she feels like a tremendous prat. “Oh, bugger it. I’ll go get my things and be back.”
Crawford’s broken and bloody face is a parody of shock. “What? Bennet-”
“Shut up. You should be out of surgery and doped up on prophylactics by the time I grab some dinner and my notes. Don’t die or something else inconvenient, Crawford.”
It’s not that she’s in love with Crawford-oh god, she’s definitely not in love with Crawford-so much as Mary is incapable of imagining a scenario where she broke a bone and her family didn’t descend en mass to gather by her bedside and weep over her limp body or, in the case of her father, say mean things to goad her back to life.
She feels bad for Crawford. It’s such a weird sensation that, when Mary recognizes it midway across the King’s green, she pauses and savors it. Rich, beautiful, successful, charming Crawford doesn’t have something (other than human emotion) that Mary takes for granted every day.
How…startling. Mary frowns and muses over it, as she is wont, as she makes her way to King’s and proceeds to call everyone in her mobile directory until she finds a resident willing to let her in. She unlocks the door to Crawford’s room and swings inside. Despite their numerous shags, she’s never seen Crawford’s inner sanctum; it was always easier to find somewhere to shag in one of the back corners of the UL or the medical library.
All of his belongings are flung across the room and it takes Mary twenty minutes to find him a clean change of clothes and a hairbrush and other things she perceives to be necessary to the maintenance of Crawford’s vanity. Then she sorts through the pile of books on a shelf over his desk. Out of disgust she avoids the Hemingway and Heinlein-of course Crawford favors misogynistic classics, she’s not surprised-and has to decide between a well-thumbed Henry IV and a collection of Yeats with a broken spine and some of the pages missing. She picks Shakespeare in the end because she doesn’t want Crawford dwelling over the tragic end of his ill-advised tryst with Fanny Price.
She stops to order some takeaway curry on the walk back, but Mary’s stomach is choosing to exhibit what she assumes can only be latent finals stress and refuses to settle enough to makes eating advisable. Back at the hospital, she settles outside of the room assigned to Crawford and waits for the staff to return him from surgery. Over the course of three hours, she revises half of what she should and answers four phone calls. Two are for her, both from her mother about some minutiae related to Jane’s pending nuptials; two are for Crawford, the captain of his rowing team and a mate looking for company.
The captain of his rowing team takes his injury seriously, and he ends the call after apologizing for swearing a blue streak up and down the line. His mate remarks that Mary has a rather sexy voice, and would she like to join him at the pub? Mary tells him she’d rather eat a newt.
Crawford wakes up around three in the morning. Mostly by lying through her teeth and looking sad and pathetic, Mary is still in his room. It helps that his sister’s name is Mary and her place on his emergency contact paperwork is still under her maiden name; through judicious application of crocodile tears, Mary has secured extended access.
“Bennet,” Crawford croaks. “What are you still doing here?”
“Watching over your arse like a bloody guardian angel,” Mary says. The fingers of her less dominant hand are trembling slightly as she reaches for the bag at her feet. “Look at this, I braved your sty of a room to get your things.”
“I knew you liked me,” he rasps. The bandage taped to his cheek ruins his attempt at a charming grin.
“Don’t do that, you look ghastly,” says Mary reprovingly. “Go back to sleep, I’ve still got to figure out how you’re going to repay me for lying about being your sister and sitting at your bedside while I should be back in my room, studying.”
Crawford peers at her through narrowed eyes. It’s the first time she’s seen him exhausted, or anything other than annoying and randy. “Bennet, are you exhibiting concern for my person?” He slurs his words.
Mary nails her eyes to the corner of her textbook. “Don’t be an idiot. Go back to sleep.”
“I knew you cared.” Crawford closes his eyes; a smile teases the corner of his bruise mouth.
“I care about whether or not I have to explain to your family why Edmund Bertram felt compelled to break your face.” Her voice, rough from stress and exhaustion, shakes. Mary knows better than to show Crawford weakness. “Now, shut up.”
~
Mary passes her last two exams by the skin of her teeth. She pulls her weary body to Crawford’s hospital room the morning before her train home, only to find him surrounded by his rowing team. Other than Ed Ferrars, who Mary knows from CUSU LGBT and can be described only as elfin, or maybe the only boy her age Mary knows who is smaller than she is, the room is packed with giants with the wingspans of dinosaurs and biceps bigger than Mary’s upper thigh.
“Bennet,” says Crawford, “what a pleasant surprise.” His voice is still half-wrecked from the impressive ring of bruises Bertram left around his neck, but he’s back in high form. “What can I do for you today?”
