by Emma Accola
Micah cocked his head at me as he set down a plate and silverware for me. His smile became mocking. “They’re not from one person. They’re from the student help in my office.”
“Seriously? What totally scandalous act did they commit?”
“They were busy writing emails. It turns out that six of the young women and one of the young men who work as student help in my department think that I’m stupid hot. In a spate of lurid emails, they freely shared their opinions of the shape of my ass and speculated on other various body parts. Sometime last night someone gathered all those emails into one and sent it to everyone in my department. Everyone. When I got into the office this morning, my administrative assistant was handing out tissues to dry the tears of three of the clerks who were involved. I hadn’t yet seen the emails, so you can just imagine my surprise when they mobbed me. When I tore myself away from them and locked myself in my office to read the emails, the top of my head almost blew off.”
My lip twitched with amusement as I spread my napkin in my lap. “That’s really bizarre. Did one of them do this to spite the others?”
“That was my first thought.” Micah’s jaw tightened as he didn’t bother to hide his annoyance. “On further consideration, it seems unlikely, because the perpetrator would be outing him or herself. The sobbing student clerks swore that this proved that they had been hacked because not all of the emails in that string had been shared with everyone in the group. I called the head of IT, and she verified that only someone with access to every single email account could have done this.”
“The students got hacked.”
“Yes.”
I gave in to a little snicker. “What are you going to do? Fire them all?”
“You’re having a laugh?” Micah asked as he served me the lasagna. “This is funny to you?”
“Well, it’s a little funny. Obviously those students don’t realize that they had no right to privacy when they used their employer’s email accounts. Was the content that explicit?”
Micah pulled a corkscrew out of a drawer and opened the wine I had brought. “I shut my office door and drew the blinds on my windows so I wouldn’t have to look at them.”
“Did you have any idea that those students thought those things?”
He poured a small amount of wine in my glass and watched as I swirled it around. When I tasted it and nodded, he filled my glass.
“If you’re asking whether I ever caught any of those students checking me out or pointing and whispering, no. None of them ever said a word to me that would have been inappropriate. So to read their frankly pornographic thoughts about me made me want to wrap myself in a down quilt.” He held up a basket of garlic bread. “Have some. It came from my favorite bakery.”
“Thank you.” I took a piece from the basket. “Then you could see who wrote what?”
“I certainly could.” Micah spread his napkin in his lap, picked up his fork, and stabbed at the lasagna. “Now I’m left to wonder what the vice president thought when she read all of those salacious opinions. She’s certain to be entertained by the passage where one student fantasizes about what it would be like to have sex with her boyfriend on my desk while thinking of me."
This time I couldn’t stop a small chuckle. The vice president was a drab, humorless woman who wore her hair in a small graying bun. Her pantsuits were so severe that many of the younger faculty called her Chairman Mao.
“I’m glad you’re able to see the humor in this,” Micah said, his eyes shining wickedly. “Really I am. A good laugh can’t fail to lighten the mood.”
“I know it’s not funny,” I said, even though I secretly found it amusing to see the confident and debonair Micah Ekstrand at a loss. I forced my expression into serious lines. “Those students could easily be fired if being around them bothers you. They’re not covered by any contract. They’re at-will employees.”
Micah picked up his garlic bread. “You’ve run a winery with a large staff. You must have a lot of experience with managing people. Is it your considered opinion that I should fire all those students?”
Before I answered, I wondered why he was asking me this. Micah certainly didn’t need to solicit advice. My intuition was tickling me with a warning, so I chose my words carefully. “This might be the first job some of them have ever held. The ones who came to you sound genuinely sorry about what they wrote. Their behavior was immature, but they’re immature.” I took a sip of my wine. “You’re a dean. If you’re feeling generous, you could just give them a written reprimand. That way they would keep their jobs.”
“You’re being very lenient. Sympathetic even. Would you give that same advice to a female dean?”
I started to say that I would, but something about Micah’s expression stopped me. My intuition sensed a trap somewhere in this. “Maybe. Yes. No. I don’t know. I would have to think it through. People have different comfort levels. A lot would depend upon the content of the emails.” I took another sip of my wine to give myself time to think. “I’ve never been a dean or a man. What do I know?”
“Since I’m a male, do you think my comfort level with being objectified should be higher than a female’s?”
The feeling that I was circling a trap intensified. “Of course not. Men have dignity and rights too.”
“I’m glad you think that.” Micah gave me a delighted grin. “Because you’re in the emails too.”
“What? Me?” I cried. “How could I be in the emails?”
“The fact that you’ve visited my office on several occasions has not gone unnoticed. A few of the emails discussed what a cute couple we make. The office gossip has us standing too close, holding each other’s eyes too long, and sizzling with suppressed sexual energy. I forwarded the email string to you a little while ago so you could see it for yourself. Actually, that’s why I thought you had come here. Do you want some more wine?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
Micah refilled my glass. “As for being objectified, the students offered up a few opinions about your cute little heart-shaped butt and that tantalizing bit of cleavage you show when you don’t button your blouse high enough. They speculated about whether your breasts are real and they especially liked the way your pencil skirt hugs the bottom of your rounded—”
I slammed my palms down on the granite counter. “You need to fire those foul-mouthed, dirty-minded perverts. I’m completely disgusted. What kind of office are you running over there?”
