Teach Me (4 page)

There
is one girl, though, who worries me. I recognize her friend, Mary
Kate, from my eighteenth century lecture. This girl seems new,
though, and from the way she spent the entire class gaping at me,
practically sweating bullets in her seat, I wonder if she’s
in over her head. Maybe she signed up for this class as an elective,
or maybe she has it confused with the Introduction to Modern Poetry
course that Drew teaches an hour earlier.

I
make a mental note to ask her if she’s
alright after class, but the second the end of hour bell rings, she
bolts from her seat and flees the room, as if the chair she’d
been sitting in was on fire. Mary Kate shoots me an apologetic smile
and hurries after her.

Hopefully
she’ll figure it out
and change her schedule.

In
the meantime, I have more pressing matters to attend to. Namely, in
less than one hour, a meeting with the dean to discuss that Eliot
seminar.

#

“The
schedule is set, Kingston.”
Dean Pierson peers up at me through his ridiculously tiny spectacles,
perched like a teardrop on the tip of his nose. It’s
a wonder he can see anything at all. He certainly can’t
see the direction out of his own arsehole.

“Screw
the bloody curriculum, Daniel. Can’t
you understand what this means?”
I gesticulate widely to make the point, and nearly knock a bust of
Adonis or some similarly ridiculous Greek figure from the dean’s
favorite bookshelf. His office is packed to the brim with odds and
ends like that—a
cheap sextant dangling from the corner of a 6x10”
reproduction map of the ancient world, capped by a Yeats quote that
looks like it was carved from wood at a local yard sale.

Tacky,
from wall to wall. That’s
all I can think every time I’m
in here. Now I need to make this lover of all things cheap see the
opportunity in a diamond in the rough. “Never
before seen work. From Eliot himself.”

The
dean mutters something that sounds suspiciously like
Americans.
I wish he’d
spit that a little louder. Maybe the exchange students passing by
outside the wide open office door would have a thing or two to say
about his opinions.

But
I ignore the low blow.

“Come
on, Daniel. You know as well as I do what kind of merit it would
bring the college. Not to mention funding.”
That makes the old bastard pause for a moment. He might not like
disruption, change, or American poets, but he loves his grant money.
“There’s
at least three founders I know just off the top of my head who would
dig up their parents’
graves and sell the bones for a chance to fund a discovery like
this.”

“If
you’re right,”
he points out. “If
they’re not just
some pretty scribbles by an unknown unnamed first year who happened
to be in attendance here at the same time as your man. This college
was chock-full to bursting with American would-be poet laureates in
that era, you’ll
recall. How can you be sure the papers don’t
belong to one of them? And it’s
awfully handy you just happened to stumble across these now, with
your consideration for tenure fast approaching.”

My
fists clench and unclench at my sides. That’s
bloody rich. Dean Perjurer Pierson, accusing
me
of faking something. Granted, there were no convictions during the
five forgery scandals in which our lovely dean here has been
embroiled during his long and storied career, but five times, really?
You do the math. One of those at least must be legit.

Maybe
that’s why he’s
so cautious about letting me run with the Eliot story now.

“Look,”
I manage through gritted teeth. “If
you won’t let me run
a full seminar, at least give me a couple of research assistants.
They don’t even have
to be PhD candidates; I’m
not picky. Undergrads if you prefer. I just want a couple more eyes
on this project than my own. You know, to be sure I’m
not just conveniently hallucinating similarities in tone.”
I inject a certain amount of venom into that last statement.

He
stares me down, and I can practically hear the tiny cogs in his brain
cranking. He wants to turn me down for the hell of it now. Say no
just to watch me yell and shout.

But
he won’t. Pierson
might be a rat, but he’s
a smart rat. How else would he keep his post through all the
knee-deep shit he’s
waded into?

“Fine.
One undergraduate. No more.”

Now
I clench my fists for a different reason—to
keep from punching the air in celebration. Okay, so it’s
not the full seminar I hoped for. But a dedicated research aid and I
can tackle this headlong, no problem. I’ll
select based on research experience and writing ability. I can use my
eighteenth century class as a pool, see how they do on the Heaney
assignment.

