The Green Shore by Natalie Bakopoulos

Author:Natalie Bakopoulos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

27

Evan had taken it upon himself to oversee Anna’s literary instruction—science was fine, he said, and necessary, but she would be unwise to overlook the humanities, and each time he’d see her, usually near the university, he’d present her with a novel, most often by a foreign writer, or a collection of poems, almost always by a Greek. “The English, the Russians, the French—they do the novel well,” he said. “But poetry belongs to Greece.” Evan rarely suggested women writers, a fact Anna had challenged. She liked to argue with him if for nothing more than to defuse the burgeoning sexual tension she insisted to Panos was not there. Of course, those frequent meetings were coincidental. She was a university student, and she had every right to be there, more than he, in fact, since he had taught not there but at the School of Philosophy—he always claimed to be visiting a good friend, a colleague, he had an office nearby. Still, it did seem each time she ran into Evan he had something for her.

It had always been like this. The ones who captured Anna’s interest treated her with a cool intellect. Men took on a protective, almost sacred adoration with her, and she had mixed feelings about it. Even Panos, who Stella insisted was in love with Anna, treated her more like a sister, though this was fine with Anna. She liked Panos but she didn’t lie in bed thinking of him. While some of her friends complained that men didn’t take them seriously enough, Anna wished she’d be taken more lightly. Would it kill one of them to not give a damn what she thought? To only want her for her body?

It was a nice body, she thought, slim hipped and narrow in the way that was fashionable. Her hair was straight and long; she supposed she was pretty enough. But by the time Sophie was her age she had seemed to accumulate far more crushes and boys calling for her attention and whistling to her on the street, gestures at which Sophie would roll her eyes, but Anna could see, below the artifice, that she had been pleased.

Panos was skeptical; he saw the man’s interest in the Education of Anna, as he called it, to be a thinly veiled attempt to get her into bed.

“Why do you insist men only want one thing?” Anna asked him. They were having coffee together near the university. She spoke slowly and carefully. In a way, it’s exactly what she wanted Evan to want, but she wondered if he actually made a move in that direction whether it would be disappointing, or worse, scary. They were in a safe place, though admittedly teetering there.

“Because it’s true,” he said. He carefully tapped the last bits of tobacco from his pack out onto a rolling paper, crumpled up the green package, and shoved it beneath the table leg to steady it. They were both quiet for a moment as he rolled his cigarette.

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