Marc stared at the dormitory Alex lived in. Yeah, who was the genius here?
He should go home. Just return to his life and give up on this thing with Alex. Yes, she was great, but was she worth all the sturm und drang?
She liked to play board games instead of relationship games. She read huge, heavy books about dead people and could talk about them like they were friends. She would watch baseball and ask questions. She was low key, calm and sarcastic. Even when she was pissed, she was quiet about it. Hanging out in Jason’s living room with her, he’d been about as happy as he’d ever been without having a guitar in his hands. And she’d made that better! When he’d played Jason’s latest brilliant brain fart for her, she’d compared the rhythm to some dead guy’s poetry and found it on the Internet for him.
They were right. She was worth it. Even if it meant having to buy I’m-sorry jewelry gifts for everyone in the office.
He used the number Suzi sent him and listened to it ring three times before it picked up.
“Hello?”
“Hello, is this Cheryl Washowski?”
“It is.”
“My name is Marc Wells and I’m—”
“I’m sorry, your name is what?”
“Marc Wells.”
“Marc Wells from Touchstone?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, my God, really? Why are you calling me?”
If you had let me finish, I would have told you. He needed a cigarette and a stiff drink. And Alex. “I’m looking for Alex Perkins.”
“Alex, why? Are you really looking for an English lit tutor?”
Oh, goodie, a Twitterer. “Something like that. Can you tell me where she is?”
“I don’t know. I suppose she’s with her advisor, prepping for her thesis defense.”
“She finished it? She told me she was planning on working on it this term and hoping to get it done by the end of the school year.” Why would she lie about something like that? That was why she couldn’t go to Italy. She’d have to take a semester off. Or had she not wanted to go to Italy with him? None of this made sense.
“She finished and handed it in not long before she got back. Got her defense committee all organized and everything. She defends Tuesday.”
“But you think she’s with her advisor now?” Marc fumbled the paper the clerk had given him out of his pocket. Address for the advisor’s office and home. “Do you think she’s more likely to be at his office or his house?”
“Why? Holy shit, are you here?”
“I’m right outside the building.”
The phone clattered. Why the hell had he said that? He jammed the paper back in his pocket half a second before the front door banged open and a middle-aged woman launched herself at him. When she hit, he staggered back a step, but caught his balance before they tumbled into a flowerbed. Arms still wrapped around his neck, the woman stared at him. “It is you.”
“It is me. Let go now, please.”
She released him, turning crimson. “I’m sorry. I’ve just been a fan of yours forever. I can’t believe you’re here. Can I get your autograph?”
Sure, now that you’ve got my damn DNA all over you. “First things first. I’m looking for Alex. Do you think she’d be at her advisor’s office or his house?”
“Oh, my God. You’re the bad romance.”
Bad romance?
“Alex looked destroyed that first day when she got back, and she said it was a bad romance.” Cheryl clasped her hands together and pressed them to her lips. Her eyes were dilated, and her color had sunk to an unnatural pale. She was about to keel over.
“Do you need to sit down?”
Cheryl sat on the pavement exactly where she’d been standing, like his question had been an order. “It’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it?”
People were starting to stare. Why wouldn’t they? This could not be a standard scene. “Why don’t we step inside?” He hoisted her to her feet.
“I shouldn’t. You aren’t a resident, and the building isn’t open, but I suppose you are a guest. You could be my guest. Marc Wells, my guest.” She kept mumbling all the way to the building where she used her key to let them in. Straight ahead there was an elevator with its guts spilled out across the hall. She pulled left so he followed into a little lounge area with a television mounted high on the wall, a long cheap-looking table, and some square, very dirty aqua blue furniture. She dropped on a couch and cradled her face in her hands, now muttering about quiet ones and thesis and somebody named Gerald.
Marc paced the room. He should have bought a pack of cigarettes when he was quizzing the clerk in that store. They probably didn’t allow smoking in here. Through the window, university life carried on. A group of groundskeepers arrived to attack an empty flowerbed. One of them clutched a Taco Bell cup in his scrawny hand. Some kids rode skateboards along the sidewalks. He could live here while he waited for her to finish out her degree. Not like the band would be doing anything until after Cassie had the baby. He could even get into some real literature and prove the Twitterverse right.
Somebody was walking toward the building, head down, very fast. Not quite running, but absolutely fleeing from something. He knew those delicate arms and the echo of them wrapped around him. He stepped toward to the window to study her. She didn’t have anything in her arms. In one hand, she clutched some kind of little card carrier from which a key dangled, glinting in the sun. She was lovely. Even without seeing her face. Something in the way she moved exuded grace. For a moment, he lost sight of her when she got to the door so he bounded over hoping to catch her when she came through. When the door clanged open, Cheryl shot up from her seat, blocking his way out of the lounge.
“Oh, my God, it’s Alex,” she hissed.
“I know.” Marc fought the temptation to grab the woman by her shoulders and hoist her out of this way. The outside door started wheezing closed and another door clanked. “Can you get out of the way?”
