“We do not hug, Imogen. It is not seemly.”
“I’m sorry. I forgot.” Of course I’d done no such thing, but I’d hoped… Although I suppose it didn’t matter. Not anymore. From this moment forward, I was determined to live my life on my terms. I was going to take my fancy degree and my ivy league education and go to Maine without looking back. I was going to become a new person. I was going to break free from the gilded cage I’d been kept in for the past twenty-four years.
For the first time in my life, I was going to live.
A bell tolled somewhere on campus, yanking me out of the past and into the present. Absently glancing down at my watch, I gasped out loud when I saw the time.
“Late. I’m so late!” Grabbing my books, I hugged them tightly against my chest as I dashed out of my office and took the stairs two at a time. Students and faculty alike looked up as I sprinted past them, the soles of my shoes slapping loudly on the pavement. “Excuse me,” I called as I shouldered through a group of guys wearing sleepy expressions and navy blue sweatpants with the college’s logo printed in hunter green on the side. “Excuse me!”
“Where’s the fire, Professor?” one of them called out, and dimly I registered the voice as belonging to the football player I’d had in class the day before. The one who had complimented my ass.
When I reached my classroom it was empty and the lights were out. Flicking them on, I hurried over to my desk and collapsed against it while I attempted to regain my breath.
I exercised regularly, but it hadn’t been the sprint from Wilson to the Mandell lecture hall that had my heart pounding and my pulse racing. It had been the fear of being late, and the anxiety that came with deviating from my carefully planned schedule.
I jumped when I heard the slam of something hitting the floor. Before I could stop them the books I’d shoved onto my desk slipped one by one off the edge in an avalanche of Shakespeare and Austen. Shaking my head at my own clumsiness, I knelt down and began to gather them up. Out of habit, I looked at my watch as I stood up and registered the time with a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach.
7:57AM.
There were still eighteen minutes to go before my first class.
And I was far more like my mother than I’d ever wanted to be.
CHAPTER FOUR
Jealousy
As he’d promised, John met me at Mandell after my last class. I didn’t question how he knew my schedule. He was, after all, the director of the program. I locked my notes in my office and sent Whitney a quick text to let her know I would be home later than usual before John and I walked the three blocks to Beany Business.
“It’s a local hotspot for faculty and students,” he explained as he held open the door. “So you’ll probably see a few familiar faces.”
I didn’t immediately recognize any of the two dozen or so people lounging around the coffee shop’s strategically placed tables and comfy looking leather sofas, but then I’d only met a fraction of the student body and a handful of its professors. After attending Harvard - population: 21,200 - being able to enter a coffee shop and recognize everyone inside of it was a foreign concept. I did a second sweep of the chairs, biting the inside of my cheek in disappointment when no one’s face immediately jumped out at me. I was impatient to acclimate to my new surroundings. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to belong. I wanted - I needed - to be part of a community.
But how long would it take? A few weeks? A month? A year?
Correctly interpreting my expression, John smiled and said, “I know it can be overwhelming at first. It was for me too. Especially if you’re a transfer.”
“A transfer?” I asked as we joined the end of the line. Given that the last class of the day had just let out it was fairly long, but the two baristas behind the counter worked quickly and in a matter of minutes we were only two people away from the front. I tilted my head back, scanning the menu written out in colorful chalk hanging on the wall.
“Someone not from here,” he explained.
“Oh.” Surprised, I looked away from the menu and met his gaze. “Is that rare?”
“A little bit. Not all the students are from Maine, but about ninety percent of them are from New England. The rest come down from Canada. The college is always trying to recruit from other states, but it’s tough.”
How odd. Had I not been pushed to attend Harvard, I liked to think I would have gone to someplace exactly like Stonewall. Someplace small and tucked away. Someplace where, even if you couldn’t recall the name of everyone you passed, you at least remembered their face. Someplace where community was valued more than competition and not having a perfect 4.0 GPA wasn’t considered a failure.
What would I have been like, I wondered, if I’d gone to Stonewall instead of Harvard?
Did it matter? I was here now. Not to start a new chapter, but to begin an entirely new book. It would take time to break old habits. To let go of old insecurities. To realize the earth wasn’t going to come grinding to a halt if I wasn’t fifteen minutes early.
I’d already done something I never would have done before. Something I never would have dreamed of doing when I’d been firmly under my mother’s thumb. I had talked to a complete stranger at a bar. I had let him touch my thigh. I had drank from his glass. I had knowingly, purposefully, wantonly put my lips where his lips had been.
Wanton.
I had been wanton.
Or at least my version of it.
And I had yearned, just a little. Yearned for a stranger who had made my flesh tingle and my heart race. A stranger I couldn’t seem to stop thinking about.
John, I ordered myself as we shuffled forward in line and my shoulder bumped lightly against his. John’s the one you need to think about and the one you need to make a good first impression for, not some hot, brooding stranger you’ll never see again.
“Why is it so hard to recruit students from other states?” I asked.
“The winters, for one.” When I looked nonplussed, John laughed and shook his head. “Just wait. You may have experienced winters in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, but they’re nothing compared to the winters here, especially on the coast.”
