by Olivia Chase
"Oh, really? Past that unfortunate stage, huh? So your little non-relationship is just progressing right along? How sweet!"
I glare at her. Where the fuck is my Uber?
"It's not my fault I just happened to see you sashaying out of Gage's house on my run,” Natasha says. She reaches up and readjusts her ponytail. “Of course I'm curious."
"There's curiousity, and there's minding your own business."
"You'd know business," Natasha scoffs. "I bet Gagey is teaching you all about business."
"You don't know anything," I say, which sounds a lot more confident than it feels coming out of my mouth. My stomach is bouncing around with the knowledge that now someone does know, and she doesn't sound like someone who keep a lid on Gage and me.
"I know students are probably not supposed to emerge from their prof's houses in the early ass morning."
Okay, this is enough. "I have to go," I say, wishing I'd driven my car here after all. And where the hell am I supposed to go, right back up the driveway and into Gage's house? Where the fuck is my Uber?!"My ride is coming."
"Looks like you already had a ride or two last night."
"Seriously?"
"That's what I'm asking." Natasha sounds genuinely furious. "Like, how could you seriously be involved with him?"
I roll my eyes, determined to just ignore her. What else can I do? She saw what she saw, and anything I say will just be giving her more information. I wrench my body in the other direction and pull out my phone. I'll call the driver and tell him I'll be the girl walking quickly up the street. But Natasha decides it would be better to just level me.
"You're not the only one, you know."
Shit. I wanted so badly to ignore her, but my hand freezes around my phone. "What does that mean?"
"He fucked me, too."
My stomach, already jumpy, rises up into my chest. "What the hell?"
"Sorry, but it's true." Natasha doesn't sound even remotely sorry. "We did the flirting thing for awhile. As long as we could stand it. And then?"
"I don't want to know," I say, even though we both know that's not true. Now I have to hear the rest of this.
Natasha finishes her thought gladly. "We got close, and got closer, and we finally started-- well, I guess you could call it an affair. A thing. But then we got busted, and he had to leave."
No. No, no, no.
"Don't look so shocked, Keri. If he'll do it with you, he'll do it with other girls. I was just the girl before you."
I force myself to look at Natasha. There's no evil smile, no sadistic glint in her eye. She just looks at me like she's figured something out, and I have a long way to go before I can become so enlightened.
She goes on. "You know this isn't Gage's first crack at being a visiting professor, right? He taught at Drummond, in California, right before this."
"I'm aware, yeah."
"Are you also aware that I'm the reason he left that school?"
I shake my head, but more in disbelief than in acknowledging a simple no. And, because I can't think of anything coherent to say, I keep shaking my head. Gage and this chick?
A pair of headlights illuminates a patch of the street, and Natasha apparently realizes she doesn't have much more time to talk. "Gage is a user. How do you think people in his position get to the top? Stepping on the little people. And he pulls the same crap in his personal life. I found that out the hard way. He's been denying everything we did, but it happened."
I shake my head. It's the only thing I can think of to respond with right now. Gage? A user? I just... how? And her words everything we did cut through me like a knife. I do not need to know what everything they did involves, but my mind creates a couple of torturous images.
"Okay," Natasha says, sounding exasperated. "I can see you don't want to believe me. I couldn't believe it either at the time. But Keri, think about it. Do you really believe that Gage Ramsey would come here? To this little podunk, nowhere school, if he didn't have to?"
I swallow. "Bristowe isn't that podunk," I counter. "Bristowe and the tourism are what keep this town not podunk. He could have picked a way worse school."
"God, you're naive. Compared to all the other colleges in the world, this is pretty fucking podunk. Don't you think he'd be at Wharton, or Ivey in Canada, if those were options? He's a huge name. He could teach anywhere on this planet. He's only here because they want him to keep a low profile and let the scandal blow over. A bigger name school or a bigger town would not let that happen for him."
