by Eden O'Neill
His rough touch on my skin.
The panic dulled with every stroke, the ache inflicted from a previous man dulling inside me. That pain, that trauma didn’t come from this man who tended to me now. It never could.
I knew that so deep in my heart now it hurt. I felt the reality of that so hard. Ramses spent many moments bringing me back to him, and when I could breathe again, sitting up, he was here for me.
He brushed hair out of my face. “Tell me what you’re feeling. All that scared you.”
It had. I nodded.
“What can I do?”
I touched my forehead to his, breathing in everything about him. Shaking again, I placed my arms round him, and he buried his face into my neck.
“Tell me.” He stroked my hair. “Please.”
The ache in his voice I felt, like he was helpless and didn’t know how to help me. It showed me even more about him.
Silent, my nose brushed his skin.
“Always make me feel safe,” I whispered, my eyes closed tight. “I just need that. Always.”
I heard my own ache, his, too, when he trembled around me.
“Did I scare you?” His voice thickened. “Back there?”
My answer had been a swallow in his ears, and he guided my face back.
He kissed my cheek before my mouth, holding me there.
“I promise I’ll always do that for you. Be that for you,” he said. Clasping my neck, he brought me into his. “I’m sorry. Sorry if I made you feel any different. I won’t again, and I promise you that too. Never again, Brielle. You’ll always feel safe with me. Always.”
I believed him. I loved him.
My arms tight around his neck, I fell into the soft purr of his car. He would protect me always. I knew that, but we always seemed to have something happen outside of us. It was like the universe didn’t want this to happen.
I held on tight as if to force it. I wanted to protect him too. For him to be and always feel safe. I didn’t want to be the reason he’d ever have to fear losing that, but every day, day by day, that was what I felt. Like I’d be the one to break him. I didn’t know how to stop it.
I didn’t know if it could be.
Chapter Thirty-One
Bri
Evie entered my classroom on Monday as I was putting things away. She waved a hand from the door. “Can you come to my office after you’re done?”
And then, she left. No time for me even to react. I hadn’t seen or heard from her since yesterday, the ballet.
A slow dread formed. There had been paparazzi.
Even still, I refused to panic. She could just want to talk to me about something. I remained hopeful as I finished packing my bag but didn’t drop it off in my office before heading straight to hers. I tapped a knock, and when she told me to enter, I did.
She wasn’t alone.
Ramses sat in front of her desk, the back of his head angling back when I entered. Seeing me, his brow twitched up.
Evident surprise on his face, he either didn’t know what this was about or simply hadn’t anticipated seeing me.
Whatever the case, he sat while his mom stood off to the side. She waved me in. “Come. Sit.”
Ramses’s gaze followed me the whole way as I occupied the seat beside him. He started to say something until his mom took a seat behind her desk.
Completely unnerving.
Evelyn appeared nothing but the educator behind her desk, her features even schooled. I couldn’t read her—at all.
And that scared the hell out of me.
My entire heart in my throat, I watched her open her hands.
“I’m just going to get right to it,” she said, her first tell. An agitation in her throat, a wrinkle in her brow. Her lips pinched tight. “You two are together.”
Not a question.
Not even an inkling of one.
Evelyn’s hand touched her lips, and I didn’t move.
I didn’t dare.
Nor did I breathe. My friend swallowed before she wet her lips. “That’s what TMZ is saying. You two are together. You two are together.” She opened her hands. “As you both know there was a confrontation last night at the ballet. Considering your background with your celebrity husband Brielle, I’m not surprised about that. But what’s alarming is the article was a follow-up to photos that surfaced apparently last week of you two.”
I frowned.
Evelyn’s jaw moved. “They had photos of you both at the store that were submitted by a student here on campus. A whole write-up on how she ran into you a while back, Brielle.”
My mouth dried.
“She had a photo of you and her together,” she paused, then placed a hand in front of Ramses and me. “And the pair of you holding hands at that same store.”
I closed my eyes, not even able to get Ramses’s reaction to the girl I’d obviously seen in the liquor department that day.
I didn’t know she’d gotten pictures.
“Mom—”
“She submitted those photos to TMZ. And they must have come down here to follow up.” Opening the laptop on her desk, she swung it around. “Because they caught the two of you again,” she stated, her voice deadpan. “Kissing this time in the faculty parking lot.”
My hand covered my mouth, that stolen kiss right before me, before us both. They snapped us right in the middle of it, my arm hooking around Ramses, and his hands on my hips. The evidence was there completely.
We were together.
This evidence caused Ramses’s eyes to close, his hand folding over his face. “Mom.”
“But I think what’s worse,” she paused, ignoring him again, “isn’t that my son or even a colleague lied to me…”
Colleague.
I forced breath through my lungs. “Evie…”
She raised her hand, not finished. “Was that you,” she directed a look at Ramses, “could actually let something like this happen again.”
Again?
Ramses’s jaw pierced his skin. He shot forward in his chair. “This situation isn’t like—”
Her hands lifted once again, still not finished.