The giants part like the red sea in front of Mary. She decides not to be intimidated and walks to Crawford’s bed, raised so that he can survey his loyal subjects like a king. “I’ve decided on my repayment,” she says. “Make sure to pack for three days in London. You’re going to need a suit.”
Crawford freezes. “Bennet-”
Mary smiles so brightly her teeth hurt. “You’re going to my sister’s wedding on the 12th, Crawford. Chin up, it’s only going to hurt for the first seven hours or so.”
~
[part iii]
~
ii. | all the blinds are fantasies
The first day of Michaelmas term, Mary wakes up early, pours coffee down her throat, and has begun her reading for her clinical course by 9am, listening to the entire body of work of Metric to get her into the mood of studying for 18 hours of every day.
Her position of solitude underneath her chosen tree is invaded midafternoon by a long-limbed shadow. “Do you mind?” asks Mary, not looking up. “I’m attempting to read and your body is inhibiting that.” She hates the new first years.
Mary’s headphones muffle the reply of the irritating person in question, so she rips them out and demands, “What?”
“I said, nice to see you out in the sunlight. I wasn’t aware vampires could brave the outside at this time of day.”
Of course. “Go away, Crawford.”
“I see you’re still stuck on your hostile setting,” he continues, settling down next to her. He immediately leans into her personal space to read the title of her textbook. “Is that for McDaniel’s class? I’m in that.”
Mary recoils from him, vaguely appalled. “Why the hell did they let you in? It’s a specialized seminar.”
“I believe my grades were acceptable and I wrote a truly superb email to McDaniel about my academic qualifications.” Crawford preens, but it’s slightly ironic. Mary hadn’t known that Crawford was self-aware enough for irony; she finds it disturbingly attractive.
“Yes, well, I’m sure you can reflect on your perfection somewhere that’s not here.” Mary makes a shooing motion. “Don’t you have a room in King’s where you can think about it?”
“This level of sun-kissed beauty isn’t possible without constant maintenance.” Crawford shows no sign of going away, and in fact rearranges his limbs so that they are even more akimbo and more pointedly invading Mary’s personal space. He tilts his head against the tree trunk and closes his eyes.
Mary’s fingers spasm against her textbook. “Crawford.”
“Bennet,” he says, not opening his eyes, “I want to enjoy a pleasant October afternoon. I promise not to antagonize you if you’ll just shut up and read.”
“Ha!” huffs Mary, but after carefully examining his expression she can’t see any indication that he’ll go back on his word. “Fine.”
She hates Crawford, but she’d rather carve out her own eyeballs than show him any weakness, so she reopens her textbook and finds her place. It’s difficult to concentrate with his arm pressed against her thigh. His skin-which, sadly, does indeed deserve the qualifier “sun-kissed”-is warm through the thin linen of her pants. Whenever she tries to focus on her the words, all she can feel is the long line of Crawford’s arm against her thigh.
“Don’t think so hard,” he says abruptly. “You’re still annoying as fuck, Bennet.”
Mary makes an offended noise high in her throat and snaps her eyes back to the two-page figure she’s ostensibly studying. “You’re one to talk, Crawford.”
He peels open one eyelid long enough to display an iris almost blinding in its blueness. It is remarkably unfair how compelling he is, considering that Dr. Fitzwilliam is about 40 times more traditionally attractive. “I’m not the one who tosses my bedmate’s clothes out the window.” He closes his eyelid and tilts his face so the sunlight streams over the crooked line of his nose. “After receiving some truly stellar cunnilingus, no less.”
Mary gives up on serenity and hits Crawford in the chest with all the force her puny arms can muster. With the weight of the textbook added, it’s an impressive effort, but Crawford has rowed for the last three years and is built like a gorilla; he absorbs the blow with only a small grunt. “Trust me,” she snarls, “that was not the most impressive cunnilingus I’ve ever received.”
She says it to have words coming out of her mouth, the necessary back-and-forth that keeps her head above the water in conversations with Henry “My Grandfather Is a Marquis, You Know” Crawford, and it’s not until she finishes that she realizes it’s true. She has had better cunnilingus, from the girlfriend that her mother is never going to hear about.
Smelling her honesty like a bloodhound, Crawford’s eyes snap open. “What?” he says.
Mary shrugs. She’s won, so there’s not much point in sticking around. She clambers to her feet, smoothing the folds and blades of grass out of her pants, and says, “I suppose I can’t avoid seeing you in class tomorrow. Please do me a favor and don’t engage me in conversation.”