Micah put his hand over his heart in mock astonishment. “But they’re immature, young, and ignorant in the ways of the world. If I were being kind, I would just write them up—”
“You will fire every single last one of them.” My fury rose, making an unpleasant heat burn in my chest. “I am not a collection of body parts to be commented on for their entertainment. If you keep them around, you will be setting a dangerous precedent. What kind of manager are you? Their bad judgment in sending obscene emails must be punished. Fire them all.”
Micah laughed as he cut into his lasagna with the side of this fork.
“This is funny to you?” I snapped, inadvertently using his exact words.
“Sorry.” He chuckled some more. “You can cool off now. I fired all of them right after I read the email string this morning. I fibbed about those flowers. They’re a thank you gift from a friend for a recommendation letter I wrote for him.”
“You’re serious?” I wanted to be mad at him, but I couldn’t, not after the way I had advised mercy when the standard had been applied only to him. “You did fire them?”
“I did,” he said with a hearty laugh.
“I may forgive you for not telling me that up front.”
“Please do.” Micah grinned as he sipped his wine. “This is the first time I’ve seen the icy Gracie Meadows lose her cool. It’s freaking me out a little bit.”
Was he making fun of me? I couldn’t be sure. “I’m allowed to show a little bit of emotion, aren’t I?”
“Of co
urse. I kind of like it.” He stood up. “We need some music in here.”
My feathers were still ruffled. “None of those students better be in my classes this semester.”
“They’re not. I checked your rosters. And they’ve been told not to enroll in your classes next semester, though I’m not sure we can make that stick.”
“I’ll get their names off the emails. I’ll know if they do.” I didn’t bother to hide my irritation. “You shouldn’t have played me that way, not with something this scandalous. It wasn’t nice.”
“Who are you madder at? Me for not telling you right away, or the student help for writing lurid emails?”
“I’m mad at both of you equally but for different reasons.”
Micah grinned. “When you showed up at my door, I jumped to the logical conclusion that you’d come about the emails. And I like seeing your ice princess façade crack a little. It’s been a long time.”
“What’s this with calling me an ice princess? I’m not. I have emotions. You’ve seen them.”
Micah picked up a little remote and started a light jazz flowing around the corners into the kitchen. “Not often enough, and when I do, I like them to be genuine, not manipulated.”
I pushed back from the island. “You’re not talking about the student help anymore, are you?”
“A little, but mostly I’m talking about us.” Micah’s smile faded. “Whoever did this hacked the campus’s email system, searched for our names, and ran across those lascivious emails. This was a deliberate attempt to single us out and humiliate us. Those students were collateral damage.”
I felt a chill because I had already thought of that. Harry Spice was already in the LMS, so why not the email? “Harry Spice means to make a spectacle of us at our workplace. And I made it easy for him by coming to Bailey College.”
Micah gave a shrug. “By this time tomorrow, the campus grapevine will have us as a couple. I’ll be regarded as the chivalrous one who fired all those students to spare your honor.”
“We’re not a couple,” I said in a low voice even though we were having dinner and wine in his kitchen.
“That’s not what people will perceive. Do you care?”
My stomach tumbled inside of me. I doubted that any woman would mind being paired with a man as insanely luscious as Micah, but not as part of an indecent email chain. “I mind people thinking something that isn’t true.”
“You mind because you don’t like being made to look foolish.”
“I’m not tenure-track,” I said firmly. “I’ve only been on the campus two months and already my name is attached romantically to a hot dean. That’s not exactly a good career move.”
“The ice princess thinks of her career. How typical. But it’s nice to know that you think I’m hot.”
My face burned. “You knew that already.”
“I did.” Micah set our plates in the sink, opened a cupboard door, and brought out a box of dark chocolates. “That day, when we sat out on the patio at your winery, you told me that wine has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has to be complete in moving across our palate. You said that the grapes have to be uniform in their ripeness so that the beauty of the fruit shows itself in the wine. You called wine sacred and celebratory. You said that wine has a sense of place.”
“I remember.”
Micah pushed the box of candy toward me and held up his glass by the stem. “This is the same wine we had that day. I remember the floral notes. We drank it with chocolate.”
He had noticed. My fingers trembled when I took a piece of chocolate. “I didn’t choose it for that reason.”
“No, of course not.”
I raised my eyebrows at him. “I didn’t come here to flirt with you.”
“Then why did you come?”
“I got bored with YouTube.”
Micah didn’t miss my tone. His expression darkened. “Harry Spice has gone to a lot of trouble to break up our relationships with our loved ones. He’s driven away your family and now is working on your career. These emails are an attack on your reputation.”
“Not yours too?”
“You’re female and you’re not tenure-track. This will hit you five times harder than it will me. Gossip of that nature is always worse for women.”
My heart jolted because Micah was right. A lump filled my throat. The chocolate coated it, heavy and rich. I picked up my wine but didn’t drink.