I want to vomit. My Uber car approaches, and now I think I might throw up as soon as I open the door. Natasha turns and resumes her running.
"Think about it," she calls over her shoulder as the Uber car stops in front of me. "Don't let him drag you down with him."
I feel sick to my stomach the whole ride home. I come pretty close to putting my head between my knees, and for a minute I get that disgusting salivating thing in my mouth. I barely manage to tip my driver and make it out of the car and into the house.
Isabel's still asleep, like most normal people who don't have to deal with abnormal love affairs. I shut myself into my room and take off my jeans, throwing on an old pair of Victoria's Secret boxers, and curl up into bed with my laptop.
It takes a little while to find anything about Gage and Natasha, or anything about Gage having a relationship with anyone. Finally, on some message board for college business fanatics who take way too much interest in noteworthy people's personal lives in between posts bitching about the GMAT, I find something.
It's a thread about big names doing teaching stints-- who's been lucky enough to take such a class, who would teach your dream class, that sort of stuff. One of the top commenters wrote "I'd want to pick Gage Ramsey, but he might hit on my gf, and before I knew it they'd be hooking up all over town."
And then, four words from someone replying to that that make my blood run cold. "I heard about that."
The sick feeling returns. I keep reading. There are "OMG," and "You serious?" replies, and another reply saying "You mean that really happened?" Finally, the person who posted that claim reappears further down the thread. "Oh, yeah. Ramsey was boning a student with some Russian name. Was met with some slight disapproval from the college for that. Oopsie."
"Yeah, Natasha," another poster chimes in.
"Lucky Natasha! I'd kill for a night with Gage Ramsey!"
"Lucky? She was probably manipulated by him. He had all the power."
A sub-thread ensues, with a debate about whether or not college girls are capable of making our own decisions. Gag me. But I keep reading.
"I don't know how this escaped the media, but my guess is Ramsey wrote some checks. But my cousin went to school there and she said yeah, people knew about it."
Unbelievable. It looks like Natasha was actually telling the truth. It can't be-- but these comments are right here on my screen, in front of my eyes.
More and more of them-- "Heard about this. Boring. Next." and "What, you think because a man is rich beyond belief that he wouldn't want a hot college girl?" And, of course, a few more comments like "Gage Ramsey, daaaaaamn, if you were going to get it on with a student, why couldn't you come to Carnegie Mellon and get with me??"
"And then come down to Florida State while he's at it," suggests a response. A slew of admirers add their schools for Gage to swing by. I feel stupid for so many reasons. Not only did I not know about this, but until the first day of class, I didn't even know what Gage looked like. Apparently he was already well-known for being hot. Everything I'd read about him was all in text format with no photos, and I just never bothered to look him up. If I had, I wouldn't be in this mess.
I close my laptop and bury myself under the covers. Maybe I'll just stay here for awhile. Like all week.
***
I skip Gage's next class, choosing instead to sleep in and make up for precious rest lost when I had to escape his house only to be ambushed by Natasha, and then couldn't go back to
sleep as a result of everything I learned.
He texted me later, asking me why I wasn't in class, but I didn't answer him. And I didn't answer him the next day, either, when he asked what I was doing, or when he said he missed me.
I’m tempted. I miss him. I want to talk to him. And I think maybe I should warn him that Natasha has obviously followed him to Deer Falls like some kind of scorned stalker. But every time I’m about to text him, anger and hurt burn through me like a brush fire.
So Thursday morning, instead of scurrying around to get to Case Studies, I lounge around with Isabel, who's also being lazy, and she does my nails, and we watch Netflix. Neither one of us mentions Gage. I know she's wondering why I'm not going to his class, but she's not asking.
My phone vibrates soon after class's end time.
Seriously where are u?
I toss my phone onto the ottoman.
When I finally roll off the couch, it's well past midday, and my stomach is growling despite the waffles Isabel made earlier. She extracted herself from our lounge session a little while ago, not willing to piss off the professor she's researching with after sweating bullets to get that job.
