Untangling The Stars

by Alyse Miller

  Untangling the Stars

  Alyse Miller

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, places, or events is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case the author has not received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Untangling the Stars

  Copyright © 2016 Alyse Miller

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN (ebook): 978-1-939590-75-6

  Inkspell Publishing

  5764 Woodbine Ave.

  Pinckney, MI 48169

  Edited By Vicky Burkholder.

  Cover art By Najla Qamber

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. The copying, scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic or print editions, and do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated

  Dedicated in Loving Memory to

  Madeline Maines

  1986-2015

  CHAPTER ONE

  The door to Andie’s classroom sprung open. The sound should have startled her in the quiet of the empty lecture hall, but it didn’t. Students, faculty, parents—hell, once even the university mascot—were always poking their heads in her door between lecture hours with random questions or to ask her for directions around campus. Sometimes a head would pop in and out without saying anything at all, and that was fine, too. Most often, though, it was simply someone passing by and stopping in to say hi. Or, as it had happened on a handful of occasions, a student—and there were always one or two comedians every semester—would stop in to hand her an apple. Andie didn’t mind. As luck would have it, apples were her favorite fruit anyway, so the joke was really on them. Those comedians had been keeping her produce bowl stocked for years.

  But, apples or not, those impromptu hellos were Andie’s favorite. In fact, they were one of the main reasons she preferred to sit in the risers instead of in her office to grade papers or organize her notes between class hours. She liked to be there, clearly visible, in case one of her students saw her from the doorway window and decided to pop in.

  Andie loved the momentum between classes. It was the movement of life happening throughout the campus hallways, and she enjoyed it almost as much as she did speaking from her podium in the front of the room when classes were in session. In Andie’s mind, to learn was an adventure, assembling bits and pieces of information into new or extraordinary ways to discover something previously unknown. That never-ending quest for new knowledge and experiences was what had compelled her to turn to academics while most of her friends and peers had chosen more mainstream fields of creative work—entertainment, photography, graphic design, or whatever else struck their fancy. Her friends often teased her that, thanks to her very Bond-loving parents, she could have been some kind of superstar (or sexy double agent) with a name like Alessandra Foxglove, but show business was never in the cards for her. Hers was a quest for knowledge.

  Well, on second thought, maybe that wasn’t totally true. Being a professor might not be so glamorous, but it was a type of performing too. It was also the other reason she sat in the risers facing the stage between classes. Lecturing to several dozen college kids at a time was kind of like putting on a show in itself. A form of engaging an audience and telling them a story in a way that made a meaningful, lasting impression. From her front row seat in the risers, Andie could mentally rehearse her performance. She could gage her movements, mannerisms, and the way she delivered lesson material with carefully scripted precision. Her books, desk, and even her laser pointer were all props, if she could find the right way to use them. Hell, even she was a prop. It helped that her research was mostly in television and entertainment media, too, and that she taught in creative writing and communication studies. It was like drama without the actual acting–the behind the scenes kind of stuff.

  Putting it that way, maybe teaching was just another form of performance art. Of course, it would have to be the ugly stepchild of the industry—a Cinderella show at best. One would have to overlook the fact that long nights spent grading essays and combing through the latest and greatest of Dr. Monotone McGee’s research had a distinct lack of red carpet glamour. But, even dusty research excavations had their own special brand of adventure. You never knew what you might mine from the deepest recesses of your brain, or dig out from the treasure trove of historical documents. Wasn’t making archeology fun again the whole premise of the Indiana Jones franchise? Or maybe it was just her. Lord knows Andie had gotten her fair share of criticism for her “unconventional” teaching methods by some of the older, more traditional academics—those who preferred to preach learning like doctrine in tweed jackets and thick, smudged glasses. Those very un-Dr. Jones-ish types who thumbed their noses at learning as an adventure. Allowing students to dictate the scope of their own assignments or using unrelated and controversial materials to emphasize a point were methods largely frowned upon by many of her cohorts. What Andie thought was novel, others often denounced as heresy. It was a wonder she hadn’t been burned at the stake by now.

  Either way, the results spoke for themselves. Andie had some of the highest attendance rates, test scores, and student engagement statistics in a campus of over 40,000 enrolled full-time students, so she must be doing something right. In the end, it was simple: Andie was as naturally born a teacher as one might have been naturally born a performer, or a scientist, or a salesman. Even Thoreau, one of her favorite authors, was famously quoted as asking, “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer?” Little Richie said it better: “I don’t get down on nobody else for doing whatever else they do—to each his own.” Drumming, singing, teaching, whatever—to each his own, right? Damn right. The way she saw it, it took a village of professors to raise one student through education, and they each had their own role to play.

  Either way, conventional or not, with its books and debates and an ever-diverse population of names and faces and ideas, the classroom was where Dr. Alessandra—Andie, to her friends—Foxglove was happiest, and by all accounts it seemed happy to have her there, too.