“They can’t be that bad.”
“Just wait,” he repeated, one side of his mouth lifting in a half-smile, accentuating his boyish charm. He was actually quite handsome, in a scholarly all-american type of way. Men like John had been a dime a dozen at Harvard. Intelligent. Kind. Thoughtful. The type I’d always seen myself eventually marrying.
So why couldn’t I get Daniel Logan out of my head? A man who met exactly none of the requirements on my long and detailed list for a potential suitor. He may have been intelligent, but I was willing to bet he was far more kinky than kind.
And I had absolutely no business thinking of the word ‘kinky’ while I was getting coffee with my new boss. What had John been talking about again? Oh right. Snow.
“The average snowfall in Maine is fifty to seventy inches on the coast, and sixty to ninety inches in the Southern Interior,” I said, recalling a statistic I’d looked up on Google the week before I had decided to accept Stonewall’s job offer. “That’s only fifteen inches more than Pennsylvania’s average yearly snowfall.” I knew my mother was under the impression I’d moved to Maine on a whim, but the truth was I’d put nearly as much research into the college and the surrounding area as I had my dissertation.
I knew the state flower (white pine cone). The state motto (dirigo, which was latin for ‘I Direct’). The state population (1.3 million as of the 2013 census). I knew it became the twenty-third state in 1820, seventeen years after Camden was first settled. I knew the state capital was Augusta, and the largest city was Portland. I knew moose killed more people via automobile accidents than people killed people. All things considered, I most likely knew more about the state of Maine than most of the people who had lived here for generations.
“That’s a handy fact to know,” John said, “but the truth is you could read
up on all the statistics that are out there and never understand a true Maine winter until you experience it for yourself. It’s something else, let me tell you. My first year here I almost moved back to Kentucky halfway through January.”
I sucked apprehensively on the inside of my cheek. “It almost sounds like you’re trying to scare me off.”
“No, no, nothing like that!” he protested with a chuckle. “Just trying to prepare you. Although something tells me you’ll be fine. I have a feeling you’re tougher than you look.”
Rather pleased with the compliment - even though by its very nature it implied I appeared weak - I stepped to the counter as the customer in front of us received their drink and shuffled over to the condiments table.
“What can I do you for?” asked one of the baristas, her friendly smile encouraging my own. She was pretty, with choppy red hair, bright blue eyes, and a smattering of freckles over her nose.
“A green tea chai latte, please.” I usually didn’t drink caffeine after four o’clock, but in this instance I thought I could make an exception. It may have been a tiny rebellion against the rules and regulations I’d placed on myself (and the ones that had been placed on me), but it was a rebellion nevertheless.
“What size?” The barista’s silver eyebrow hoop wiggled as she lifted an eyebrow.
“Um…” I quickly scanned the menu again. “A medium.”
“Better make that two.” John rocked back on his heels as he fished a brown wallet out of his front pocket and placed a twenty-dollar-bill on the counter. I reached instantly for my purse.
“Let me-”
“My treat, remember? Trust me, it’s the least I can do. You have no idea some of the resumes that were coming across my desk before I saw yours.” He feigned a shudder. “It was starting to get scary.”
Having ducked behind the espresso machine to begin our orders, the barista flitted back just in time to hear the tale end of John’s sentence. She looked at me with interest. “Are you a teacher too?”
“Yes.” Unable to stop the smile that bloomed across my face, I nodded. “Yes, I am. I just started at Stonewall this semester.”
“You seem pretty young to be a professor,” the barista said skeptically. “Are you one of those… what do they call them…” She snapped her fingers. “Prac teachers?”
“Professor Finley,” John interrupted, enunciating my title, “is our newest full-time faculty member. If I’m not mistaken, you’re enrolled in her night class next semester.”
“Oh.” The barista studied me for a split second longer, then shrugged her shoulders. “That’s pretty cool, I guess. Here’s your change, Professor Hainsworth.”
John tucked the bills and three quarters into his wallet. “Maddy is a junior majoring in English Literature,” he explained when the barista went back behind the espresso machine to finish our drinks. “She wants to be a writer and I have to say, she has the talent.”
“That’s wonderful.” I’d dabbled in writing off and on, but I didn’t have the imagination for it. My brain was stuck firmly in non-fiction, and while I revered the works of Shakespeare and Austen and Rowling, I was realistic enough to know I would never be able to do what they had done.
Maddy returned promptly with our order. “Two medium green tea chai lattes,” she said, setting two white cups with black lids down on the counter.
When John picked his up and moved to the side to allow room for the next customer, I did the same.
“Have a good one, Maddy,” he called out.
She glanced in our direction and waved. “You too, Professor.” Her smile dimmed noticeably as her gaze flicked to me. “Nice to meet you, Professor Finley.”
“You as well, Maddy. I look forward to having you in my class.”
“Yeah.” She jerked a shoulder up in another careless shrug. “Sure thing.”
“I - I don’t think she liked me,” I said uncertainly as we made our way to a vacant table.
