He nodded, wondering how she fixed such a big problem with a simple movement. He had probably missed something obvious. That was usually what happened. And then he felt like an idiot.
Which he did not want to feel like right now—at least about the computer. She wasn’t judgmental over it the way that the IT people were. She acted like tech that malfunctioned for no apparent reason was absolutely normal.
He took a deep breath. He was overthinking (and overfeeling) everything. “You said you wanted to consult?”
“I do, but it looks like you have no time.” She traced the top of the laptop as she said that, almost as if it had reminded her that he had a real job.
“I have time,” he said. “My class doesn’t start for another two hours. I’d have to be here, like, in an hour-forty-five, but the point is, that I do have time.”
Now the speech centers were overloading him with words. He forcibly shut his mouth so that no more words would emerge.
She smiled, even though the smile didn’t quite meet her eyes. “Wonderful,” she said—and he wondered why she was no longer as interested as she had seemed just a few moments ago. Had she just remembered what a nerd he could be? Did seeing him in his native environment make him less interesting? (He had no idea how he could be less interesting. He’d pretty much hit the rock bottom of interesting the last time she saw him, when he’d been tired enough to fall over in the middle of their conversation.)
“My office is two buildings over,” he said, “but there’s a small coffee nook upstairs if you don’t want to go out in the snow.”
“Is it private?” she asked.
The snow? His speech center urged him to ask, but he managed to control that wayward remark. She meant the coffee nook, and he knew that, and a tiny little joke about an unclear antecedent was even nerdier than he wanted to be. He had to tame that weird little voice in his brain somehow, because it was really in overdrive.
“Yeah,” he said, “unless there are students in it. Which we won’t know until we get there.”
“Let’s go to your office then,” she said. “If you don’t mind.”
If he didn’t mind. He’d been fantasizing about inviting her to his office for weeks now. Only in the fantasies, he’d closed the door, then taken her in his arms, kissed her, and—
Well, none of that would happen here. He knew it. He would just have to convince his overactive imagination of it.
“I don’t mind,” he said. “I really don’t mind at all.”
15
SHE SHOULDN’T HAVE come. She realized that when she fixed the projector for him and then told the truth about the way she had done it. Magic. What the hell had she been thinking? If he had believed her—and of course he hadn’t—then she was revealing secrets (again), and if he hadn’t believed her—and of course, he hadn’t—then she had just sounded flip, which she had not been. She didn’t want to seem flip to him, or crazy, or needy, or anything.
If she could have done so in some kind of creative way, she would have fled right then and there, but she couldn’t. Instead, she smiled at him, watched as he grabbed his coat from a nearby chair, and then followed him out of the building.
He moved like a runner, with a natural grace that she hadn’t expected. He also walked like a man on a mission: she had to hurry to keep up with him.
Instead of focusing on him, she pulled on her mittens, but she slipped her cap into her pocket. She should have worn those ear-warmer things, instead of a cap. Her hair probably looked a mess.
As if that mattered. She wasn’t here to seduce him; she was here to talk to him.
Two buildings over sounded far away, but in the vagaries of campus design, it took less time to cross the quad than it did to get out of the building holding his class. He opened a nearly invisible door in the side of a red brick building that looked ancient, and then led her up a flight of well-worn stairs. This building still smelled faintly of chalk and cigarettes, even though she knew that neither had been inside this place for years.
The smell had burrowed into the building’s DNA. It had to be one of the oldest buildings on this very old campus.
He pushed open another door, rounded a corner, and waved at a woman sitting at a desk.
“Professor Palmer,” the woman started, and then she saw Nissa. The woman smiled, and Nissa knew why. Nissa had spoken to her on the phone not thirty minutes ago. The woman was the department secretary. “You must be Ms. Kealoha.”
“I am, thanks. Your directions were good.” Nissa spoke as she walked, because Ryan didn’t stop. He opened one of three doors in a little alcove and stepped inside a room.
Nissa followed, then stopped as her breath caught. She had been in professors’ offices hundreds of times before, and never had she seen anything like this. The windows were large, arched, and mullioned, with a view of the quad she had just crossed. Built-in bookshelves made of something that looked like mahogany covered the remaining walls. The furniture was heavy, old-fashioned, and somehow appropriate.
The desk was in what looked like an antechamber to the rest of the room (which seemed more like a small library than an office), and was the only messy thing around—if you wanted to call stacks of papers messy. Her desk at the office was truly messy—there wasn’t a stack to be seen. This was organized, even though there were more papers than she had seen outside of a recycling bin in years.
Ryan glanced at the desk as if contemplating sitting down at it, then walked past it. “Let’s sit in here. It’s more comfortable.”
But he didn’t sit down. Instead, he stood near one of the overstuffed leather chairs, and put a hand on its back.
Nissa stopped beside him, uncertain if she should sit in the other overstuffed chair or on the couch, which stood directly across from his chair.
His gaze met hers, and her heart started to beat. Hard. She wanted to kiss him. She really, really wanted to kiss him. Right now. And use the couch for something other than sitting.