Unfortunately, Crawford and Lydia attended the same school of advanced war tactics; he comes in the next morning-and the one after that, and after that, and the clinical practicum they apparently also share, as well as a frankly useless literature seminar that makes Mary want to peel out the relevant sections of her brain and set them on fire-and takes a seat next to her, slinging his leather satchel onto the table and crossing his feet at the ankle, lounging negligently.
“Heya, Bennet,” he says casually.
The pencil that Mary is holding groans right before it breaks in half. The girl sitting next to Mary stops staring at Crawford long enough to get a slightly frightened look on her face and she promptly gathers her belongings and moves down a row.
“Crawford,” replies Mary, lethal and low.
“I was thinking,” he continues, “that we were rather remarkable partners last year, and maybe we should revise our arrangement.”
“I am going to fuck you when hell starts crying kittens,” Mary assures him.
Crawford grins and bites the end of his pen. It would be devastating if Mary cared, which she doesn’t, because he’s an arsehole and a prick with daddy issues and she wouldn’t suck his mangy, inbred cock if she were poisoned and his semen was the antidote.
“But how will I improve?” he purrs. The girl now a row down from Mary audibly sighs. “I need your tutelage, clearly.”
“I don’t know where your mouth has been,” Mary tells him. “For all I know, you’ve been sticking it into anything with a clit for the past six months.”
Thankfully, McDaniel chooses that moment to swirl dramatically into the room, white hair whipped into a frenzy above his rumpled suit. “Students!” he bellows. “Welcome, welcome.”
Mary is distracted by scrambling to open her notebook, so she almost misses how Crawford leans forward and whispers in her ear, “Fighting’s only foreplay, sweet.”
DO YOU KNOW WHAT ‘NO’ MEANS? she writes in the upper corner of her notebook. BECAUSE THIS IS HARRASSMENT.
Crawford doesn’t reply during class-McDaniel is too terrifying for that-but as Mary pushes her way out of the room at the end of the seminar, she finds a note crumpled in the pocket of her cardigan. You’ve never told me to stop. Say it and I will.
~
It’s stupid. It’s so stupid.
But Mary crumples up his note and throws it away and she lets the sexual tension leak all of her memories of the eminently fanciable and completely unsuitable Dr. Fitzwilliam out of her head. Henry Crawford is a bad idea the same way that no one telling Hitler about the quality of Russian winters was a bad idea. Still: He’s got gorgeous eyes and he’s the second best sex she’s ever had, after Marianne her second year, and there’s no rule saying she can’t fuck someone she hates.
This is probably how Lydia ended up pregnant.
Well, sex is definitely how Lydia ended up pregnant, but Mary consoles herself with the fact that she is never going to be blind to Henry Crawford’s faults the way that Lydia was to George Wickham’s.
At the beginning of November, as midterms loom threateningly in the close future and Mary’s studying reaches such a frenzied pitch that she turns off her phone and locks down Internet access on her computer, she accepts Crawford’s invitation to study together. It’s inevitable that they end up in the back of the library, in a rarely dusted section devoted to the Portuguese naval influence on the Napoleonic Wars, with Mary’s legs locked around Crawford’s waist as he licks his way up her neck.
“Fuck,” she mutters. “This goes against my moral code.
“Bennet,” Crawford mouths into the slick skin of her neck, “shut the bloody fuck up.” To accentuate this, he bites her so hard that she arches off of the shelf onto which she’s propped herself. He’s now holding the entirety of her weight with twin palms pressed on the bottom of her thighs, but it’s apparently not too much for Rowing Champion Crawford.
“I’m going to accept your challenge,” he says, licking the spot of his bite, “but not right now.”
It has always been one of Mary’s more sordid dreams to be thoroughly fucked in the abandoned stacks of the UL, but she hadn’t exactly expected Henry Crawford to be playing a starring role. For one thing, she hates him. It’s hard to remember why when he’s devoting most of his energy to getting her off, but the relevant data returns as Mary twists her hand in the back of his jumper and the expensive cashmere slides as slickly as Crawford’s two fingers inside of her.
Right. He’s an arsehole whose entire existence can be summed up by his sister, who married the third-richest man in Britain with a title, excluding the Prince of Wales and his offspring.
“Oh, Christ,” Mary moans, “Crawford, you’re getting better at this.”
“Practice, Bennet,” he says. “And it’s easy when you’re so fucking enthusiastic. I should’ve guessed about the books.”
