Instead of flying into a rage or panicking, Roger leaned back in his chair, shaking his head. “I don’t understand. I thought you came back to me because you remembered how much you loved me.”
“I came back because you threatened to destroy my career, and you submitted Melanie’s thesis as mine. I didn’t come back out of love. I came back out of fear.”
Fear. The word caught on some Moby Dick-sized blackness in her soul, dragging it up so that it nearly occluded the fluorescent lights in the office. Alex reached back for support. Her hand landed on a thick paperback that felt too much like her Early British Writers book for comfort.
“Alex?” Roger stood, reaching for her.
“Don’t.” Alex put up her hand to stop him, but snatched it back before he could grab it. The last thing she wanted was for him to get that foothold again. It might start becoming reasonable to defend the stolen thesis, and from there, it was all downhill into the cesspool she’d been trying to climb out of for the past five months. A board creaked in the outer office. One of the other profs must be stopping in, or a student looking for a professor early. Either way, witnesses would keep Roger in check. “Roger, I meant what I said last spring break. I’m done. This is wrong. It’s not fair to me. It’s not fair to Carla. And it’s not fair to Melanie.”
“Melanie is gone. There’s nothing you can do to hurt her now. I know you were good friends, but she chose to take her own life.”
Alex clenched her fists. Was Roger insane or had he just started to believe the story he’d woven for her? “We were not good friends. We barely knew each other. Even if we were best buds and her dying wish was for me to use her thesis to get my degree, I wouldn’t be able to do it. Can’t you see that it’s wrong?”
“Love is always right, and I do love you, Alex. You mean the world to me.”
“If I mean the world to you, then why won’t you let me go? I’ll take all the blame for the thesis if you want. I’ll take the blame for everything. Just let me go.” Marc had talked to her. He had played board games with her and hung out. He had walked around town holding her hand, ushered her into his car, ate lunch with her. A woman at the diner had videotaped him saying he loved her. It was probably on YouTube by now. When she got back to the dorm, she’d search for it.
Marc had said he loved her and everyone in the diner had applauded.
“I thought you understood. I have to move very carefully with Carla. She’s delicate.”
Someone was muttering their way up the dim, narrow hall just outside Roger’s office.
“I am not asking you to move in any direction with Carla, and she’s delicate because she’s depressed…except she’s not, is she?”
“She’s having a very good week. That was why I agreed to repaint the dining room. She was finally interested in something, and I wanted to support that. Before I can leave her to be with you, I need to know that she’s stable.”
Shock rolled up her spine and thundered out her mouth. “I don’t what you to leave her, for me or not for me.”
Roger opened his mouth no doubt to embroider another layer on his fiction, but froze as the office door swung open between them.
For one glacial moment, Marc just stared at them, his presence filling the doorway. Then his eyes blackened and his brows came together as his presence grew to darken the office, the building. “Surely, you are not serious.”
“Don’t call me Shirley,” Alex quipped. The look Marc turned on her made her wish she was on a crashing airplane.
“Him? You dumped me for him?”
“Marc.” Alex floundered as her desire to flinch away from him collided with her need to collapse into his arms, succeeding in slipping on a pile of books. She caught herself on a bookcase before she landed on her ass, and then wondered if she wouldn’t be better off groveling at Marc’s feet.
“Who do you think you are barging into my office like that?” Roger blustered. “Did no one ever teach you to knock?”
“The last time I saw you, I was kicking you out of a diner for manhandling her.” His gaze swung back to Alex. “If I had only known.”
“Marc, please—” He loved her.
“No.” Marc dusted his hands together. “I’m out.”
He couldn’t have disappeared that fast, but the doorway was empty. “Marc!” Alex lunged for the door, but Roger grabbed her arm.
“Where are you going?”
“I swear to God, Roger, if you don’t let me go I will go to the dean and tell him everything, starting with how you were sleeping with the undergrad who was writing your papers for you.”
Roger went white and released her.
Alex ran out of the office and down the hall. Marc was pushing through the stairwell door. “Marc, wait.”
He didn’t stop. Alex’s throat closed against a second plea. How had he even tracked her down in Roger’s office? Why was he here at all? When she said good-bye at the dorm, he should have gone away before he found out about this. She shoved through the door. His footsteps were near the bottom. She started down the stairs double time. “Marc, please!”
He was waiting inside the door at the bottom of the stairs. “You left me for him.”
“No, not really.” Alex rubbed her forehead. Her breath hitched. Not now. No tears. If he had any respect for her at all, it would be gone with the first tear. “I never wanted you to know.”
“What happened to Shakespeare?”
She blinked.
“No legacy so rich as honesty.”
And she’d accused him of intellectual inferiority? She’d told him that quote once, days ago. “Marc, I’m sorry. Let me explain.”
He folded his arms.
Alex sat down on the steps before her legs gave out. The truth. She owed him that. Then he could walk away hating her for the right reasons. “I… Roger and I—”
“You’re having an affair with your married professor.”
If he knew, why was he making her tell? “Was. Was having. Past tense. I have been trying to get away from him for years, but he kept convincing me to stay. Until last March. I told him it was over at spring break.”
