On the Ropes (24 page)

He paused in front of the history department’s grand staircase, where the foot traffic was light. They could linger undisturbed, at least for a moment.

“Glad to hear it.” Grant lifted his battered newsboy hat, shoved back the dark, dripping-wet curls drooping into his eyes, and repositioned the cap backward. That explained his scent. He must have just showered there on campus. Many students did after availing themselves of the state-of-the-art athletic facilities. What was his sport? Running? He certainly had the body for it.

She looked down at the arm he’d released and found the fine hairs standing on end and her skin mottled with goose bumps like she’d gotten too close to a cracking power line. He’d never touched her during the entire semester she was in his section of Introductory Composition. Not even so much as a handshake. Any more than that platonic gesture would have been inappropriate. He’d never touched her at all until that day in the student store.

For the four months she was in his class, she’d mostly stared through him from the same seat in the middle of the room. At first her shyness had been spurred on by shame, and later it was pure grief.

She’d spent most of freshman year in a haze of confusion after her father had died in September. She would go to class and stare blankly at the lectern while neither listening nor seeing, only tuning in when important keywords such as “exam” or “paper” were murmured. Her ability to read a syllabus and self-teach at home got her through the year, but barely.

She let out a deep breath and imagined she was blowing her toxic thoughts away on a breeze, the way the free therapist at the student health center had taught her when she’d finally returned to school at twenty. She’d hated that damned breeze and the therapist prescribing the exercise, but after a while the trick had become one of her vices. Using something physical to distract herself from the mental anguish. Heart rate at a more normal level and brain less muddled, she met his gaze and dug deep down into her well of Southern-girl charm.

“It’s lovely to see you again, Grant.”

He wriggled the dark brows over his olive-green eyes and let his smile spread wider. “The pleasure’s all on my end.”

She laughed. “You’re full of it.”

His face brightened at her turn of mood, and he suddenly looked a bit younger, not that he was a dinosaur to start with. He looked to be right on the cusp between boyish and what comes after. Good genes. He had the fair skin one would expect of a born and bred Irishman and nearly black hair. Combined with his rakish smirk and his casual choice of clothes, a novice would have pegged him at around Carla’s age. She, however, knew better. She knew faces. Faces were how she made her living. The fine wrinkles at the corners of his warm eyes when he smiled put him squarely in the thirty camp, and actually even a bit beyond.

Grant gave her arm a light cuff after she’d been staring at his face for far too long for politeness.

She closed her eyes tight and cringed. When she opened them again, his expression was one of concern. “Sorry. I guess I was a cat in my last life. Sometimes I stare.”

The tension in his jaw ebbed as his easy smile returned. “Yeah? Seeing you out of the blue like this is odd. I was thinking about you just a few days ago.”

“Oh?” Her tongue had suddenly crumbled to dust; she struggled to swallow. She pretended to be interested in the state of her ballet flats. She wasn’t all that worth remembering, not charming or particularly witty. That left her looks, and on most days she could take those or leave them.

Then again, she remembered some things about him other people would have found trifling even if she couldn’t remember his last name. For instance, the way he twirled his pencil in his long, elegant fingers when he was reading silently. She would stare and fixate on the spinning wood until he stopped, then resume her one-sided staring competition with the lectern.

“We’ve never really had a chance to talk, huh?”

She shook her head and rested her shoulder bag atop her feet. If they were going to settle in to a long conversation there on the steps, she’d at least spare her shoulders. “No, we haven’t.”

He rubbed the stubble on his chin and stared over her head at the clock tower. “Well, your advisor had let us all know your dad died, and I wanted to say something, but didn’t know what.”

“Yeah. Common affliction, I hear.” She tried to chuckle, but it came out sounding like a scoff. She slowly raised her head and saw the expression on Grant’s face had smoothed from one of knavish flirtation to his former concerned one. He must have thought she was off her rocker for sure.

“Yeah. I was on your end of things a long time ago myself. Doesn’t make the words come easier.” He shifted the strap of his bulging messenger bag from his left shoulder to his right and cast his eyes down to the hands she used to wring the strap of her own bag. “Listen, I wanted to just say how sorry I was. It’s late coming now, but my cowardice has been eating away at me all this time.”

She clamped her teeth as her shoulders inched up to her ears--her defensive switch thrown. Time had taught her everyone was sorry. Everyone pitied her. She was damn tired of being pitiful. She was sick of being told it’d all get better with time.