It would embarrassing that he can tell how badly she wants him, but Mary decided two years ago to stop being embarrassed by her enthusiasm for sex, right around when she found herself snogging Marianne Dashwood after a pro-con discussion of the use of menstrual cups. “Crawford, if you don’t-” Mary’s threat dies unspoken in a thick, high keen that Crawford smothers with a warm, wet kiss, his fingers tight across the back of her neck.
~
“Still room to improve,” Mary gasps when she has her breathing under control.
Crawford rolls away and tries unsuccessfully to brush the dust off of his slacks. “Oh, pull the other one, Bennet.”
The sight of his finger shaking on his zipper imbues her with enough confidence to raise an eyebrow and lazily lift herself to her elbows. “Crawford, just because you know what a clitoris is doesn’t mean you’re a god of sex.”
He stops fussing with his slacks and glares at her through narrowed eyes. “Oh, really?”
~
Through a system of mutual goading and orgasm denial, the sex rapidly becomes fantastic. It’s too bad that Crawford’s personality is nowhere near fantastic. Other than being charming and having a Neanderthal-like strength that is strangely appealing, he’s still a gigantic prick and clearly only set on becoming a doctor to eventually practice expensive surgery somewhere that will keep him in bespoke suits and supermodels for the rest of his life. When he’s not setting all of his focus on becoming the best shag Mary has ever had, he’s still annoying as fuck.
They don’t have an exclusivity clause because they’re not dating, but the other girls at Girton seem to think that Mary’s just in denial about the seriousness of their relationship. Through Girton’s impressively vast gossip network, they give her details about Crawford’s movements that are akin to a particularly obsessive Twitter feed.
“He’s laying siege to Maria Bertram,” Isabella Thorpe tells Mary in the corridor between their rooms on a Thursday afternoon in late December.
“I don’t care,” Mary throws over her shoulder, occupied in half-scanning an email update on things in Finchley from Kitty. “He’s not my boyfriend and I don’t interfere in his affairs.”
Mary honestly follows that philosophy-she’s too busy for a boyfriend, and she doesn’t care what Crawford does with his free time as long as they use protection during their biweekly hate-shag sessions-until Shreya Govindarajulu stops her before their literature review seminar and says in a low voice, “He’s dropped Maria Bertram for Fanny Price.”
“Jesus, Crawford,” Mary says, slamming her books onto the table that they still share. “Fanny Price? She’s a saint and everyone knows that she’s in love with Edmund Bertram, the blind git.” Crawford, surprisingly, colors red and then purple.
“It’s not like that,” he blusters. “And keep your voice down, Bennet.”
Mary sinks into the seat next to him. “I can’t believe you,” she hisses. “I don’t give two fucks about Maria, as everyone is well aware of the state of her morals, but Fanny Price thinks everyone is as kind-hearted as she is. And, I reiterate, some day very soon Edmund Bertram is going to get his head out of his arse and make Fanny very happy. You just have to look at them to know that in three years they’re going to be married with a throng of nauseating infants.”
“Why should she have to wait?” Crawford’s voice is oddly pitched, more frustrated than the situation would seem to warrant. He can’t actually want Fanny, can he? Charming pricks like Crawford aren’t built to appreciate saints like Fanny Price, although they can probably seduce them with enough effort. He avoids making eye contact in classic textbook fashion, fixing his gaze on his pen and employing some Olympic-grade fiddling.
Mary finds herself, strangely enough, overcome by sympathy. “Crawford, you don’t deserve Fanny Price. You’re a terrible person.”
Crawford frowns and straightens, finally looking at Mary. “My sister says that a good woman will be the making of me.” The tightness in his mouth and tension in the corner of his eyes tell her that Crawford is upset, and for some reason he apparently thinks Fanny Price will soothe the tremors of his soul.
God, he’s so much of a moron that it’s rather breathtaking. “That will only work,” Mary explains gently, “if you’re willing to become a better person for Fanny. Pretending to be nice doesn’t cut it.”
Mary makes it clear that if he’s pursuing Fanny Price she doesn’t want to see any sign of his arse, sun-kissed or not, until after the matter has been resolved. Crawford laughs it off, but he must be serious; he doesn’t text Mary again about meeting to deplete the stress that McDaniel’s seminar builds in their bones, and she occasionally sees him in town, framed in the front window of Fanny’s favorite teashop, earnestly discussing Fordyce or whatever it is people reading theology spend their time doing.