“You don’t talk,” she said before transferring her attention to me. She leveled me with a stare so hard I felt it from across the desk. Her teeth ran over her glossed lip. “I’m going to ask you a question, Brielle, and I need you to be perfectly honest with me. Your job depends on it.”
My breath escaped.
Ramses growled. “Mother, you are completely out of line here.”
“I said you don’t talk!” Her face filled with color, beet red on normally fair skin. “You won’t talk. Not until I hear from her.”
From her…
Words like that and “colleague” didn’t sit well, and if this conversation felt bad before, it really did now.
I faced Ramses, and at this point, he had his hands laced on his mom’s desk. Fingers pressed to his lips. He knew something I didn’t.
“Did you take advantage of my son, Brielle?”
I shot my gaze in her direction, completely serious with her question. My lips parted. “What?”
She nodded. “It was brought to my attention this morning by a fellow faculty member Ramses may have transferred out of your class. This faculty member saw your TMZ story and the potential circumstances in which you may have met my son worried him. He came to me. Ramses is currently a student in his class.”
I folded a hand over my face.
Guy Donahue. It had to be him.
He was the only one who knew.
He was the only one I’d told, but before I could speak, Ramses angled in. His teeth bared. “Mom—”
“And my son confirmed with me just now you were his professor.” Her manicured hand raised again. “I asked him that before you came in.”
Ramses swung a glance in my direction, his hands opening. She’d obviously bombarded him with this, or he would have warned me.
I breathed into my hands, and in those moments, Evie l
eaned forward.
“So, I ask you again,” she said. “Did you take advantage of my son?”
“That’s not how we met,” Ramses ground out. “And if you’d given me a second to speak when you asked me in here, I would have told you that.” He shook his head. “Brielle and I met at December and Royal’s wedding. She had no idea I was in her class. We both figured that out later.”
“And lied to me about it.” The breath eased from her lips. “Continued an affair as student and teacher.”
“We didn’t.”
My voice arrived meeker than I wanted it to, and its presence had Ramses’s hand moving in my direction.
He hesitated in the end, though. He didn’t dare as he shouldn’t. He nodded at me. “She’s right. We didn’t. Brielle cut everything off.” He faced his mom. “We both did once we knew.”
“Well, things obviously started up again.”
“Yeah, once I wasn’t her student.” His eyes narrowed at Evie. “There isn’t anything for you to look into here, Ma.”
“Isn’t there?” For the first time, emotion filled her words, no longer the educator and disciplinarian. This was a woman, a mom sitting in front of her son. Her jaw clenched at me. “Tell me, Brielle, did you know?” She leaned in. “Did you care if you did know? Or are you just another one of those women who takes advantage of a situation? Another professor taking advantage of her young students?”
The words popped the surface of an already heated and emotional conversation. I, personally, had been simply trying to keep up thus far.
But then she said this.
Ramses shot forward. “Mom, it is not like that, and you know it.”
“He’s gotten in trouble before with people like you,” she claimed. “Older women like you who prey and like to take advantage of young men.” She shook her head. “I know you’ve been through a lot of crap, Brielle. I feel for you. I felt for you. I got you this job.” Her voice cracked at the end. “I trusted you.”
I started to protest. I started to say something, anything, but her words locked me in place. The accusatory nature of them, yes, but the fact that I was losing.
Losing her.
And losing him.
I stared at Ramses, at a loss for words beside me. He seemed to just be trying to keep up too, but I read between the lines here. She was accusing me of something that clearly had already happened before. Something that happened involving her son.
Oh, God.
Feeling sick to my stomach, I swallowed.
A soft plead touched Ramses’s eyes, unsaid words parting his lips. I never gave them a chance to sound. Instead, I opted to face my friend. “Evie…”
“Please leave.” She covered her face. “Please go. I can’t…”
And I didn’t make her. Because if what she said was true, I got it.
As much as I hated it.
Rather than deal with any of it either, I got up. I left, embarrassed and feeling like a complete idiot. I rushed from her chairs, out of her office, but Ramses hooked my arm before I even made it out of the building.
“Bri, it is not what she says,” he urged right away. He wound me around to face him, a terror on his face I’d begun to connect with loss. The fear of losing something. Losing me. “What she said isn’t what it sounds like.”
“Am I fetish?”
“What?”
“Am I a fetish?” I backed out of his hands, his eyes twitching wide. “Is this a thing for you? Older women?” I had to ask the question.
I had to know.
Something told me this was the thing that happened to him at Brown. And though he hadn’t lied to me about that. He hadn’t told me about it either.
Would you have stayed if he had?
Probably not, enough odds stacked against us to not think I was also a fetish for him.
His brow launched up. “Of course not.”
“Why of course not?”
“Because it’s not true.”
“How can I believe you?”
“Because it’s me.” His hands cage my face, his brown eyes scanning mine. “It’s me. The man who is so fucking in love with you it fucking hurts. Who wouldn’t hurt you. I’d hurt first.”
My lips trembled, his firm hold guiding my gaze up to clash with his.