“So what are you doing here?” His arms flexed in his black T-shirt.
“It’s complicated.”
“Use small words that an idiot like me will understand.”
She was as bad as Roger. “I’m sorry about that. I never should have insulted you that way.”
“No, you shouldn’t have.” He unfolded his arms and sat down beside her. “Alex, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here.”
Alex rubbed her face and turned her eyes to the ceiling before threatening tears could escape. A good-sized cat was climbing around on her lungs after using her stomach as a litter box. “Can we go somewhere private so I can explain?”
Marc picked his cuticles in silence for some short eternity, but the rectangle of sunlight on the floor in front of the door didn’t move so it couldn’t have been more than a minute. “I still love you, Alex. I was pretty pissed off this morning when I worked it all out, but even I’m bright enough to know I wouldn’t have spent the night in a hotel room tacking index cards to the wall trying to figure this out if I didn’t love you.”
Alex sobbed and curled over her knees.
He started rubbing soothing circles on her back. “I’m going to assume from this that the feeling is mutual.”
She nodded without lifting her head. Her face felt scalded. “I just never wanted you to know. I know how you feel about people who cheat on their spouses, and I knew if you found out I was the instigator who led a man away from his wife, that you would hate me.”
His hand on her back stilled. “You what?”
“I didn’t mean for it to happen that way. I just looked up to him, and I wanted him to like me. He was so smart, and I thought he was handsome. I just thought—I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t think I was making him fall in love with me.” Alex swallowed, tryin
g to loosen her throat so her voice wouldn’t sound like air escaping a balloon. “I’m sorry. We shouldn’t be doing this here. Someone might see.”
“I don’t care if you don’t.” He resumed his slow circles.
“But if someone sees us they might—”
“Tell my wife? I’m short one of those right now. You must be confusing me with your last boyfriend.” Marc stood. “Alex, stand up.”
She wrapped her arms tighter around her knees, praying for a hole to open up and swallow the entire building.
“Alex.” He crouched in front of her. “Darling, we can’t do anything here. You wanted to talk in private so let’s go someplace private to talk. Alex.”
She tried to suck in a breath through her nose, but the way she was crunched up, she failed. Then Marc had her by the shoulders and was pulling her up. She wrapped her arms around him as he cradled her to his chest.
“Your dorm is close. Let’s go there.” He stroked her hair.
“I have to talk to the dean and get him to let me withdraw that thesis. I’ll tell him it was my fault. That’ll end this faster and with less of a cloud over the department.”
“What thesis?”
“Roger submitted a thesis I didn’t write under my name. I have to figure out how to withdraw it without getting anyone but me in trouble.”
“Why are you taking the blame for something Roger did?”
“Penance.”
Marc pressed his lips into a thin line and drew a deep breath before speaking again. “Is that what you want to do?”
“I have to.”
“You should stop at the bathroom and wash your face first.”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes, I think in this case I might be experientially superior to you.”
“Are you going to keep bringing that up?”
“Hopefully for the rest of our lives.”
* * * *
Alex left him outside the bathroom while she washed and prepared herself for meeting the dean. Her knees felt like she’d just walked away unscathed from a forty-car pileup, but her stomach wasn’t so sure she hadn’t caused it and still expected to be jailed for manslaughter. Somehow, she had to make the dean understand that she couldn’t defend Melanie’s thesis without letting him know it was Melanie’s thesis. Unless she walked in and told him the truth. That had gone over so well with Diana after all. No, best to withdraw the thesis without the cloud of outright theft and faculty impropriety.
From the hall, she could hear voices. The hair on the back of her neck turned to needles. Marc’s confident baritone countering Roger’s less confident tone. She threw herself out the door, landing right between them. Marc leaned on the wall to the left of the door with his arms folded, his mouth pulled into a sneer like he was looking at a wet garbage bag that had just broken on his clean kitchen floor. Roger, standing in the middle of the hall, was more rumpled and pudgy than usual, like a deflating balloon. His eyes were red as though he’d been crying.
“Marc. Roger.” Alex looked from one to the other, trying to rewind and clean up the audio of her memory so she could figure out what had been said before she came out, but her brain was not Memorex, and she lacked the advanced gadgetry they used in all of Finn’s police procedural shows. She would need to invest in an upgrade soon.
Roger pointed one stubby finger at her. “You will not get away with this.”
Alex blinked. She’d been under the assumption that she was in the middle of damage control. She had no clue what Roger thought and at the moment didn’t have the faculties to figure it out.
“Pardon?” Marc had plenty of wits to work with. He was still smirking. And she’d told him he was stupid.
“I will not allow it.”
“Sorry, buddy, but I think it’s been taken out of your hands.” Marc straightened. “You know how they say when God closes a door He opens a window? I’m Alex’s window, and I’m pretty sure I’m a skylight.”
Roger stared at Marc.
Marc turned to Alex. “Too flowery? I was talking to Suzi last night.”
Alex held up a finger. “Let’s address that in a minute. Roger, I’m withdrawing the thesis. That’s all.”
