“You serious, boy?” Michaela said, furrowing her brow.
“Dead serious. The news is going around the whole campus.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s true,” Michaela remarked.
“B-but,” Kate stammered, “surely he didn’t molest anyone. Why should he need to? J-just look at him.”
The student said, “Yeah, but you never know about people. It’s just like in Hannibal. Or Dexter. I mean . . . those guys are serial killers, and you wouldn’t know it to look at them. Right?”
Michaela put up her fist. “You’d better start getting better at reporting the news, kid. Who did he allegedly molest?”
“We don’t know. They won’t release the name of the student. She can be anyone here.”
“But he didn’t molest anyone,” Kate cried. She stood up. “Where is he now?”
“Still with the Dean. Maybe they are calling the police now,” the freshman said excitedly. “He’ll be cuffed and led away!”
“Bullshit.” Michaela stood up too, and she dwarfed the student. He actually shrank back. “I’m going to ask someone else.”
Kate was frozen to the spot. The freshman went around to spread the rumor, and she could only stand there, her insides swimming with sickly anxiety.
Rust. She did this to Rust. Now they were caught out. But how? They were so careful not to do anything near campus. Did someone leak out their affair?
Her mind immediately sprang to Carlo.
Shit.
That display in front of him in the intimate restaurant. She had known it was a catalyst for something deeper and darker. That was when the seeds were sown. She knew this instinctively.
Her heart clenched. It was something they couldn’t take back. And now they would both pay.
But Carlo still hadn’t leaked her name out. Was he protecting her in some way? There was a psychological game being played here. She needed to talk to Rust.
Michaela came back from talking to the students at the other table.
“That’s the rumor all right,” she said wryly. “And now there’s a new one. Rust O’Brien has admitted to molesting the student.”
“What?” Kate was truly incredulous.
“He’s out of the Dean’s office now. Apparently, he has tendered his resignation.”
3
Kate could only fly off blindly away from the cafeteria, causing Michaela to call after her, “Wait. What’s wrong?”
She had to see Rust. She headed towards the Dean’s office, running as fast as her legs could take her. Students were grouped everywhere, avidly talking and dissecting the news. Why was everyone so eager to see Rust’s downfall? He had never harmed anyone. He was a great professor.
There was a commotion outside the Dean’s office. Students milled around ten rows thick. It was a media circus. She could see Rust standing at the doorway of the ivy-covered building. Every face was turned to his. He looked super-handsome, as always. His hair was neatly combed back, and his eyes were impossibly green.
“Professor,” shouted a student, thrusting a cellphone recorder into his face, “is it true you have been asked to step down?”
Campus paper reporters, thought Kate in disgust.
“Professor, who’s the girl you molested?”
He didn’t molest anyone, she wanted to scream.
“Professor, is the girl pressing charges?”
“Are you going to be arrested?”
“How did you get caught? Who fingered you?”
Rust swept through the crowd without speaking a word. Kate tried to catch his eye, but he made a beeline for the parking lot, where she knew he parked his white BMW. A trail of people followed him. The morbidly curious. The ones who wanted to get a glimpse of the disgraced professor.
If only they knew what he really was, she thought, thinking of the magnificent tiger.
She lost sight of him, obscured by the bobbing heads. A celebrity falls, and everyone wanted to be there for the kill. She could only watch as the white BMW slowly pulled out of its parking lot and revved away to the road to head out of campus.
A sinking sense of dread engulfed her.
She wondered if Rust was going to blame her for what happened.
*
Kate rang Rust’s cellphone for the seventeenth time. And for the seventeenth time, it went to Voicemail.
She could take matters in her own hands, of course. She could take a cab to Rust’s penthouse, where they had made love repeatedly, and tell him herself that she was guiltless. Did he blame her? Was that why he wasn’t answering her calls?
Oh my God, he thinks I’m the one who went to the Dean about him!
Despair such as she had never known swept through her. He couldn’t blame her! She didn’t do anything except love him desperately. What did the Dean tell him when he fired him? Did the Dean know who she was?