“Because my parents think I can write.”
The professor paused with her answer. His eyes narrowed and he brought his finger to the bridge of his nose, made a slight movement. It was then that I realized what he was doing, something out of habit.
Pushing his glasses further up. Except he wasn’t wearing his glasses. Because they were hanging from my shirt.
Ten feet away. Four students away.
He continued asking people as he moved down, but their answers were dull echoes in the room because all I could think about was the fact that he was coming closer and closer.
The faintest scent of his aftershave hit me when he was two students away.
I took a quiet breath in, inhaling his scent and the memories that came from it. And then I lifted my head just as the slacks came into my view.
I stared up at him and watched as his face changed. From indifference to confusion to awareness, he stared at me for a beat longer than he’d stared at any of the other students.
He turned his head to the left, giving me a view of his chiseled jaw and I watched as he clenched his teeth, the muscles around his mouth shifting, seemingly composing himself. His profile was strong, sturdy, and when his eyes turned back to mine they were devoid of everything.
“Why am I here, Professor Easton?” I prompted, my voice soft. My hand came up to the glasses hanging in my shirt and I watched his eyes follow the movement. One eyebrow lifted in reaction and he flicked his eyes to mine again.
“For you, of course.” My words were breathy and seemed to hold him still in my grasp.
Leaning back in my chair, I tilted my head and said at a regular volume, “I heard you’re a good teacher.” My lips curved slightly, a wry smile beckoning. His eyes were twin storms of several kinds of frustration and I lifted my shoulders a half inch, the picture of nonchalance.
The voices around us were murmured, no doubt people assuming I was just another desperate Professor Easton fangirl, eager for whatever sprinkles of attention he’d bestow upon me. He backed away, turned toward the board, erased the question and began the class as if nothing had been exchanged between us.
But I caught him, more than once, glancing at me, to the glasses hooked on my shirt.
Chapter Four
Almost four years had passed like it was ten times that long. That’s the thing about death—you start measuring your days in a way you’d never done before. Like the fact that the first Tuesday of every October was when she and I would go to the farmer’s market and pick out pumpkins and those stupid fucking little gourds she liked to decorate the house with. But now, the first Tuesday of every October just made me want to punch something. I’d done it for three years when it came around, and I was slowly counting down the days until the fourth time it rolled past my calendar. Just one more day that got covered in a thick black x when it dragged to a close. The sluggish passing of time that never bothered me, because it was all I deserved.
Until last week. I’d kept myself out of trouble. I’d refrained from any sort of empty release for almost that long, because if my wife couldn’t be around to breathe the same oxygen as me, then I shouldn’t be able to indulge myself in anything that might make me happy. Might make me forget.
But walking down the hallway of a bar that I didn’t really want to be at, she’d ran into me, knocked into me with the subtlety of a rabid nuclear bomb, with her skintight black pants and fake black leather jacket and smirking lips made to drive a man down to his knees. The lips that I had no intention of ever seeing again. Because all I’d needed from her was the perfect moment of oblivion she’d given me; the way she’d let me use her and debase her and bruise her was exactly how I should have introduced my sorely neglected cock after so long of a celibacy.
Never, not in a million years, had I expected to look up and see her. Maybe she’d always been hiding in the rows of blank faces that pretended to pay attention to me. Oh, the female students paid attention to me, they always had. Even when I’d had the bright gold ring wrapped around the third finger on my left hand. That had never mattered to them. But I took it off about a year ago, and the attention hadn’t wavered in the slightest, like they hadn’t noticed it in the first place. And at no point had any of them tempted me.
Not when Ashley McInerney, the nitwit who could never manage to turn off her phone, had offered to blow me under my desk in order to get a passing grade; or when Bridgett whatever-her-name-was leaned over and shoved her admittedly excellent cleavage in my face under the guise of handing me her essay. It hadn’t been the cleavage that clued me in her to offer. It had been the handwritten note slipped between the second and third pages with her phone number and the days her daddy would be out of town on it.