Roger ignored her. “If you go near my wife, I will ruin you.”
“What are you going to do? Get me kicked out of school? Your wife has a right to know, and trust me, if I just ruin you after this, you’ll be lucky.” Marc’s smirk had turned felonious. “I have friends with very long reaches and vindictive streaks. You have no idea.”
“Stop. Just stop,” Alex said.
Roger went pale. This time when he poked his finger at them it was shaking. “You stay away from me and my family. I’ll tell the police you threatened me.” Roger walked a few steps down the hall. Stopped. Turned back. “I’ll get a gun.” Then he ran out of the building.
“What’s he going to do? Shoot Tessa through the phone?”
“Who’s Tessa?”
“My lawyer. I’m not sure what we’re suing him for yet, but we’ll come up with something.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “Let’s go take care of this thesis thing.”
“Do we have to tell Carla?”
“We do. Trust me, this is important.”
Suddenly, talking to the dean wasn’t so threatening. Alex led him to the bend in the L-shaped hall. The English department door was open, and a student secretary with a nose ring stood behind the counter sorting reading lists. “Can I help you?” She didn’t even look up.
“I need to see Dean Meyer for a minute. It’s urgent.” Audible at least. Intelligible even. Alex peered down the short, shadowy hall that led to the dean’s office.
“You’re kidding.”
“No.”
The girl shook the papers at her. “Do you realize these frigging things have to be hung up to-fracking-day and they are in no order at all, and that rat bastard Jeremy called off with laryngitis, and Annabelle is just too good to work this week because this is the week all the grunt work has to be done.”
Marc leaned on the counter, turning up the wattage on his charm. “I’m not going to be doing anything while she’s in her meeting. Maybe I can help while I wait.”
The girl’s pout deepened. “We have to rip down all the old ones, but the stupid staple puller thinger is missing.”
“I can improvise. I’m good with my hands.” He spread one hand on the counter top and Alex experienced her first hot flash even though menopause had to be decades off yet. She could attest to how good he was with his hands as well as other parts of his body.
“Shit.” The girl put the papers down. “He’s in his office. I’ll see if he can see you.”
Alex placed her hands on his chest. She’d run away from this? How important were career and reputation when she had a hot man willing to stoop to fixing dishwashers and doing clerical work for her? “You aren’t planning on improvising with those good hands on her, are you?”
“I’ll save the special improvisation for you, but if I can get you the meeting you need by pulling a few staples, it’s worth it.” He kissed her, lingering for just a moment before leaning back to stare into her eyes. “Surely, you don’t think anyone could tear me away from you.”
“Don’t call me Shirley.”
He kissed her forehead.
She took a deep breath, drawing strength from him. All of this was manageable. Get the thesis thing dealt with. Talk to Carla. Finish her own damn thesis. Go to Italy. Live happily ever after. “I love you.”
“I know.” He gave her a lopsided smile that made her heart lurch.
The secretary clomped down the hall. “Okay, he said he can give you a couple of minutes if it’s urgent, but he has a lot of shit to do today, too, so you can’t be in there long.”
Alex couldn’t fathom the word “shit” coming out of the Dean’s mouth, but the intent was clear. “I’ll be quick.”
As she left the outer office, Marc was
leaning over the counter asking what the secretary needed help with first. The dean’s door was down a short unlit hallway. He sat behind his desk, studying the computer screen. A frown was set into his schnauzer-like features.
“Dr. Meyer?”
“Ah, Miss Perkins!” He stood, waving her toward the chairs in front of his desk. “How lovely to see you. Did you ever manage to find that book?”
Book? She’d had him for Major American Literature. They’d studied only Jewish writers. One of the books centered around the daughter of an obscure writer only remembered for a short story, Street of Crocodiles. “No, I didn’t, but I did find a film that referenced it. It was in a film festival of Post-Soviet Eastern European animation.”
“Brilliant. Is it on the YouTube? I would very much like to see it.”
“I’ll try to find it for you and send you the link.”
“Yes, good. Then Genesis can show me how to play it. Genesis is a lovely girl. You know her from the desk?”
Genesis, the overworked scowler. “We’ve met.”
“Very good. Now, what was it you needed to talk to me about?”
“It’s my master’s thesis.”
“Oh, yes! Congratulations. I knew even when you were an undergrad, someday you would be here on the faculty with us. I look forward to attending those boring parties with you. You will be a bright spot in the room. Dr. Wittier was saying to me just the other day, he also looks forward to it, but he didn’t understand why you would want him on your defense committee.”
Alex blinked at a sudden rush of tears. Looking forward to her being on staff? A bright spot in the room?
“My dear girl, what is it?” Dr. Meyer came around his desk and sat in the chair across from her, enveloping her hands in his. “Surely, you are not nervous or afraid to fail.”
At least the joke didn’t spring off her lips unbidden this time. He had that papery skin old people get, and his hands were dry on hers. Dr. Meyer had been the dean of the English department since she’d started here and she had to disappoint him. This was going to be a lot harder than she had anticipated, and this wasn’t the worst she had yet to face.
Waiting for a Girl Like You Page 16