It took all of her strength to break that gaze. She wondered if her pupils had dilated; she supposed they had. He had to know how attracted she was to him, right?
She didn’t want him to know, because that meant he wasn’t attracted. He hadn’t acted on it yet.
She walked over to the window and looked at the view, even though it didn’t interest her. She had rehearsed this conversation in her head, and she couldn’t remember how it was supposed to go.
So she just dove in. “I’m not sure if you remember that I work for Claus & Company.”
“I do,” he said. He sounded different here. Calmer. More relaxed. Maybe that computer thing had really upset him.
“I—um—I got into a lot of trouble for agreeing with you last month.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, as if it were his fault.
She turned. He was still holding that chair. In fact, the chair was between them like a shield. So he wasn’t attracted, and he had noticed her interest. He didn’t want her near him.
Her heart sank.
“It’s not your fault. You have a good argument.”
He shook his head, and she could tell he was going to reiterate that it wasn’t his main argument. She didn’t need to hear that.
Before he could speak, she said, “I finally convinced my bosses that they were the ones who were out of touch. But now, they expect me to start crafting Santa’s 21st century image. What they want is to keep it exactly the same, only make it different, and I want it to reflect current society, and be good for children. I know you’re not a professor of marketing or anything, but you have some really good ideas, and I think you’re right about the importance of brands and role models in the health arena and….”
She let her voice trail off. He was just staring at her, as if she had lost her mind. Maybe she had. She could do this without him. They both knew that. She should do this without him, because Santa’s image wasn’t really about marketing or branding, but about keeping him relevant in the 21st century, maybe even
a force for good. And no professor of public health, no matter how sexy and charismatic, could help her with that.
So she shrugged and decided to go for broke. He was already looking at her like she was crazy; how could telling the truth make that worse?
“And, honestly,” she said, “I just wanted to see you again.”
He swallowed visibly. “You’re kidding,” he said, and then looked appalled that those words had come out of his mouth.
“No,” she said. “I’m not kidding. I—um—I haven’t been able to stop thinking of you since that day in the studio. I’ve never quite met anyone like you before.”
He let out a small laugh. “I’m not sure that’s a compliment.”
“It’s not meant as one. It’s the truth. I find you—” she decided to go for broke. “—fascinating. I find you fascinating.”
And charming and handsome and funny and appealing and oh, so, sexy. She wanted to tell him all that, but felt like she had revealed too much with “fascinating.”
His fingers clutched the top of the chair so hard that his knuckles had turned white. “I’m awake, right?”
“What?” she asked, not sure she understood him.
“This isn’t a dream, is it?” Then he shook his head and rolled his eyes just a little. “Of course, even if it is, you wouldn’t tell me. People in dreams don’t know they’re dreaming.”
“What?” she asked again.
“I’m—ah, hell.” He stepped around the chair and walked toward her. Her heart pounded. Then he put his hands on her shoulders for just a moment, standing so close to her that she could feel the heat from his body.
His gaze held hers—that magnetic gaze—and then, then, he leaned toward her slowly. He was going to kiss her or maybe he was asking permission to kiss her or maybe—
She didn’t care. She slipped her arms around his waist and pulled him close. Then she kissed him.
He tasted of sunshine mixed with just a hint of chocolate and mint. She pressed against him, felt more muscles than she had expected (public health, right? That included exercise, right?) and then melted into him.
His hand slipped from her shoulders, up her neck, cupping her chin, then getting tangled in her hair. His touch was gentle and erotic at the same time. His thumbs found the slightly pointed edges of her ears—that legacy from her mother that she had always hated—and he moaned slightly.
His kiss got more passionate, his body even closer, despite all their winter clothes. She started to slip her hands under his sweater when he suddenly broke away from her.
“I—I—I—have a class,” he said. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes bright, and his lips just a little swollen. “I’m sorry. If I didn’t stop, well, I wouldn’t have stopped. I mean, I think you’re the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen, and I’m such an idiot, I probably just ruined everything, and I want nothing more than to—”
She leaned into him, kissing him again, slipping her hands under his sweater anyway, feeling how warm his skin was. She could kiss him forever, classes be damned, but she had control too, just not as much of it as she had initially thought because this kiss was going on longer than she had originally intended and she wanted nothing more than to make him miss that class, but then he might resent her or someone might knock on the door or—
She made herself break off the kiss. She was breathing as hard as if she had just snowshoed fifteen miles.
“I—you’re right,” she said. “You need to go to your class. But I would love to take you to dinner. I’d say it was to pick your brain, but really, I just want to—”
“I know,” he said and kissed her yet again. She had been about to say get to know you better, but this was good, this was better than good, this was great in fact and perfect and her hands were reaching, not for his sweater this time, but for the edges of his pants, and she made herself stand back, even though that meant ending what she considered to be the best kiss of the three.
“Dinner?” she asked again. “Is there somewhere good around here?”