I throw on some Adidas shorts and running shoes with my Bristowe tank top, and put my hair up without much effort. A dash of mascara and lip gloss, and then I'm out, backpack in tow. I wish I could just stop going to classes altogether, but I can't. And for now, I'm just glad Gage doesn't teach the one I'm heading to.
I eat a bagel on the walk to class, vowing to eat more as soon as we're dismissed. The bagel barely tides me over while I listen to the lecture, and by the time everyone's packing up their stuff to leave, I'm starving again.
I've got my sights planted on a gyro from Bylbos Deli when a tall figure steps in front of me, blocking my path across the quad.
"Gage," I say, jerking my head left and right. Who's watching us?
"Nobody's looking," he assures me. "Walk with me."
I keep my eyes in front of me. "Hi," is all I can think of to say.
"That's it? Just hi? Where've you been?" His voice is a low growl, and I can’t help the stir of attraction in my stomach.
"Around," I say. "I guess I didn't really feel that well today."
"Or Tuesday."
"Or Tuesday."
"Why haven't you answered any of my texts?"
I don't have a decent response, so I just keep walking. Not being able to look at him is killing me, but finding out what I found out killed me, too.
"Keri." Gage's voice is low, but audible enough for me to detect stress in it. "Did I do something wrong?"
"I don't know," I say. "According to Natasha, you sure did." I glance at him out of the corner of my eye, watching as his jaw twitches and his lips set into a straight line.
He stops walking.
"Go to my office," he says, before I walk too far ahead now that he's standing still. "I don't know how you heard about that bullshit, but let me debunk it for you."
I want to say no, but I can't deny the lift my heart feels at hearing that. He's going to debunk it. So it's not true after all?
"I'll meet you there," I murmur, and make a lap around the humanities building so that Gage and I aren't seen entering his office together.
When I knock and open the door, he's waiting for me with a look that's somewhere between annoyance and distress. He’s sitting behind his desk, wearing a navy sweater that hugs his broad shoulders. I resist the urge to run to him and fling myself at him, to let him wrap me in his arms.
"Keri," he begins, his voice steel. “Where did you hear about Natasha?"
"From Natasha herself."
He grips the edge of his desk so hard that his knuckles turn white. “When?”
“When I was leaving your house," I say, and his eyebrows arch. "Before six AM, she was outside, running past your house, which she apaprently does a lot, so you might want to be aware of that."
"Outside my house? Here?"
"Uh, yes."
"She's in Deer Falls?"
"Yeah."
Gage picks up a pen and throws it. It hits the far wall of his office before clattering to the floor. "FUCK!"
"She said she's on vacation,” I say meekly.
"Right. Coincidentally where I'm teaching." He rubs his forehead. “I suspected she'd probably drop out of Drummond, but I never thought she’d follow me here."
I chew on that for a minute. "So you broke up with her, and then…what, she tried to go public? To get you in trouble?"
"No." Gage shakes his head emphatically. "We never broke up, because we were never together."
I try not to roll my eyes. I know all about guys' versions of together versus not together. You can be with a guy for years, and then suddenly not be, according to his timetable. Fucking Becker. And I've seen Isabel through a couple of shitheads who pulled the "Oh, wait, we never said we were exclusive!" bit.
"Does she know that?” I ask. “Because she came right up to me, and started telling me about your... relationship."
Gage visibly recoils at that word. "We never had a relationship."
"Well, what would you call it?"
"Nothing," he says. "Keri, there was no relationship of any kind."
"Hookup, then? However many."
"None," he says. "Zero. I never touched that girl."
"That's pretty much the complete opposite of what she told me."
"I don't know what she told you went on, but outside the classroom, it was absolutely nothing."
I pinch my lips together, thinking. I want this to be true. God, I want this to be true.
"So she knows, then?" Gage exhales, his voice still steely. "She knows about us?"
"It looks that way. I was coming out of your house before dawn."
