by Karina Halle
“You’re an author?”
“No, not yet,” he says, looking away briefly. “But that’s what professors do in their spare time, you know. Academic papers, journals. Always writing. Honestly, I’m feeling the pressure, but I can’t do it on my own. I’m such a slow writer to begin with, and anything extra bogs me down.”
“What’s your book about?”
“Tragic clowns. Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin. Their performances in early cinema.”
Could this man be any more perfect? I’m freaking obsessed with Keaton, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, all of them, ever since my father got me watching them when I was little. Shit, it’s tempting. Really tempting. But Professor Blue Eyes is barking up the wrong tree.
“I’m flattered, I think,” I tell him, “but there’s no way I could handle two jobs. I literally work here all day long. The intern life. No breaks, no fun.”
“You’ll only have to work a few hours a day, and if you want more work, that’s fine too. I’ll pay you forty pounds an hour.”
Forty pounds an hour? To do research on Buster Keaton?
It’s like a real dream job landed in my lap. And a job at that, not a payless internship.
But I can’t exactly leave the film fest high and dry either.
“Can I talk it over with the people here?” I ask him. “Maybe we can work something out.”
“Of course,” he says, giving me a sly smile, like he already knows I’ll be working for him. He stands up and puts his business card on the pile of scripts. “When you have an answer about both questions, give me a call.” He peers down at me with a tilt of his head. “It was nice meeting you, Natasha.”
Then he’s ducking out the door, and he’s gone.
CHAPTER THREE
Natasha
London, England
Present Day
I wake up with that uneasy feeling. You know, the one that tells you your alarm didn’t go off like it should have this morning and you’re totally fucked.
I open one eye and blink at the ceiling. The light in the room seems a bit off, and I can hear the shower running next door along with 90s gangster rap, which means Melissa is already up. I’m usually out the door way before she is.
I roll over and pick up my phone.
9:50 a.m.
SHIT.
My first class starts at eleven, and I’m all the way out at Wembley.
I leap out of bed, throwing the blankets aside, and quickly search my room for something to wear. I pick up a pair of jeans, but yesterday I spilled tomato sauce all over them when Melissa and I went to the football match. Which makes me think I didn’t take a shower when we got home last night, and there’s no way I’m showing up for Professor Irving’s class smelling like beer and meat pie.
I throw on my robe and hurry out into the hall, pounding on the bathroom door.
“I overslept!” I yell. “How long are you going to be?”
For a second I don’t think she can hear me over the blaring of R. Kelly, but then the water turns off and she yells back, “Give me a minute!”
I wait until the door opens and she appears, face flushed from the shower, hair wrapped up in a towel. “I was wondering if you were ever going to wake up,” she says. “Here, it’s all yours.”
“You could have tried to wake me up,” I tell her. “You know I have class at eleven.”
She rolls her eyes. “Who am I, your mother?” Then she sashays back to her room.
I know she’s got a point, but still. Sometimes I think Melissa wants me to fail just so I’ll be at her level. She says I care far too much about school, but after everything I’ve been through, I have no choice but to throw myself into the program. I was gone for nearly four years, and aside from a few credits here and there, I basically have to start my master’s degree all over again. The degree at King’s College is modeled differently than it was at Met, as well. Meanwhile, Melissa didn’t even go to her classes last week because she was at the bars off-campus, searching for prey.
I jump into the shower, washing my hair and conditioning at record speed. Even if Melissa didn’t go to her classes, I went to mine, and I learned what a pain in the ass it’s going to be to try and get back on track. What if there was no point in coming to King’s College? What if I should have stayed in France with my father and just left my education as it was? The fact that I have to do everything over is both disheartening and staggering.
Breathe, I remind myself, closing my eyes and taking a moment to let the water run down my back. My panic attacks are fewer and fewer these days, but I know one has been creeping up on me, just waiting for me to break down.
Oh, that inevitable breakdown.
That’s the price you pay for trying to come back to life.
Somehow I manage to shake it out of me and hop out of the shower. I can’t even be bothered with makeup. There’s just no time. I’m Professor Irving’s teaching assistant for Film 100, and even though it pains me to look like a chump in front of a hundred students, I fear my professor’s wrath even more. Last week he kicked a student out just for looking at his phone.
“Want some tea?” Melissa asks from the kitchen as I hurry to my room and start throwing things around, looking for a pair of pants that don’t have some kind of stain on them. I’d like to say I wasn’t this disorganized or messy before the incident, but that would be a total lie. I’m twenty-nine years old and I’ve only slipped backward.
“No time!” I yell, holding up a skirt that might do if I’d started going to the gym regularly like I promised myself I would. The one good thing about recuperating in France was that I’d lost some weight I needed to lose. Even so, I still have hips and ass for days, and now I have a little belly that wasn’t there before. I blame all the meat pies I’ve scarfed down since moving back to London.
I pull the skirt on anyway, throw on my bra, a light knit sweater, and a raincoat. It’s pouring outside and I have to walk a while to get to the tube. Then I run into the kitchen and grab a banana while Melissa sits at the table. She dumps artificial sweetener into her tea, swirling it around and around with her spoon.