“What Mom said isn’t true. Not the way she said it. She’s just scared. She thinks what happened at Brown is happening again.”
“What happened?” I asked, wanting so hard to give him the benefit of the doubt. Wanting to trust him.
“I’d hurt first.”
I’d hurt first for him, too. Because I loved him, but I wasn’t certain it’d be enough. The odds continued to be stacked against us and I was just so tired.
I wondered if he was tired, too. I mean, how much was just too much?
People started to pass us in the hall, and Ramses let go. But once the area was clear, he placed a hand on the wall and blocked both prying eyes and ears by putting his back to them. “For starters, she wasn’t my professor. She was a mentor in my business program. An older mentor.”
“How old?”
His eyes close before he faced me. “Why does that matter?”
It didn’t. Probably not. I mean, what happened, happened.
His fingers drew down his mouth. “Forty. Forty-one?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”
It didn’t, but I definitely couldn’t stop my reaction to that.
I studied the wall and he adjusted, doing the same.
“We had no right getting involved,” he said. “Especially because she was my mentor. I admit I rushed into it. Wanting it to happen…” He tapped the wall with his fist. “To feel something.”
I braced my arms.
“I’d gotten tired of casually fucking,” he stated. “I did a lot of that. Didn’t want to get really involved after December and I didn’t. I played the field and had fun, but I didn’t want to do that anymore. I was about to graduate, and I guess I wanted something real.”
“So why her? That woman?”
“I can’t tell you.” He frowned. “We had a connection. On the base level, but we had one. I shouldn’t have gotten involved with my mentor, and there were signs it was a mistake besides the obvious. When I looked into those signs, I found out she was married.”
My gaze jerked up.
His head bobbed twice. “Once I knew, I tried to end it. I did end it.”
“What happened?”
His shoulders lift. “She didn’t want it to end. Became obsessed and threatened to blackmail me if I did. She had influence over the department at Brown, over my grades and that’s when I got my lawyers involved. My mom involved.” He shook his head. “We were able to get it sorted, but not without a settlement. My mom was super adamant about keeping me out of any scandals. Got really crazy and protective. She paid the woman to let this thing go, stay away from me. Which she has. My lawyers advised transferring schools in addition due to the obvious.”
I framed my face, visually cringing but not for myself or this situation we were in, but for him.
No wonder Evie hates me.
She thought this was happening again, an older woman taking advantage of her son and I didn’t blame her. I’d probably hate me, too. I would hate me, too. I hadn’t been pregnant for long, but in that short time I’d loved my unborn child as if they’d been with me every day. I’d want to destroy anyone who ever hurt them.
“Look at me, Bri.”
I did. Though, he cupped my elbows anyway, directing me to look at him.
“This situation isn’t like that.” His palm cupped my head. “I know that, and you know that.”
“But Evie doesn’t.”
“She will.”
“And how could she?” I shrugged. “We’ve been lying to her. I’ve been lying to her. I have no credibility with her, and I shouldn’t. Not after what happened to you. I’d feel the same way she does if it’d been the other way around.”
His sigh fell he
avy.
“I’m not saying it won’t take time. Effort, but I’m imploring you to give my mother the benefit of the doubt. To not,” his voice thickened, “to not default to your fallback. To not run. Not this time.”
I cringed, unable to help it. I couldn’t see how I looked from his eyes, but I knew how all this felt inside. I was being unraveled piece by piece.
He braced my head, his mouth to my ears. “I want you to fight for us. Fight through the grit and whatever comes next. Fight as hard as I will.”
I touched my forehead to his chest, my fist balled when he worked his arms around me. I had no idea how long we stood there like that, and by the end, I felt drained. Like I’d physically died in his arms. I knew whatever I did next, we both did next, might affect our entire lives. For me, it would.
I couldn’t see a life different from this moment now. My life had changed with him in it, and I wasn’t sure if I could change back. That’d be like rewinding time. Impossible.
Impossible.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Ramses
Weekly taco night occurred at my house this week. But that was because my mom bombarded me with it after I repeatedly ignored her phone calls and texts. One better, she showed up with the new man she was apparently dating.
“And then the guy says to me…” James chuckled, head actually thrown back like he couldn’t contain himself before the rest of the joke even hit. He put his hands out. “Is that cheese on the table or an oil slick?”
Full blown laughter. Full fucking blown at the twenty-fifth dad joke I’d had to endure at my dining room table in under an hour. James was full of them, a man I knew from the country club. This wasn’t a small city, but small enough for everyone in the city’s elite to know each other. Yeah, I knew this guy. Average with above average funds. His family came from oil and migrated here.
Currently, I had to entertain the fact he took every opportunity he had to place his hand on my mother’s, hers wrapped round his bicep as she simply roared at the dad-shit he said. I endured it behind a glass of Merlot, my attention only half there before James said my name.
“I think we’ve lost him, Evie.” James chuckled once more, waving his hand. “I apologize. Once I get going, I run away with myself. I bore my own mother.”