  ***

  “Oh, hey.” The man’s gravelly voice slid through the door before he did, knocking Andie out of her reverie and back into the classroom. He ducked in quickly, twisting away from her to look back out the window like he was making sure no one had seen him enter. He shut the door softly behind him and gave a low sigh of relief. “Sorry. Didn’t see you,” he said dismissively to Andie’s reflection in the doorway window. “I’m just looking for a quiet place to lay low.”

  Lay low? Andie blinked back a small laugh. Had senile Dr. Preston taken his homework-hostility up a notch and started poaching the students? That wasn’t an impossible idea, but still, “laying low” was a new one. She looked at the stranger, who was still staring out the sliver of window on the heavy wooden door. From her limited view of his backside—which was admittedly a pretty nice one in her opinion—he looked simultaneously like every other guy and none in particular. The only thing she knew for sure was that he wasn’t one of her students nor was he any fellow professor she knew of. If there were an eligible prof with that kind of backside roaming the campus, she would have heard of him by now from her girlfriends in the administrative office if she hadn’t already spotted him herself. Cute guy gossip wasn’t just for the st
udents. In fact, it seemed to worsen with age.

  The stranger hiding in her classroom was tall, lean but broad-shouldered, and wearing ratty Chuck Taylors (original ones, not the cheesy knockoffs), dark wash denim jeans, and a distressed black leather jacket that fit like he wore it every day. His chestnut brown hair was disheveled and looked like he’d been sleeping on it. It fell unevenly over his ears and back into the collar of his jacket in one of those artfully ambivalent hairstyles that people spent hundreds of dollars on salons and products to perfect. But with his age-softened leather and torn sneakers, this unkempt stranger didn’t give off the smell of store bought hipster. He was a bit of a mess—a hot mess, judging by her view—but a mess nonetheless.

  He turned to face her and Andie sucked in her breath. Even with his face half hidden behind completely unnecessary black sunglasses, she recognized the man in her classroom immediately. Hell, half the world could probably pick Guy Wilder—or rather, his infamous character, Silas Dove—out of a crowd. He was TV’s most notoriously scrumptious nocturnal lady-killer, with a pair of piercing steel blue eyes to match his piercing twin fangs. Ever since Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight trilogy had propelled paranormal romance back into the mainstream, the infiltration of preternatural sex symbols was a little overwhelming and a surge of books, television shows, and movies had popped up faster than she could keep track of. Over a decade later, the fad was still clinging to life (pun intended), and shows—whether of the vampire, werewolf, witch, zombie or whatever other undead variety—still made it to the top of Hollywood’s ranks, adding to the swell of the supernatural entertainment canon.

  Andie could see the appeal, of course. Vampires were as classically romantic as they came, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Meyer’s Team Edward. Eternal youth, beauty, and seduction—what girl wouldn’t want that? Now, the Vampire Lestat de Lioncourt—Anne Rice’s iconic French antihero—that was a sexy vampire. Andie had found a copy of Interview with the Vampire in a flea market bookshop her freshman year of high school, and had read it until the pages fell completely off the spine. She’d remained a devoted supporter of Rice’s elegantly tragic characters ever since. The beautifully penned gothic fiction and the way it was brought to life on screen had been one of the catalysts behind her eventual turn to study it academically. She’d even published a paper on it somewhere—something about the normalizing of forbidden, otherworldly romances. Looking at Guy Wilder made it seem completely irrelevant. Neither Stoker’s Dracula nor Meyer’s Edward had anything on Rice’s Lestat, but mon Dieu! This guy put them both to shame.

  Now Silas Dove—Guy Wilder in all his “mortal coil” (as Lestat might have said)—was standing, tersely and abruptly, in her empty classroom, and looking dead at her with blue eyes bright enough to shine through the darkness of his shades. He looked in life as he did in nearly every photo she’d ever seen of him: perfectly imperfect. He wasn’t handsome exactly, at least not by conventional standards, but he was definitely some other kind of gorgeous. He wasn’t polished or dimpled. He didn't even have the traditional bad boy look down to a science. Frankly, with a general look of disarray and cheekbones so sharp they seemed to slice straight down to his chin through a face of unshaven stubble, he looked like trouble—if that was a thing—and the kind you were just begging to get into.

  Andie let her breath out slowly and swallowed down the swarm of butterflies that threatened to fly out of her mouth. She hadn’t spent her career analyzing pop culture films just to get star struck the first time a TV star showed up unannounced in her doorway, right? Right. Even with her stomach tangled into a tight knot of want to dive into whatever guilty pleasure vampire melodrama Guy—or Silas—could offer, Andie could still count on her professional reflexes to zap her back to reality. She had noticed the slight tremor in his hand when he closed the door. After all, she had spent enough time navigating the emotional turbulence of young adults to spot that specific brand of discomfort. Then again, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to notice how he shifted his weight nervously from foot to foot practically broadcasting his anxiety. Whatever he was hiding from—probably the throng of his rabidly admiring fan base lurking just beyond the doorway—he obviously needed the break. Maybe laying low wasn’t so far from the truth after all.