“Aren’t you going to class?” I ask her. “What do you even have?”
“Eh,” she says. “Some class about analyzing film comedy or something.”
“Who’s teaching it?”
She shrugs and slurps her tea. “I don’t know. Someone.”
I frown at her. Melissa is a very smart girl, which is probably why it bugs me so much that she’s so lackluster about school. She barely goes and she still gets good grades. She’s not even getting her master’s degree for any other reason than to appease her parents. What she really wants to do—what she does—is acting. I grew up with a mother who was obsessed with it and stardom the same way Melissa is, and I know how it all ends. Even I did my fair share of it when I was growing up in LA, but that lifestyle wasn’t for me.
Melissa and my mother are in love with the idea of fame, the idea of being wanted and adored and validated, but not the reality of being an actor. Maybe that’s why when I first met Melissa six years ago, we hit it off. She reminded me of my mother, the very person I escaped LA from. How is that for irony? Come all the way to England and then meet pretty much the exact same person you were trying to run away from.
When I first met Melissa, I had gone with my undergrad class to a film set she was working on as a stand-in. We’d got to talking, clicked, and the rest was history. I guess I liked Melissa because even though she was as vain and self-obsessed as my mother—always taking selfies, posting about how much more talented she is than other actresses and that she deserved so much more—she was also a lot of fun, and I needed some of that in my life. She also looked up to me for some reason, maybe because I was a bit older or because I grew up in LA. When she found out I was going to school for film, she wanted to do the same thing. Of course she one-upped me, and by the time I was in the first year of my master’s at the Met film school, she was starti
ng her undergrad at King’s College—a much better school.
Still, I found it flattering that she wanted to emulate me, and she ended up being a true friend through thick and thin. She hadn’t really approved of what I was doing with Brigs, even though she met Brigs only once, but she was by my side after the incident and during my breakdown. When I moved to France to be with my father to get my head on straight and piece my heart back together, we’d lost touch, but as soon as I found my strength to step back into London in May, we reconnected. And when her last roommate moved out, I moved in.
Melissa eyes me like she can hear my thoughts. “Don’t worry about me. I’m going. Besides, I haven’t seen what guys are in my classes yet. Maybe I’ll luck out and get someone with a hot arse.”
“Maybe your teacher has a hot arse,” I tell her, grabbing my bag from the back of a chair. “Text me when you’re done with your mystery class and I’ll meet you.”
She waves goodbye and I run out of the building. The rain has let up for a moment, but it doesn’t matter much since my hair is still wet from the shower. Ever since I died it honey blonde, I swear it’s gotten thicker somehow.
As I hurry to the tube station at Wembley (we have a view of Wembley stadium from our balcony, which is great for reminding you about all the concerts you can’t afford to go to), my mind flits back to something it shouldn’t.
Him.
Brigs.
All because I said her teacher might have a hot arse.
Because, fuck, did Brigs ever have a hot arse. It’s like he was born to do lunges.
“Stop thinking about him,” I tell myself. Out loud. Because I’m crazy like that. Luckily there’s no one around to hear me, and honestly that would be the least of my problems if my train of thought continues. Brigs is a trigger. He was once the man I loved more than anything in the world. But he was also the man who would never be mine. There was that beautiful, brief period where I thought we had a chance. We were so close to being together, to putting an end to the guilt. Then it all fell apart.
And by falling apart, I mean his life imploded and I was sucked into the blast.
It was my fault.
It was our fault.
And I’ll never stop blaming myself for what happened. For what happened to them, and what I did to him.
If I didn’t exist, if I had never met Brigs and fallen for him the same way he fell for me, his wife and child would still be alive.
My love killed.
My love ruined that man’s life.
I’m shocked to find a tear rolling down my cheek. I wish I could blame it on the rain like the song says, but I can’t. I haven’t cried over Brigs, over the incident, in months. It’s what my old doctor would have called progress. And this tear is what my father would have called “humanity.”
“Embrace your humanity, Tasha,” he would say to me. “For if you didn’t cry, your soul would never heal.”
It hasn’t healed, and I don’t think it ever will. But I don’t think crying has anything to do with it. It’s just that there are some things in life that you can’t walk away from.
But I’m trying. I’m trying.
One foot in front of the other.
Starting over.
As long as I keep focused on the future and not the past, maybe, maybe I can come out of it. This is a new life, a better life. I’m even going to a better school now: Kings College. If I can just keep moving forward, maybe then my soul will have a chance.
I get on the train and head to school.
***
Well that was a fun class, said no one ever, I think to myself, getting out of my seat. The lecture hall is absolutely crammed with students leaving, and I have a feeling that myself and the other two TAs, Devon and Tabitha, will be expected to stay behind and talk to Professor Irving.
