Epic fail. Those were the words she should have tattooed on her forehead.
Bailey chewed thoughtfully on her pen cap as she watched her chemistry prof unload his briefcase onto his desk, turning to hang his long overcoat on a hook before surveying the room with those sharp, sexy blue eyes of his. He always looked like he wanted to start a little trouble. He didn’t miss anything with those eyes. She shifted in her seat, uncrossing and re-crossing her legs, smoothing her skirt over her thighs.
She knew she’d failed the test. She’d known it when she handed it over to him on Friday, a sinking feeling in her belly. He’d raised his eyebrows in question and she couldn’t do much except bite her lip and shrug. She certainly wasn’t going to tell him, “Yeah, I failed it.” Hours of studying, falling asleep at her little desk, drooling on her keyboard until she short-circuited the letter “b” and her fat, orange cat, Simon, jumped up to remind her it was time for his breakfast—and for what? A big fat F.
The thing was, Jacobs wasn’t a bad prof. He was stern and exact, but she supposed all chemistry teachers had to be. One mistake in chemistry could blow up the whole building. But somehow he still made chemistry interesting—something Bailey thought impossible—and even made her want to learn it. It wasn’t his problem, it was hers. She’d sailed through all her biology classes, dissecting frogs and fetal pigs like a pro, but when it came to chemistry, things just didn’t add up. Literally. She couldn’t do the math.
She’d tried everything. Math tutors—her father agreed to pay for one and the poor old guy practically had a heart attack every session because of Bailey’s constant mistakes. That turned out to be a total waste of time and money. She’d tried staying after class—Professor Jacobs was more than willing to stay and help. Sometimes the line up to his desk was so long she’d have to give up and head to work. American Fitness was open twenty-four hours and she got a lot of studying done sitting at the front desk.
Her roommate, Joanna, kept teasing her that it was Professor Jacobs’ good looks that had Bailey all distracted, and Bailey let her think so. Granted, the man was good-looking. And young. She didn’t quite know how young, but not that much older than his students. And he was kind of distracting. She’d found herself watching Dom—he told all his students to call him Dom, short for Dominic—when he turned toward the board to write something on it, wearing jeans and a white button-down shirt, his suit coat thrown over a chair, and wondering about him.
More students filed in, the tangled white wires of ear buds connected to iPhones dangling from their necks, wrapped around yellow and gold hoodies with CMU, CENTRAL MICHIGAN or some variation on the front. Some of the boys looked like they’d just rolled out of bed at the crack of noon, bedhead and PJ bottoms included. The girls were more smartly dressed, short skirts in spite of the cold temperatures outside, and blouses or tight sweaters or button-down shirts so low-cut as to be indecent, all of them, she was sure, trying to catch Dom’s attention.
“Hey, can you stay after today?” His presence was hot beside her, like standing next to the sun, but his voice was low, as if he was telling her a secret. His hand pressed a Scantron flat on her desk, face down, and she saw his red penned note on the back: See Me. It was the test. He’d been passing them out while she was daydreaming.
“Yeah, sure.” She couldn’t help the flush on her cheeks, spreading lower to her cleavage, just as exposed as any other girls’ there, she had to admit. She wasn’t above trying to catch his attention that way. Like the rest of the female population, she hoped maybe he might take pity on her and pass her through the class. She’d tried everything else, after all. And sometimes, the way he looked at her like he was now, full of warmth and hunger, she thought maybe she’d succeeded. “Am I in trouble?”
“See me.” He pointed to the red penned words.
He finished passing out the tests, all business as class began, the lecture starting, as it always did, with some sort of funny story or joke—something engaging and easy to listen to. He was magic up there, pulling in even the most bored and disinterested students, and usually she thoroughly enjoyed watching it all happen, but today she couldn’t stop thinking about her test.
See me.
Was she failing? They only had two tests the whole semester and this was the first. But she’d turned in all her homework. And her labs. She’d done the best she could on those. Wouldn’t they count for something?
If she failed, it would mean the end of her future career.