Of course, the whole situation is going to blow up in his face. Edmund Bertram is quiet and reading theology but that doesn’t negate that he plays rugby and has fists the size of dinner plates. Exactly two days before the end of the term, the entirety of Girton pours out onto the green to watch Edmund Bertram plant a facer on Henry Crawford over the honor of Fanny Price.
“This is beautiful,” Isabella says when Mary joins her. “Look at his form. We haven’t had anything this riveting since George Nyugen throttled Elton for trying to molest Emma in the backseat of his car.”
Since no one in Girton has any sympathy for her or her antics, Maria Bertram, disheveled and half-dressed, is crying alone off to one side of the green; on the other, Fanny Price is wringing her hands and looking confused and apologetic. Mary doesn’t need Isabella’s blathering to infer what’s happened. “You’re a moron, Henry Crawford,” she says under her breath.
For a few long seconds, as Edmund Bertram grips Crawford’s collar and lifts him clear off of the ground, she contemplates not intervening and leaving everyone to their assorted fates. It’s Crawford’s own damn fault that he got bored with Fanny Price and decided to fuck Maria on the side.
Mary has no obligation to clean up his mess. Mary chants in her mind, It’s his fault, he shouldn’t have so thoroughly pursued someone he was going to end up hurting, and still finds herself elbowing her way to the front of the crowd and waiting for a good moment to latch onto Maria Bertram’s half-bared shoulders.
“You should go and apologize to Fanny,” she says to Maria.
“What the bloody hell-” begins Maria, but Mary cuts her off.
“Trust me, Crawford is going to drop you the second that he peels himself off of the grass. If you want any chance of saving your relationship with your brother, you should do it through Fanny.” Mary turns Maria’s frail shoulders so that she is pointed towards Fanny. “Look at her. She’ll forgive you in half a second if you’re at least 70% sincere.”
“Oh, fuck off,” says Maria, but she squares her shoulders after wrenching them out of Mary’s grasp and goes to stand next to Fanny. She waits for her brother to reel backwards from Crawford’s swing to his jaw and then begins a conversation that is so awkward Mary can smell it from eighteen feet away.
Once Edmund Bertram has finished wringing a good quantity of blood from Crawford’s nose, he collects Fanny Price from the clammy embrace of his teary sister (79% sincerity; she’ll be fine) and they disappear in the general direction of Corpus Christi, where Fanny will presumably soothe his ills with her sweet loving. The rest of Girton loses interest and returns to their rooms for revision. Mary, who commits 100% when she wants to do something, stands above Crawford’s crumpled body and says, “At the risk of sounding like a cunt, I want to say: I told you so.”
“Fffufuf,” says Crawford through what is definitely broken zygomatic arch.
“We better get you to A&E,” Mary says. “Up you go, come on. Christ, Crawford, you’ve got at least seventy pounds of muscle on me, you need to give me a hand here.” Crawford drunkenly scrambles to his feet and sways dangerously before achieving stable footing.
Getting to the hospital takes forever with Crawford listing heavily away from Mary and blinking blood out of his face. After he’s been plugged into an IV and the A&E doctor has signed him up for a surgery date, Mary nicks his mobile and calls his sister, whose entry in his phone’s contacts is BITCH SISTER FROM HELL. “I can’t possibly come out now,” she tells Mary. “Nicky’s got a very important appearance tomorrow that I can’t miss.”
“I have final exams,” Mary explains in a voice that she hopes is friendlier over the phone line than it sounds in her head. “I can’t possibly stay with him.”
“He’ll be fine alone,” says Crawford’s sister. “I’ll be up on Friday. Tell him that.”
Mary hangs up, more shocked than she should be that there is a meaner Crawford sibling than Henry, and returns to Crawford’s bedside. “Your sister can’t get away until Friday, but she’ll come as soon as she can.”
Crawford snorts derisively and immediately regrets it, to judge by his low moan of agony. “Of course she can’t. Right. Well, off with you then. Have you still got any exams left?”
“Two,” Mary admits. She slowly pulls on her coat, lingering by his bedside, and wonders why she feels like a tremendous prat. “Oh, bugger it. I’ll go get my things and be back.”
Crawford’s broken and bloody face is a parody of shock. “What? Bennet-”
“Shut up. You should be out of surgery and doped up on prophylactics by the time I grab some dinner and my notes. Don’t die or something else inconvenient, Crawford.”
It’s not that she’s in love with Crawford-oh god, she’s definitely not in love with Crawford-so much as Mary is incapable of imagining a scenario where she broke a bone and her family didn’t descend en mass to gather by her bedside and weep over her limp body or, in the case of her father, say mean things to goad her back to life.