“Harry Spice’s plan is to get us isolated and vulnerable,” Micah went on. “We’ll need to have each other’s backs. We’ll need to give each other absolute trust.”
His words rankled me. “How will the two of us achieve absolute trust? You never believed that I saw Harry Spice that night.”
Micah didn’t try to deny it. “We’ll have to leave the past in the past for this to work.”
“Hah! All we have is the past. Why would you trust me when you’re incapable of believing that I saw Harry Spice in the hallway of my apartment building on the night that Tamra was assaulted?”
Challenge filled Micah’s eyes. “Whether or not I believe it is irrelevant.”
“Not to me,” I cried, still reeling from how my own family didn’t believe me about Damien.
“I’m not going to lie to you and say that I do.”
I set down my wineglass and put my napkin next to my plate. At that moment I was entirely convinced that unless Micah accepted me at my word, we couldn’t work together. “Thank you for dinner. We’re done here.”
Micah leaned toward me. “What is it with you? Why are you so completely unwilling to let me believe what I want to believe?”
“That’s not what’s going on here.”
“Then what is?”
“Maybe I’m sick of people trying to make me doubt my own truth,” I cried, my temper flaring. “Maybe I’m sick of my own family not trusting me when I said that I wasn’t the woman in the video. Maybe I just hate the way I wanted them to take me at my word when I wouldn’t do the same for Leonardo.” I started shaking. “Even you’re trying to get me to step away from my own reality and accept yours. Do you know how that feels?”
“Yes,” Micah replied, his voice harsh. “Will you accept divorce papers as proof?”
A cutting retort melted away in my mouth. Micah’s attention was fixed on a point over my shoulder, his eyes dark and guarded. The air seemed stretched tightly between us.
I jerked my chin. “Fine. You were doubted. But I was too. So where does that leave us?”
His angry eyes found mine. “I guess it leaves you with a chip on your shoulder the size of Texas.”
I gasped in outrage. “And you’ve wrapped yourself in self-righteousness because you’re right and I’m wrong.”
“I never said you were wrong.”
Skeptical, I glared. “But you won’t believe that I saw Harry Spice that night.”
Micah jabbed his finger in the air. “What I said is that I couldn’t prove it. And neither can you.”
“Because it’s not on video?”
He made a scoffing sound. “We’re programmed to trust video and audio as if it’s the last and final word in the annals of our lives. If it’s on a thumb drive, it must be true, right? People have ended up in prison over what’s on a video. The guilty walk free. Yet all of it is subject to interpretation. I don’t know whether you saw Harry Spice that night, and I don’t care.”
“You acted as if you cared,” I said quietly.
“It’s a moot point. Harry Spice has managed to free himself from prison. Given that the forensic dentist has been discredited, it’s doubtful that the DA’s office will want to try him again based on your testimony alone.” Micah ran his hand over his hair as if he were completely exasperated. “Trusting is a choice. If we’re going to survive Harry Spice, we should work together. He has a beef with both of us. If you need to trust something, trust that.”
My face tightened with skepticism.
Micah gave me a cool smile. “I can
see that we’re going to have to work on our relationship. We can start that process by asking each other questions.”
“That wine is going to your head.”
“We each get to ask—and answer—a set number of questions.” Micah’s gaze became bold. “Full disclosure on both our parts. Some say honesty is the highest form of intimacy.”
His pretty eyes dared me to back down. “Of course. Intimacy will be created once we share our favorite memory involving chocolate, the biggest lie we ever told, or an unshakable belief.”
“You’re scoffing.”
“I teach composition classes. Don’t you think I know a writing prompt when I hear one?”
“Oh, no, sweet Gracie. These questions will be to stop Harry Spice and none of them will be easy. No subject—nothing about our families or love lives or careers—can be off limits to either of us because nothing will be to Harry Spice.”
Micah’s idea unsettled me. Full disclosure hadn’t been healthy for my relationships. “We don’t need to dredge up painful family secrets to catch a killer. What’s wrong with just the facts and cold hard logic?”
“Where did cold hard logic get you with your fiancé? What did it take to break through your apathy so you could notice that your relationship had become a corpse you’d kept breathing into?”
I jumped to my feet. “You can go—”
Micah was suddenly standing over me. He moved quickly for such a tall man. “Harry Spice made a mistake. He didn’t know that your engagement was a big, sad zombie love. How long had it been since you and Leonardo asked each other the sort of questions that lovers ask each other?”
His inquiry wounded me because I didn’t know any of the questions that lovers asked. My mouth opened, then closed, wordlessly.
Micah watched me, missing nothing. “What was Leonardo’s favorite childhood memory? His biggest hope for the future? His biggest worry? What did he love about his life? What did he regret?”
I didn’t know any of those things, not for sure, and it angered me to have it pointed out. Leonardo and I had never had those kind of talks. We didn’t seem to need them because we were like skiers being funneled down the same mountainside. The destination awaited us both at the bottom. Wouldn’t interrupting our trip have been like asking for stumbles? Shouldn’t a smooth ride stay a smooth ride?