He stared at her for a long moment, as if he wasn’t sure what she was asking. Finally, he said, “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
She smiled, because she didn’t know what else to do. Her mother had once told her that she should never deny a compliment, but she wanted to. She also wanted to reach out and grab him again, so she took another step backwards, just so that she wouldn’t get lost in another kiss.
“Your class,” she said as a reminder.
“Yeah, right, of course,” he said. “And dinner. God. Dinner. How about—oh, God, you’re used to Manhattan. There’s nothing good here.”
“Then let’s go somewhere bad,” she said.
His eyes twinkled, and she realized exactly how he had taken that. She wasn’t going to correct him. If he wanted to go somewhere bad with her, then she was willing.
“There’s Frank’s Country Restaurant,” he said after a moment. “Around here, we call it carbo-loaders paradise.”
“So, not a place a professor of public health should be seen,” she said.
“We public health professors are not subject to those rules,” he said, “so long as the place passes its health inspections.”
“And has it?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah.” His gaze had never left hers. If she moved even slightly, they’d be in each other’s arms again. “It’s the best worst place in town.”
“Sounds perfect,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess it does.”
16
IF HE WERE a smarter man, he would have cancelled class and just made love to her on that couch, all day long, uncurtained windows be damned. His entire job be damned. He would have sacrificed it all for her.
If he were a smarter man.
But he didn’t think of that option until he started the PowerPoint presentation, after the lights had dimmed in class, as the presentation ran more or less on its own, and he had to stay turned slightly away from the class because every time he thought of her, his body reacted in ways he didn’t want his students to see.
But it was more than just lust. He’d been in lust before, and he’d always known that once it was slaked, he would be able to walk away. This was something else. Something about this woman called to him from deep within, as if he had met a missing piece of himself, which was so stupid, because unless people truly were missing pieces of themselves (from accidents or whatever) they were always whole. Or so he had told one of his girlfriends once when she said that everyone had the perfect soul mate somewhere, the person who completed them, and he wasn’t that person for her.
You’re being unrealistic, he’d said, even though he hadn’t wanted her to stick around. He had almost told her that those high standards would make her end up alone and unwanted, but he’d stopped himself, because he recognized in that last moment just how cruel he would sound.
But those words had never left him: the lack of realism in that longing for the “perfect” mate.
Whom he had just found.
And if he told Nissa that, she’d run from him, he knew it. He would run from him if he had said that and he were her, or something like that.
His thoughts had been tangled since those kisses, and he wasn’t sure he would ever have clarity back. He wasn’t even sure how he made it through his class.
Or the next one.
Or how he had prevented himself from running down the slippery sidewalk to the faculty parking lot.
Or how he managed to drive to Frank’s Country Restaurant and how he managed not to be too early, but early enough to get a table, even though it was the dinner rush.
For sixty years, Frank’s Country Restaurant had done its best to bring the country into Upstate. In the middle of delis, diners, and bad Italian restaurants, Frank’s had once been an oasis of middle-American blandness. Now, though, it was a nostalgic place in the midst of vegan restaurants and upscale boutique restaurants so expensive that Ryan was afraid h
e’d pay more for a meal than he did for his mortgage payment.
Frank’s had become the go-to place for him, and for everyone else in town on a real-world salary. This evening, though, he saw it through Nissa’s Manhattan eyes, and realized he probably should have taken her to one of the upscale boutique restaurants.
The décor was shabby, the booths a bit tattered, the windows clean but scratched. No one had updated the carpet since the 1990s. There was a real jukebox in the corner that only played four songs, because the company that ran it had gone out of business years ago.
Families crowded the tables, children screamed on their way to the designated play area, and the salad bar looked like a bomb had gone off in the middle of it. (The bomb was probably a small group of ten-year-olds who were currently throwing cherry tomatoes at each other in the play area.)
Ryan let out a small sigh and wished he had gotten Nissa’s cell phone number. He also wished he had her card. Maybe the number on that would take him directly to her. Only he had deliberately tried not to memorize the number. He hadn’t wanted to dial her late one night when his resistance was down.
“Hey, Prof!” Henry Hewitt, one of his best students, waved at him from the cash register. “You meeting that gorgeous woman from the talk show?”
Ryan felt like he’d been outted in more ways than one: first, he hadn’t realized anyone in town had seen those talk shows since no one talked to him about them, and second, he hadn’t expected anyone to recognize Nissa. The fact that Henry had recognized Nissa meant she had beaten him to the restaurant. Ryan couldn’t back out now.
“Yeah, I am,” Ryan said, unable to find a better way to answer that question. “She’s here, huh?”
“In back,” Henry said. Then he grinned and said softly, “Nice goin’, Dude.”
Thanking Henry for that comment felt inappropriate, so Ryan just nodded his acknowledgement and walked to the part of the restaurant that locals considered the back. It was technically the side of the restaurant—the back was where the play area was—but it felt farther back than the play area. In class, he’d once used that discrepancy as an example of the way that perception influenced fact.
Santa Series: Three Stories of Magical Holiday Romance Page 15