The man is such a chauvinistic piece of shit. With his balding head covered in liver spots and the permanent scowl etched upon his wrinkled face, he’s the kind of teacher that obviously just crawled out of the stone age. Even though all we had to do during this lecture is listen to him and watch the film along with all the undergrads, the sexist remarks he made to me and Tabitha at the start of the hour were uncalled for. He told me if I want the students to respect me, I shouldn’t come to class like a slob. He said the same thing to Tabitha too, even though the woman is wearing a damn pantsuit. I think he said it because Tabitha is borderline obese, and he knows he’d get into some major shit if he commented on that.
Meanwhile, Devon with his penis and his nonexistent chin gets all the praise and glory, just for knowing a few answers.
“What are you still doing here?” Professor Irving says as he spots us standing around. He waves his hands at us. “Go on with your day. I’ll email you about the tutorials later.”
I turn around, happy to get the fuck out of there, when he says, “Wait, you. The girl who had a break.”
I stop and take a deep breath. How did he know about that?
Tabitha shoots me a sympathetic glance, while No Chin Devon looks a bit butthurt that he didn’t get called on.
I slowly turn around and give Professor Irving a big smile. “Yes, sir?”
He narrows his eyes at me, raising his chin in appraisal. It’s not a good appraisal. “You did take a break, did you not?”
I nod, rubbing my lips together. “I did. Four years.”
“And why was that?”
I have a prepared answer for this. It’s only half true. “I went to France to be with my father. He was sick.”
“I see.” He sticks his finger in his ear and wiggles it around. I try not to grimace, keeping the awkward smile plastered on my face. “You went to Met before and completed one year of your Master’s. Four years is a long time to mess things up, family or not, don’t you think? Do you think you’re ready to be back at school, at this school in particular?”
My smile falters. “Of course.”
He raises his brow. “Good. I just want to make sure we’re on the same page here. I expect a lot out of my students and a lot out of my TAs. You see, when I talked about my book, Iconography in Early Film Texts, you were the only one who didn’t comment. Have you read it?”
Ah, shit. I swallow hard. “No. I haven’t yet. I didn’t realize it was part of the curriculum.”
He chuckles rather nastily. “My dear, when you’re assisting my class, you’re grading the students. You can’t grade them until you know how I think. It’s only common sense, don’t you think?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I suggest when you’re done here, you go to the bookstore and pick up a copy. When I see you next, bring it to me. I’ll sign it for you. Wouldn’t that be a lucky treat?”
Give me a fucking break. But I manage to smile. “Yes, it would. Thank you.”
Then I quickly get the hell out of there. I wish my first stop wasn’t the bookstore to buy his book, but I know he’s going to expect me to read the whole thing before the next class. I stop by the cafeteria to get something for my raging stomach, opting for a goat cheese salad over my usual meat pie and chips, and decide to text Melissa.
Where is your class? Did you make it?
It’s room 302. Teacher’s not here yet. Maybe I can skip, she texts back.
Stay where you are. How long is it?
It’s supposed to be two hours. I hope there’s a film.
Cool. I’ll meet you in two hours, then. I’ve got to read a bullshit book in the meantime.
Fun. You deserve a beer after that.
We’ll see.
Lo and behold, after I hole up with the book (the crap cost thirty pounds!) in a corner of the library (one of my favorite places), and before my brain starts to bleed from boredom, I think I might need a beer after all. If only the book didn’t cut into my beer fund so much.
I head to the third floor just as the classroom doors start opening and people start piling out.
I can see Melissa at the end of the hallway, wide-eyed and walking kind o
f jerkily toward me like she’s just done a line of coke. She’s mouthing something to me, but I think it’s just, “Oh my god, oh my god.”
She probably had a teacher like Professor Irving. So far we aren’t having the best luck with teachers this year.
But as she gets closer, hurrying now toward me and shaking her head as if in disbelief, my eyes drift over her shoulder to the classroom.
A man has just stepped out of the door.
Tall.
Broad-shouldered.
Wearing a fine, tailored grey suit.
High cheekbones.
A strong jawline.
And the most haunting blue eyes in the world.
Eyes I never ever thought I’d see again.
I freeze in place, or maybe it’s just that my heart stops beating, and I can hear Melissa saying, “Natasha, oh my god, come with me, let’s go, you won’t believe this, oh my god,” as she grabs my arm and tries to haul me away.
But it’s too late.
Because those eyes see me.
They see me.
And Professor Blue Eyes looks like he’s been hit by a train.
I know the feeling.
It’s your heart and soul being smashed to smithereens.
Because of one person.
One look.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” Melissa says quickly, and I’m turned around as she tugs at me, our eye contact broken.
It. Can’t. Be. Him.
It can’t.
And yet it is.
I look back over my shoulder and meet his stunned gaze once more.
Brigs McGregor.
The love of my life.
The love that ruined lives.
One step forward and five million steps back.
.
CHAPTER FOUR
Brigs
London
Present Day
I check my watch. Five minutes until my class starts and I’m still scrambling over the tutorial notes. I made these months ago, but now that I’m here, among the students and in the school, I felt like it has to feel more organic, so I’ve spent my morning in my office, scrapping everything I was slated to speak about today.