My
mind is racing so fast with preparations that it takes me a moment to
notice Pierson has already slammed his office door shut in my face,
stranding me in the middle of the quiet, mid-morning college hallway,
a few steps from the registrar’s
office.

I
turn on my heel, ready to storm back to my office and start putting a
list of potentials together, when I nearly trip headlong over a
student.

I
blink a few times at the girl blocking my path down the hallway.
She’s almost a head
shorter than me, her huge blue eyes locked on mine beneath a cloud of
runaway auburn waves. Something about the purse of her lips makes my
mind immediately run to places I’m
not proud of. My eyes want to drift along her curves, drink in the
way her low-cut shirt exposes her collarbones and the hint of
cleavage beneath, not enough to be revealing, just enough to make me
know there’s a lot
she could reveal to the right guy. I lock my eyes onto her face
instead, but that doesn’t
help quell the beast.

Fuck,
she’s gorgeous.

She’s
also staring at me, wide-eyed. “Sorry,”
she gasps, her eyes somehow widening even more, and that’s
when I recognize her. Mary Kate’s
nervous friend from class.

Stop
ogling the students, you cretin
.
“Not at all,”
I say aloud. “My
fault. I trust you’re
enjoying my class, Miss . . . ?”
I wait for her to fill in the blank, but she only gapes at me longer.

Finally,
her mouth snaps shut and her shoulders square. She’s
even more attractive this way than when she’s
being timid. I bet she could take charge in the bedroom.
Christ,
Jack, what the hell.
I
banish that thought to the darker recesses of my clearly overworked
mind.

“I’d
like to talk to you,”
she says, all in a rush, like this was a difficult admission.

She’s
American, I notice with surprise. Something about the loose gray
sweater she’s
wearing, paired with jeans and high boots, had suggested local girl
to me. I readjust the settings in my head, think about her as a
confused exchange student instead. It certainly helps explain her
bewilderment in class.

I
really don’t have
time for this, but I sigh and point up the corridor toward my own
office. “I can give
you five minutes.”

Do
the right thing, Harper.

I
stand outside the office of the registrar, my heart torn in two. I
really, really wanted to take this class. But there’s
no way I can sit through his lectures knowing what happened between
us. Especially when
he
obviously doesn’t
realize. That much was clear from the way he gave me a blank look in
class.

I
don’t know why that
bothers me. It’s
better like this. I’ll
drop the course, find another class to replace it. It’ll
set me back a semester at home, because I was supposed to fulfill my
poetry requirement here, but better that than getting myself
embroiled in yet
another
mess.

This
one would be the worst yet. Worse than my TA, worse than the time I
accidentally slept with my mother’s
new boss (who, in my defense, is a lot younger than she is).

Hey,
you survived those,
I
tell myself. That gives me the courage to push open the door to the
registrar.

That’s
when voices catch my attention. Raised voices, coming from another
office a few doors down. One voice that I recognize. “
Screw
the bloody curriculum
.”

I
can’t help it. I
creep closer to the open door, one eye on the empty hallway around
me.
Ignore it. Turn
around, go into the registrar. Drop the class.
My brain fires all kinds of helpful, sensible, non-stalkerish
suggestions at me.

Naturally,
I ignore them all.

If
someone comes by, I’ll
leave. But the hallway remains empty, and anyway, Professor
Kingston’s next
words freeze me to the spot. “
Never
before seen work. From Eliot himself
.”

No.
Freaking. Way.

The
words themselves practically make me nerdgasm on the spot. Another
student passes by, shooting me a weird look as she walks around me
into the registrar’s
office. I completely ignore her, and tiptoe closer to the open
office. Dean something-or-other is written on the door. I listen to
their whole conversation, my heart beating faster with every word
Jack says—and not
with lust this time.

Well,
with some lust. But mostly of the holy shit, I
need
to get that research
position variety. This could totally make my undergraduate career. I
can already see my faculty advisor back home salivating over the
thesis I could write on this.