Pulling a seat out for me before he took his own, John looked over my shoulder at the counter. “Who, Maddy?” At my hesitant nod he sighed and said, “Don’t worry, it’s not you.” Setting his latte to the side, he leaned forward and lowered his voice. “You just made her a little jealous.”
“Jealous?” I echoed, my brow creasing. “Because I’m a professor?”
“No, no.” With a laugh, John sat back in his seat and picked up his drink. Popping the lid open a crack, he blew across the top. “Because we work together.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Maddy has a crush on me.” John calmly took a sip of his latte while I stared at him in stunned silence. “It started freshman year when she took my Intro to American Lit class.”
I’d heard of such things, of course. Student-teacher affairs. I had even devoted an entire semester to the study of them in my psychology class. I knew they were much more prevalent in college than high school, but just because the student was over the age of eighteen didn’t make the act any less illicit or corrupt. Sex between a professor and his student may not have been illegal in the eyes of the law, but for any institution of higher learning it was grounds for immediate dismissal which meant even the hint of an affair was not something to be taken lightly. If John told me anything was happening between him and Maddy it would be my obligation to report it. I would have no choice. Like every other professor at Stonewall, I’d taken an oath to adhere to a strict code of professional ethics. As educators, it was our responsibility to nurture our students. To respect them. To value their opinions. To encourage freedom of expression. And, most importantly, to provide a safe environment where they could better themselves not only as scholars, but as upstanding members of society.
Fighting the queasy feeling in my stomach, I met John’s gaze. He didn’t look like a man who would take advantage of a student, but as the old saying went looks could be deceiving. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it, but I did know something had to be said if only to allay my own fears. I took a deep breath. “Did you… did she…”
Reading in my eyes the question I couldn’t put into words, John shook his head vigorously from side to side. “No. God no. I meant the crush started freshman year. That’s all it was. That’s all it has ever been, and it’s never been reciprocated. If I somehow implied otherwise, I apologize. I was simply trying to explain why you may have gotten the side-eye.” Expression strained, he raked a hand through his hair. “I hope you believe me, but if you feel like you saw anything inappropriate by all means you should-”
“I do,” I interrupted. “I do believe you.” Embarrassed guilt quickly followed the relief I’d felt upon seeing the sincere consternation in John’s warm brown eyes. “I’m sorry. I never should have said anything.” My shoulders hunched as I dropped my gaze to the table. If I had been hoping to impress John, I was pretty sure I’d failed miserably. Great job, Imogen. You just basically accused the director of the entire English department - and your boss - of sexual misconduct with a student based on absolutely nothing. Way to go! “I jumped prematurely to the wrong conclusion.”
“And after I bought you a coffee. How rude. I’m joking,” he said hastily when I stared at him in dismay. “It’s a joke, Imogen.” Reaching across the table, he put his hand over mine and squeezed. “I apologize. It was poorly timed.”
“No it’s… it’s fine.” Forcing the muscles in my mouth to move, I stretched my lips into a smile. “Really. I don’t always pick up on the subtleties of a good joke.”
John took a sip of his coffee. “Or a bad one?” he asked dryly.
“Or a bad one.” Glancing down, I saw his hand was still covering mine. His nails were cut short and neatly filed, his fingers long and elegant, his skin smooth and uncalloused. I held my breath, waiting - wanting - to feel sparks, but instead I felt what I usually did (except for last night when Daniel had sat down beside me and slid his hand across my thigh).
Nothing.
I felt nothing.
No heat.
No spark of attraction.
No quick, lustful pull.
Except that wasn’t quite true. I did feel one thing. The heat of an angry stare scorching a hole in the back of my neck.
I knew, without having to turn around, that the barista who had served us our drinks, the one who had an unrequited crush on John, was currently wishing very bad things would happen to me.
As inconspicuously as possible I slid free of John’s grasp and made a show of picking up my latte with both hands. “You were right,” I said after taking a careful sip, mindful of burning my tongue. “They do have very good coffee here.”
“Best in all of Camden.” He sat back in his chair. “Have you had a chance to explore the village at all? Some of the higher end restaurants and bars close down for the season, but there’s quite a few that stay open year round.”
I thought of The Pier, which of course made me think of Daniel. “No,” I lied. “Not really.”
“Well if you need a tour guide, let me know. I’d be happy to take you around.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
He shrugged. “We’ll be spending a lot of time together. I don’t see any reason we can’t be friends as well as colleagues. You know what I mean?”
Actually I didn’t. Not exactly. Not in the way I think he was trying to imply. There was something in the tone of his voice and the subtle tilt of his head. Something that didn’t quite feel right. Something that didn’t settle. But I’d already jumped to one wrong conclusion where John was concerned, and I wasn’t about to do it again. “It would be nice to get to know everyone in the English department. Maybe we could all plan on going out for lunch one day,” I suggested.
For an instant, John’s brown eyes lost their warmth and turned cold as the ocean waves crashing up against the shore. Then I blinked, and he was once again the friendly, affable director who had gone out of his way to make me feel welcome. “Sure. That would be great. I’ll look at the schedule and see what day would work.”
Learning to Fall Page 5