“My mum died when I was sixteen. Anaphylactic shock after multiple bee stings.” He tipped up his hat up and scratched his head. “We never knew she was allergic. We expect to outlive our parents, right? But the coping seems more difficult when you haven’t quite grown up yourself.”

She blew out the breath she’d been holding and let her shoulders fall. “Wow. I’m sorry, too. It was a pretty rocky healing process for me. Took me years to delete my dad’s contact information from my phone.” She grimaced just thinking about all the times she’d been bored and picked up her phone to start dialing his number, only to remember when it started to ring no one would answer. Sad as it was to be flooded with those memories now, her father always had a way of making her smile, even from beyond the grave. He used to answer his phone a different way each time she’d called. The last time, he’d picked up and said, “North Raleigh Pizza and Dry Cleaning. Which do you want?” His voice had been so flat, she had pulled her phone back from her ear to verify what she’d dialed. He’d started laughing before she pressed the device against her ear once more and groaned, “Ugh, Daddy!” She smiled thinking of the fit of hysterics he’d been thrown into from her gullibility.

“Hey, she has teeth!” Grant joked, a wide smile crossing his own face yet again.

“Yeah, I suppose I don’t show them much nowadays.” She shrugged and crossed her arms over her chest. She’d picked a bad day to not wear a bra. Normally she could get away with it, but she’d overestimated the temperature and hadn’t planned for the chilly wind. A storm approached, which probably explained the headache she had been nursing all morning.

“You should. Makes your face light up.” He squinted at her. “Or maybe not. You probably don’t want every bum in town hittin’ on ya. Your fella probably wouldn’t like that.”

She snorted and quickly covered her face with her hands from embarrassment. Then she began to giggle uncontrollably. She held up her index finger to bid him to wait.

He put a hand against his heart and widened his eyes. “Did I stick my foot in my mouth? Tell me you like boys, else you’ll break my heart, love.”

She wiped the tears from her eyes and took a deep breath to recenter herself. “I’m just careful,” she finally managed. Careful was putting it mildly. Between her brothers and her friends, any man she dated had to endure an excruciating vetting process. Most didn’t last, and the ones they would have her date were either dull, closet assholes or both.

Grant nodded, then cringed when the campus bell tower announced the noon hour. “I gotta go. Got one last exam to administer.” He patted his bag demonstrably. “It’s my last semester here, thank fuck. I hoped my goddamned dissertation would sprout arms and write itself toward the end.”

She raised a brow at his decidedly nonprofessorial language.

He bowed and said, “’Scuse my Middle English.”

Without thinking, she reached forward and put her hand on his forearm. That spark of electricity again surged straight down her core. “Oh! Your language isn’t offensive to me. My mom is first-generation Italian American and my dad was Irish American. Between the two of them, there was lot of colorful language in the house growing up. I’m just always shocked when teachers turn out to be real people.” She started to draw her hand back, but Grant took it in his.

“Good thing I’m not your teacher anymore, eh?” he said, stroking the top of her hand with his thumb.

When she realized he was coming on to her, her breath hitched and chest constricted. Me?

They stared at each other for a moment like two kids on separate ends of the gym during a middle school dance, then she took her hand back to swat her hair out of her eyes. She hoped to screw up enough courage to cut it one day, because it was getting on her last damn nerve.

“Right.” She ignored the chiming bells, hoping he’d ask her out to coffee or something. “Um, so I guess you’ll go back to Ireland soon, huh?” She couldn’t remember the man’s last name and hadn’t spared one thought about him in months, but suddenly she had a pretty good idea of what love at second sight felt like: amazing.

Grant shrugged. “Dunno. I’m sort of playing things by ear at the moment. A school in Ireland has been following my doctorate work with some interest and wants to hire me on as an assistant professor. I’m on the fence. They’ve hinted around that they’d likely promote me after a year, which is flattering, I must admit. I had wanted to get a job in the States, but the job market for college-level educators in this field is…well, I don’t want to bore you.” He started walking backward up the stairs, smiling at her as he transited.

“Oh, you’re not boring me at all!” She cringed at how awkward she must have come across. She was really out of practice with flirting, not that she’d ever been that great at it to start with. She hadn’t had a boyfriend in two years, and that last one was so exceptionally churlish she still hadn’t recovered from him. Until right then.

He paused his ascent and leaned against the stair railing. “Yeah? If only I could have gotten you to talk to me in class or seen me during office hours all those years ago. You have a pretty voice.” With one more smirk, he spun around and bounded up the stairs toward the building’s entrance right as the tardy bell chimed.

She blew out a most unladylike Bronx cheer.