He doesn’t say anything. He looks at me, his eyes bright and burning, and I can tell he knows I don’t quite believe him. He gets up and moves toward me, wrapping his arms around my waist.
“Keri,” he says, his voice low. Arousal stirs deep in my belly as the scent of his musky cologne hits my nose. “I didn’t get fired. Do you honestly think I could have come to any college after being fired for a sex scandal?"
"It would be tough," I admit. "But you are Gage Ramsey."
"Well, evidently I'm not that well-known." He tips my chin up and gives me a smile. "Sometimes my students don't even know what I look like until they walk in."
"Uh huh," I say, not ready to smile back just yet. I take a deep breath. “So then what went down, exactly?"
"She-- Natasha--" I can tell Gage hates saying her name-- "seemed nice at first. Then she seemed a little too nice. Always staring at me, and stopping after class to ask me some question or another. And then those questions stopped being business-related and started getting personal. Did I have a girlfriend, shit like that."
I summon my strenght and pull out of his embrace, then lean against one of his guest chairs. "Go on."
"It made me uncomfortable, but I figured she was harmless. Maybe a little enamored, I don't know, but harmless. Turned out that wasn't the case. She got obsessed. And I'm not sure, but I think maybe she broke into my office there, at Drummond. Nothing was out of place, but she got my personal cell number somehow. The number I don't use for class."
"The one I have," I muse.
"Yeah." Gage gives me an imploring look. "If I give someone that, they must be pretty special."
He's looking at me like he's waiting for me to come around, to say "Oh, okay then!" I'm not done yet, though. "For her to be shadowing you at two different schools, in different states. Something must have been intense."
"Yeah," Gage says. "Her fucking fantasy world in her head. She got set on this idea, and kept trying to make it pan out, and when it finally became clear that it never would, she couldn't deal with it. Remember when you asked me about stalkers?" I nod. "I did have one. Her."
I recall asking Gage about stalkers, all right. And I recall him flinching, like he had a bad memory of something.
"The Dean and the board met with me, and we agreed to a mutual parting of ways. I didn't want my reputation damaged, and they didn't want Drummond's damaged. They knew I was innocent, and they promised they'd refute anything if the media came calling. And apparently one newspaper did call and ask, and they told them it was bogus. Luckily, the newspaper decided that wasn't news. And after that, nothing really came of it. We all decided it would be best if I just moved on."
"I see," I say. "But that experience didn't make you want to quit teaching altogether? Because honestly, after being stalked, especially considering you really don’t need the money, I'd think you'd just bail on teaching entirely."
"You'd think so," Gage repeats. "But the crazy thing is, I actually love teaching. Even more than my actual business endeavors. Would anyone buy that?"
"I might," I tell him. He's looking at me so solemnly, his eyes piercing mine. He's as handsome as ever, though I can see the deep worry in his face. "About Natasha. What are you going to do? She knows where you live. She's clearly not afraid to show up there."
"Was she in my yard, or on my property at all?"
"No. But still. Maybe you should call the cops.”
"I'd have to tell them about us if I do that. And if they question her, she'll out us."
"Shit," I mumble. "You're right."
"I’ll take care of it. But you shouldn't come over for awhile.”
"But we can't meet at my house, either. I mean, Isabel's cool, but there are tons of Bristowe people all over. My whole street is Bristowe."
"The whole neighborhood," Gage agrees. "Not going to your house, no chance. Wait a minute." His smile vanishes. "Isabel knows?"
"She's fine with it," I fib. "At least, she promised not to tell anyone. And she saw me leave the bar with you that first night, anyway."
Gage relents. "I was hoping she had no idea who I was, then and now, but there is a point where I'm probably asking too much of the universe." He lets out what must be the fiftieth sigh of the day. "I wasn't expecting to meet you, Keri. I was just supposed to come down here and keep my head down and my nose clean. But I did meet you. And I don't want to give you up."