Cheryl opened her mouth again in the distinctive O shape that warned him another plea to the heavens was on its way, and he lost his fight. He clasped her shoulders as gently as he could manage under the circumstances and maneuvered around her.
The pneumatic hinge on the stairwell door was easing closed. He pushed through and heard Alex’s footsteps running up.
“Alex!” Marc leaned into the gap between the railings. Based on the white fingers wrapped around the railing, she appeared to be on the third floor. “Alex, hold on.”
Nothing. No footsteps coming down, no footsteps going up. Marc watched her fingers as he climbed. When he came around the fourth flight of stairs to the third floor landing, she was standing as if frozen with one foot two steps higher than the other and her hand with a death grip on the railing.
“Alex?”
She stood, staring down at him, poker faced. “What are you doing here?”
Marc put one foot on the bottom step. Somehow, the energy to climb up to her wasn’t there, like she was putting out some kind of force field that wouldn’t allow him any closer. “You left so suddenly. I was worried that something was wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong. I submitted my thesis, and if I can get it approved in time, I might be able to have a teaching post here this fall. Everything’s great.” Her voice lacked all the music it had always had before. Now it was off key and toneless. If she’d been a guitar, he would have thought she needed work on her bridge.
“And yet you sound so happy.” With effort, Marc hauled himself up a step. “Ida wasn’t pleased.”
“It was important that I get back here as soon as possible. Far more important than some waitressing job.” She pursed her lips and then licked them. Nowhere near as sexy as usual. “I’m getting back together with my old boyfriend, too.”
The deep dark baggage. “Oh?”
“When I came back to school, I saw him and we talked.”
“And again, you sound so happy.” Her enti
re body looked like it was carved from one piece of hard wood.
“It’s none of your business.”
Marc braced himself to attempt another step. This was like walking into a blizzard. He picked up two risers this time, bringing him to what should have been arm’s reach and level with her shoulder. Up close, her face looked even more shuttered than it had before. He’d been mistaken about the hard wood. She was carved out of marble.
“I think it is.”
“That’s because you’re a self-centered celebrity who thinks everything is about him. You—” She twitched and something awful surfaced under the marble.
“No, it’s mostly because five days ago we were in WVA playing board games, watching Airplane! and talking about going to Italy, and twelve hours later you had vanished and everybody blamed me.”
“I just woke up. There’s no way you and I could have a successful relationship. I’m intellectually superior to you.”
Marc blinked. It sounded like she’d just called him an idiot. Harsh. “Okay. You could have said good-bye, at least.”
“I assumed you would have figured that out when I left town, but if it helps, good-bye.”
She turned and walked up the steps. Marc stood listening to her footfalls all the way up, followed by the sound of the fire door at the top opening and closing.
Damn.
He stopped on the way out to leave an autograph for the resident director, but she’d already retreated into her apartment, and he didn’t have the energy to deal with her so he signed her white board. Then he made his way back to the hotel feeling like the whole world was filled with cement.
She was just a girl, and too young at that. The world was full of girls. Girls and women. So what if he liked her and she was calm? She’d just kicked him to the curb. She’d also told him he was stupid. Twice. Just because he hadn’t gone to college didn’t mean he was stupid. What a bitch.
No, that wasn’t right. The cadence of her speech, the way she held herself like she’d taken a mortal wound, the way she vanished. Something was very rotten on the state of Denmark.
Marc grabbed the phone off the desk. “Hi, I need a pack of index cards, a thing of yarn, and some tape delivered to my room.”
Chapter 10
Alex opened Roger’s office door without knocking. What was the worst that could happen? Catch him mounting a co-ed on the desk? That would be a relief. “I can’t do this.”
Roger jerked backward, his face turning gray like she might have taken a couple years off his life. He held his hands up in limp claws. His laptop was open on the desk so he might have been working on the book he’d been writing for the past three years. “Can’t do what?”
“This thesis. I can’t submit it as my own work when it’s not.”
“Alex, Alex. You’re being silly again.” Roger came around his desk, and she thought he was going to hug her, but then he reached around her to close the door.
“I’m not stupid.”
“I didn’t say you were stupid.”
“You said I was being silly. That’s a synonym for stupid.” Alex put her fists on her hips.
“No, it isn’t.”
“The way you use it, it is.”
Roger sighed, and it sounded just like he was telling her she was being silly again. “You must remember that you have done the work.”
“This is Melanie Finch’s thesis.”
“But you did write your own.”
“I didn’t finish it, and this thesis isn’t my work.”
“All the work you have done to help me over the year would have easily been a master’s thesis.”
“All that work is published in your name.”
“Precisely.”
Precisely what? When had this gibberish he spouted made enough sense to her that she’d gone along with it?
Roger put his arm over her shoulders and guided her to lean against his desk. “Alex, we owe it to Melanie to do this.”
“We owe it to Melanie to steal her thesis?”