She feels bad for Crawford. It’s such a weird sensation that, when Mary recognizes it midway across the King’s green, she pauses and savors it. Rich, beautiful, successful, charming Crawford doesn’t have something (other than human emotion) that Mary takes for granted every day.
How…startling. Mary frowns and muses over it, as she is wont, as she makes her way to King’s and proceeds to call everyone in her mobile directory until she finds a resident willing to let her in. She unlocks the door to Crawford’s room and swings inside. Despite their numerous shags, she’s never seen Crawford’s inner sanctum; it was always easier to find somewhere to shag in one of the back corners of the UL or the medical library.
All of his belongings are flung across the room and it takes Mary twenty minutes to find him a clean change of clothes and a hairbrush and other things she perceives to be necessary to the maintenance of Crawford’s vanity. Then she sorts through the pile of books on a shelf over his desk. Out of disgust she avoids the Hemingway and Heinlein-of course Crawford favors misogynistic classics, she’s not surprised-and has to decide between a well-thumbed Henry IV and a collection of Yeats with a broken spine and some of the pages missing. She picks Shakespeare in the end because she doesn’t want Crawford dwelling over the tragic end of his ill-advised tryst with Fanny Price.
She stops to order some takeaway curry on the walk back, but Mary’s stomach is choosing to exhibit what she assumes can only be latent finals stress and refuses to settle enough to makes eating advisable. Back at the hospital, she settles outside of the room assigned to Crawford and waits for the staff to return him from surgery. Over the course of three hours, she revises half of what she should and answers four phone calls. Two are for her, both from her mother about some minutiae related to Jane’s pending nuptials; two are for Crawford, the captain of his rowing team and a mate looking for company.
The captain of his rowing team takes his injury seriously, and he ends the call after apologizing for swearing a blue streak up and down the line. His mate remarks that Mary has a rather sexy voice, and would she like to join him at the pub? Mary tells him she’d rather eat a newt.
Crawford wakes up around three in the morning. Mostly by lying through her teeth and looking sad and pathetic, Mary is still in his room. It helps that his sister’s name is Mary and her place on his emergency contact paperwork is still under her maiden name; through judicious application of crocodile tears, Mary has secured extended access.
“Bennet,” Crawford croaks. “What are you still doing here?”
“Watching over your arse like a bloody guardian angel,” Mary says. The fingers of her less dominant hand are trembling slightly as she reaches for the bag at her feet. “Look at this, I braved your sty of a room to get your things.”
“I knew you liked me,” he rasps. The bandage taped to his cheek ruins his attempt at a charming grin.
“Don’t do that, you look ghastly,” says Mary reprovingly. “Go back to sleep, I’ve still got to figure out how you’re going to repay me for lying about being your sister and sitting at your bedside while I should be back in my room, studying.”
Crawford peers at her through narrowed eyes. It’s the first time she’s seen him exhausted, or anything other than annoying and randy. “Bennet, are you exhibiting concern for my person?” He slurs his words.
Mary nails her eyes to the corner of her textbook. “Don’t be an idiot. Go back to sleep.”
“I knew you cared.” Crawford closes his eyes; a smile teases the corner of his bruise mouth.
“I care about whether or not I have to explain to your family why Edmund Bertram felt compelled to break your face.” Her voice, rough from stress and exhaustion, shakes. Mary knows better than to show Crawford weakness. “Now, shut up.”
~
Mary passes her last two exams by the skin of her teeth. She pulls her weary body to Crawford’s hospital room the morning before her train home, only to find him surrounded by his rowing team. Other than Ed Ferrars, who Mary knows from CUSU LGBT and can be described only as elfin, or maybe the only boy her age Mary knows who is smaller than she is, the room is packed with giants with the wingspans of dinosaurs and biceps bigger than Mary’s upper thigh.
“Bennet,” says Crawford, “what a pleasant surprise.” His voice is still half-wrecked from the impressive ring of bruises Bertram left around his neck, but he’s back in high form. “What can I do for you today?”
The giants part like the red sea in front of Mary. She decides not to be intimidated and walks to Crawford’s bed, raised so that he can survey his loyal subjects like a king. “I’ve decided on my repayment,” she says. “Make sure to pack for three days in London. You’re going to need a suit.”
Crawford freezes. “Bennet-”
Mary smiles so brightly her teeth hurt. “You’re going to my sister’s wedding on the 12th, Crawford. Chin up, it’s only going to hurt for the first seven hours or so.”
~
[part iii]