So
when Jack—
Professor
Kingston,
I mentally
correct myself—backs
into the hallway, I don’t
do the smart thing. I don’t
run. I stand there, take a deep breath, and let him nearly run
straight into me. He’s
taller than me, I now notice. A lot taller. Almost a foot—I
know I’m short at
5’5”,
but wow.

Emotions
flicker across his even-hotter-close-up face—anger,
surprise, recognition—and
then he seems to settle into mild annoyance, even after I manage to
ask to speak to him.

Five
minutes. I can totally explain this and plead my case within five
minutes, right?

He
leads me down the hallway into his office, a cramped but surprisingly
homey room, the walls lined with huge, dusty old leather-backed
tomes, and a massive mahogany desk commanding my attention the moment
I step inside. My traitor imagination immediately notes how the desk
is perfectly positioned at waist-height, just begging for someone to
be bend over it . . . 

My
face flushes, and I swallow hard.
Stop
it.
This is exactly
the kind of thinking I need to cut the hell out.

It
doesn’t help that
he’s standing right
next to me, close enough that I can feel the heat from his body. I
know that if I meet his intense gaze again, I’ll
lose all my nerve. So I focus on the desk instead, and try to ignore
it when he squeezes past me, and his arm brushes my shoulder. Fire
ignites along my whole side, and my breath catches as I remember the
way his arms circled me last night, pulling me against him, so firm,
completely in control.

Meanwhile,
he’s refusing to
meet my eyes too. Does he remember? Does he recognize me somehow?

I
clear my throat. Doesn’t
matter. I need to come clean, and somehow convince him to let me into
that seminar.

“Well?”
he asks, and we lock eyes finally. Yep. Intimidating as crap to stare
into those deep, dark eyes—almost
honey from close up, with the sun shining in them through the window.
A lock of his dark hair falls across his forehead, and my fingers
itch to run through it again.

All
my carefully planned speeches fly straight out of my head.

“I
have a confession to make,”
is all I can think to say.

Apparently
it’s enough. His
eyebrows shoot skyward, and from the way the color drains from his
face, I’m guessing
he’s recognized my
voice after all. Or my choice of wording.

“Dear
god.”

“I
wasn’t going to say
anything,” I babble,
my words practically tripping over themselves in my rush to explain.
“I was going to just
drop the class, because, I mean, obviously that would be the right
thing to do, given the, um, the circumstances, but I accidentally
overheard you talking to the dean about the Eliot thing and I’m
planning to write my thesis on him next year; I would do anything to
help you with those papers, please, I really need this.”
By the time I reach the end of that little meltdown, I’m
out of breath.

On
the bright side, color returned to his face while I was talking. On
the down side, now he’s
just straight up scowling at me, his jaw clenched.

“You
told me you were just visiting for the day,”
he says, after a pause so long I nearly sweat through my shirt.

“I
know. I didn’t know
who you were or I swear I would never have . . . I
mean . . . ”
His glare makes the words die on my tongue. I clear my throat to
force the block out of it. “It
will never happen again, professor.”

“Damn
right, it won’t. And
if you think I’m
going to give you
favors
because of what happened—”

“No,
of course not, I’m
not asking for favors, I—”

“You
just told me you lied to get into my pants last night, and now you’re
asking me to let you work on a project that you only know exists
because you
eavesdropped
on a private conversation
,
and you don’t see
the conflict of interest there?”

I
grimace. This all sounded a lot more convincing in my head. “Just
consider me. Please. I’ll
do anything.” I
pause, realizing how that sounds. “No,
I mean, not like that, I . . . ”

He
heaves a sigh, and for a second the angry facade drops. I catch a
glimpse of the guy I met last night underneath. Overworked,
frustrated. Passionate, in desperate need of a release. His eyes
catch mine, bore straight into me, and I forget to breathe. He can
pin me in place without even touching me. “I’ll
consider you in the same way I plan to consider every student in your
class. No more, no less. Impress me with the Heaney essay due this
week, and then maybe—
maybe—
we’ll
talk about Eliot.”