“She was a sad, disturbed girl who did a lot of work to no good end. You have already done so much work, and you contributed so much to my book. It’s like you already wrote an entire thesis and then some.” He tugged her closer. “If you hadn’t been so distracted with my book, you would have finished by the end of last year. This is going to give you back a year of your life.”
Alex closed her gritty eyes. Did she want that year back at this price? “I’m not staying at the university once I have my master’s.”
“What do you mean? Of course you are. Darling, we have plans.”
Why had she gone online looking for pictures of Marc last night? If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have seen the pictures of herself with him looking so happy. It was Marc’s fault. Tracking her down in the stairwell yesterday. She’d been trying to break it off—well, not clean, but leaving him out of the really corrupt parts. Better for him to go on thinking she was a crazy bitch than knowing what she really was.
“I told Carla this morning.”
Alex’s stomach lurched. “Told her what?”
“I told her I’ve been unhappy.”
“Unhappy.” Three years sleeping with another woman, and now he tells his wife he’s unhappy? Did he consider this working on his marriage?
“She cried. I’m going to have to tread very carefully with her. I can’t be responsible for her hurting herself or the children.”
“I met her last week.”
Roger stiffened. “When?”
“The day I got back into town. I went to your house looking for you, but you had gone to get paint. You were painting the dining room.” Alex turned to him. The proximity was too tight. From this distance, she should be leaning in to kiss him. “She isn’t anything like you described.”
“She’s been having a good summer. That visit with her family did her a lot of good.”
What had she ever seen in him? Doughy, barely on the healthy side of pale, big fat liar. “You told her I had crippling social anxiety.”
“I had to have a good reason for why you never came over. It would just be too difficult to have both of you in the same place.”
“For who?”
Roger frowned like that should have been obvious. At least he hadn’t used a nice word to tell her she was stupid this time. “For all of us. For you to be with your rival. For me to have the love of my life and my wife together. For Carla to realize when she saw us together. It wouldn’t be fair to her.”
To her. As much as Alex wanted to know what hold Roger had over Diana, she wanted even more to know what hold Carla had over Roger. Alex drew a deep breath and closed her eyes. That made everything so much worse. All the better to see Marc’s face when she had told him she was intellectually superior. Yeah, superior. Marc would have been smart enough to get her out of this mess. He could have waltzed in here, formulated a plan, and executed it without anyone even feeling slighted because he was just so dang charming.
Roger kissed her cheek.
Alex flinched. “Roger, don’t. I’m going to finish the year here. During that year, I’m going to apply to doctoral programs elsewhere.” The University of California perhaps. According to the Internet, Marc was interested in studying literature.
“Darling, why? We’re so close to having everything we’ve always wanted. I have a friend who rents a condo that is far enough away from campus that we won’t run into any students. I’ll be able to come to your place. It’s waiting for you.”
“I’m committed to the residence hall for this year.”
“But you don’t have to do that now. You’ll have a real job.”
“I keep my promises.” Except for the one to Ida about working that breakfast shift, and the one to Marc about running away with him and being his one and only as long as he wanted her.
Roger scowled. His toy was not behaving the way it was supposed to. Poor baby. “I suppose this will allow you to star
t paying off your loans.”
Loans. There were no more loans. Marc paid them off even after she’d told him to leave her alone. Told him he was stupid. Why would he do that?
And she was about to go through with the defense of a master’s thesis stolen from a dead girl because Roger said it was expedient. Right from a certain perspective. What perspective could this possibly be right from?
“Roger, this is wrong. I’m going to the dean and withdrawing Melanie’s thesis, and then I’m going to finish my own thesis, defend it, and find another university for my doctorate.” That I’m not even sure I want anymore. How many semester hours would it take to get a teaching license? Teaching high school English can’t be that hard.
“Darling—”
“Please stop calling me that.” Alex pushed away from the desk and turned to face him. The office was so crammed with books that she couldn’t get far, but it was enough for the moment that he wasn’t touching her. Her chest hurt. Her eyes burned. Once, in a past life, she had been able to draw a deep breath, but that was a hazy memory now. She deserved a Darwin Award for throwing away a chance with a man who loved her to keep covering up this affair with a man who didn’t even know what love was.
“You can’t believe the dean will allow you to just withdraw your thesis.” Roger shook his head. “You’ll be kicked out of the program. Shamed and blacklisted.”
Shit, she’d been wearing those rose-colored glasses again. The dean wasn’t going to accept Oops, this isn’t mine as a reason for withdrawing a master’s thesis. Unless… “Not if I tell him you did it.”
The noise Roger made hung somewhere between a derisive laugh and a cough. “Why would he believe such a story?”
“Because it’s true?”
Roger smirked.
She should have known that was unrealistic. “Then you need to help me come up with a story that will keep us both in the clear. And your pal Diana Gregor.” Alex pressed her fist into the desktop. “I’m going to the dean, with you or without you. At this point, I really don’t care if I get kicked out of the program or who I take with me.”
Waiting for a Girl Like You Page 15