  Andie slipped her foot back into the cheetah-print oxford she’d kicked off under her chair earlier, straightened her chambray blazer, and stood up to greet him. Play nice with the scared vampire, she chanted to herself. “Dog eat your homework?” she asked in her most non-threatening voice. Obviously, he wasn’t here for class, but the homework thing was almost automatic—and the most disarming—thing she could think of. Honestly, she’d have said just about anything to get him to relax a little. That would help them both out, seeing as how she seemed to be having trouble putting words together with Guy Wilder staring her down.

  Guy opened his mouth but stopped before any sound came out and tipped his head to the side as if puzzled. It clearly wasn’t the question he’d expected her to ask. Whatever response he’d readied on autopilot fizzled out unsaid. “Uh, no.” He shrugged his shoulders backward so the worn leather of his jacket resettled against the mold of his body and regained his composure with a low, rumbling laugh. Maybe he’d gotten the whole homework bit. “Sorry. Guy Wilder.”

  She stretched out her smile and her hand toward him. “Andie—Andie Foxglove.” Crap, she hadn’t meant to sound all James Bond when she said it. She didn’t even like Bond movies; she was a Mission Impossible girl all the way. Go Tom Cruise—who’d, coincidentally, played Lestat in the film adaption of Interview with the Vampire—or go home. Vampires and secret agents—she might have to reevaluate her choices in men.

  Guy gave her hand a brief, obligatory squeeze and then stuffed both of his in either of his jean pockets. He didn’t make a move toward the sunglasses. “So, what is this class?” he asked, tilting his head back to look—she assumed—around the empty hall.

  The uncertainty in Guy’s voice was gone. In the blink of an eye, he’d gone from a fizzling ball of nervous energy to sounding as if he was unrelentingly bored. Andie knew better. If he were really so at ease, he’d lose the glasses. It wasn’t like he needed them in the building. They were less a fashion accessory and more of a privacy shield. But Andie could respect that. It couldn’t be pleasant to have a hoard of people flashing you with camera phones if you so much as even peeked your face outside. Andie didn’t even like posing for photos. She couldn’t imagine being chased down for one.

  “Expository Writing. Television and American Identity.” Andie hoped she hadn’t said it too flatly, but even to her it came out sounding like she’d read it out loud from a college course catalog. Really, it was a second year critical writing course investigating how ideologies of contemporary television reflect and refract individual lives, but she left that part out. The fact that Guy had stumbled into this of all the classes on campus was more than a little tongue-in-cheek to Andie, since the course focused on ripping through the veil of the reality distortion field depicted in entertainment, and he was one of the hottest celebrities on the market. Besides, it wasn’t worth going into detail if it might make him even more uncomfortable.

  Guy pursed his lips together and nodded his head faintly, still without looking at her. Perhaps he had caught the irony, but if he did, he didn't push it. Instead he looked over his shoulder toward the closed door and then back toward the empty risers. “Yeah. Sounds cool.”

  Andie doubted Guy’s interest was about the class, but rather on staying out of the spotlight of attention he was surely getting in the crowded campus hallways. Either way, that echoing, throaty voice of his was some kind of sweet music that seemed to be interfering with her ability to think clearly. “You think the professor would mind if I sat in?”

  Andie responded with a slight smile. Obviously, he’d mistaken her for a student. He wasn’t the first, nor would he be the last, Andie was sure. She didn’t take offense. Most days, running around in jeans and hoodi
e sweatshirts with her hair in a ponytail, she did look like every other female student on campus. She was younger than most of her peers by a decade if not more—and in some cases, many more. She’d bulled through four years of college and six of graduate school with fierce determination and a set of unrealistically high expectations that landed her at the top of her class. Beyond that, she did look surprisingly young for her age, being both petite and looking perpetually girlish with a mass of wavy honeycomb hair that fell almost to her waist, a propensity for vintage clothing, and thick, black-framed glasses she wore when the winds picked up and wreaked havoc on her allergies. She’d been of legal drinking age for a decade, but if experience proved anything, she was nowhere near beyond being carded for a glass of wine at dinner. Sometimes her friends joked that she was a missing cast member for The Big Bang Theory. But whatever, Andie could easily blend into the student population if she so desired—and she often did. It gave her a distinct advantage as a teacher; they often forgot she wasn’t one of them.

  “I’m sure it’ll be the professor’s pleasure.” So what if he thought she was a student? It really made little difference anyway, seeing as how he wasn’t a student himself. Besides, it was true. Having Guy Wilder’s brilliant blue eyes in her classroom would be her pleasure indeed.

  He seemed to take her answer as permission to stay. He nodded shortly, and one hand ventured out of his pocket to brush a stray lock of messy brown hair behind his ear, which made the angle of his cheekbones strike even sharper. It was like looking at the keen, shiny edge of a blade, and Andie had a strange urge to reach out to see if it was sharp enough to cut her. It was the same compulsion one might get if they stood on the edge of a cliff and thought—for just a split second—about jumping. She had read somewhere that cheekbones like his were supposedly an indicator of dishonesty in men. The devastating cheekbones of Star Wars villain Grand Moff Tarkin were the poster children of that hypothesis. Maybe it wasn’t just men, though. Angelia Jolie had had razor sharp prosthetic ones in Maleficent, too.