Teach Me(33)

She groans. “You don’t give up, do you?” She swats my arm with the back of one hand. “I’m a writer, okay? There you go. Shameful confession complete.”

I lift one eyebrow. “I’m a poetry professor, you really think I would judge you for being a writer?”

“You’re a poetry professor, isn’t it pretty much your job to judge other people’s writing?” She wriggles her eyebrows as well.

“Only their poetry,” I say, and as her face falls into a scowl, I realize that duh, Jack, that’s exactly what she must write. “But I’m sure yours are brilliant, if they’re half as good as your essay work.”

“They’re not.” She collapses back onto the pillow face-first. When she speaks again, it’s muffled by the cotton sheets. “I haven’t written a word since I got here.”

“Have you traveled since you’ve been here?” I point out.

She turns sideways to shoot me a what-the-hell look. “Uh, hello, American in Oxford. Pretty sure this whole trip is traveling.”

I shake my head. “You’re living here now. It’s completely different than just stopping by for a visit. If travel is what inspires you, then you need to travel somewhere else, not just hang around this crappy old city for the next three months.”

Harper rises to prop her head up on one elbow. “I’m listening.”

I shrug. “There’s a million places to go. For one thing, flights between European countries are a hell of a lot cheaper than they are from Europe to the US. You could do weekends in Paris, weekends in Barcelona.”

“Yeah, I can afford maybe two of those tops.” She rolls her eyes.

“So, take some day trips.” I wave a hand at the window, through which you can see the spires of Christ Church. “There are tons of homey little country destinations all within a couple hours’ drive of here. Hell, some are even closer. The Cotswolds, for instance, have always been a favorite of mine. If you’re free Saturday, we could reach the nearest village in half an hour, spend all day meandering around.”

I don’t stop to think about what I’m doing. Inviting the girl I just told to stop hooking up with me (and who I then subsequently hooked up with) on a day trip. That’s a very couple-y move.

But if I don’t think about it in practical terms like that—if I just think about asking Harper to wander through the sprawl of tiny little medieval villages, churches and centuries-old homes that make up the Cotswolds, stopping in the markets to buy some snack food, maybe, or enough to make a picnic, and then traipsing up through the rolling hills that surround said scenic villages to perch on top of one and share an outdoor lunch . . . I want to share that with her. I want to show her that part of my life—the childhood I spent roaming those hills whenever Mum and Dad took us on family outings.

It’s been years since I’ve been back there, but who knows? It could be inspirational for me too.

So when she agrees, still watching me with wide eyes, like she’s afraid she misheard and I didn’t just ask her to do this, I smile, reassuring, and run my hand through her hair. “Don’t worry,” I say, right before I lean in to kiss her soft, unresisting lips. “I’ll only make you share one poem with me as payment.”





Harper




I have no idea what to expect from this trip. Aside from the fact that Jack made me agree to read one of my poems to him (which in and of itself is terrifying enough), I don’t know where we’re going or what to expect. He told me not to look it up when I asked him what a Cotswold was. He said it would be better as a surprise. So I dutifully have resisted all search engines for the past three days (aside from when I needed them for the project).

In fact, I’ve avoided everyone and everything for the past three days, getting laser-focused on the poetry analysis, since we wasted so much time on day one figuring out how the hell to deal with the sexual tension between us.

So far, our best bet seems to be ignoring it. Jack sits on his side of the desk and I sit on mine, and we make no eye contact, just bend over the manuscripts we’re studying (and okay, every now and then I sneak peeks at the way his shaggy haircut falls in his eyes, or the way he’s letting the stubble on his jawline grow a little longer between shaves, to the point where I bet it would scrape my thighs just the right amount . . . Yeah, sneaking peeks no longer allowed).

We spend most of the time in total silence, reading or writing or thinking to ourselves, lost in our own separate worlds, worlds that Eliot created—because the more and more time we spend with these poems, the more and more positive I become that Jack was right all along. These really are Eliot’s work, lost for the ages in an old, forgotten corner of the Merton Library, only discovered again by a stroke of pure luck.