The Purity of Blood: Volume I (10 page)

Oddly enough, he
didn’t appear to be a big eater for such a buff guy, and Daniel was definitely
what my mother would call a strapping young man.
 
From what little I’d been able to observe
without him noticing, he appeared to just nibble on whatever was on his plate
and drank what I assumed was coffee from his mug.
 
Honestly, judging by the look of him, I’d
have assumed he spent most nights at the gym, not hanging out by himself in the
student dining hall farthest from his office.

Out of some strange
sense of self preservation, I really tried not to look in his direction and I managed
to succeed most of the time.
 
I usually
failed when a female co-ed approached his table under the pretense of asking
some question about class.
 
The response
was always the same.
 
He’d look up with
that bored, somewhat irritated expression and give some dismissive
response.
 
I often found myself chuckling
at the dejected look in their eyes that inevitably followed, as the girl, or
the occasional guy, walked away.
 

Yes, on the
surface Daniel was slightly more physically attractive than Ben, but in my
opinion, Daniel was much stranger as well.
 
Which after my bizarre walk in the woods with Ben was really saying
something.
 
I’m not sure I’d ever
understand men, especially the really good looking ones.
 
Maybe there was some correlation between
looks and strangeness that I was hitherto unaware of.
 
If so, I must only apply to men.
 
Otherwise there was just no accounting for
me.

Part of me
couldn’t blame the seemingly endless parade of female students that traipsed
past his table night after night.
 
Daniel
was externally gorgeous.
 
I’m talking
male model, drop dead, moth to the flame gorgeous.
 
His sandy hair, tall perfectly formed
physique and piercing blue eyes were only the beginning.
 
He was in peak physical condition.
 
I couldn’t begin to imagine how much time
you’d have to spend in the gym to get a body like that.
 
Not that he had bulging muscles like a body
builder, but when I’d seen him out of class he occasionally wore tight
tee-shirts that allowed you to see the definition of is muscles with little
left to the imagination.
 
A little on the
pale side, all he needed was some color to make him perfect.
 

Well, almost
perfect.
 
Something was always
missing.
 
And if you asked me what it
was, I’d say it was because he never looked happy.
 
In all the times I’d seen him over the last
week or so I don’t think I’d ever seen him crack a smile.
 
Not even at some of the ridiculously stupid
answers some of my classmates offered in class.
 
Most of the time he had a sort of grimace on his face.
  
And yet something about that made me
sad.
 
It made me wonder why a good looking
guy like him couldn’t find something to be happy about.

His continued
presence in the dining hall wouldn’t have bothered me so much if it wasn’t for
the fact that I was plagued by the feeling he was trying not to let me catch
him watching me.
 
Of course, he
wasn’t.
 
I mean why would he?
 
What was I to him?
 
When I’d look up, I was never able to catch
him looking directly at me, but I always got the feeling he’d just looked
away.
  
A few times I tried to look at
him using my hair as a screen.
  
When I
did, I was pretty sure I’d caught him watching me intently.
 
But I could never be sure seeing as I was
trying to see through the red haze of my hair.
 
But again the nagging question was … why?

Sometimes after
a dejected freshman retreated from his table, I’d wonder what he’d say if
I
walked over to him.
 
His facial expressions never gave me cause to
think he thought favorably of me, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that he
seemed to seek me out, almost as if he was stalking me.
 

Perhaps I should
be flattered.
 
An insanely good looking,
intelligent man was interested in me.
 
Well, something about me interested him, but I had no idea what my
allurements could possibly be to a man like Daniel Simmons.
 
He didn’t even know me and I was nothing to
look at physically compared to the girls he turned away on a daily basis.
 
If I had been one of my more shallow, bubble
headed freshman classmates, I probably could have deluded myself into thinking
his strange attentions were a good thing.
 
But eyes that look at you like you’re the weakest sheep in the herd and
not the most beautiful girl in the room are never flattering to the ego.

As hard as I tried, I was never able to really convince
myself that Daniel was up to anything sinister.
 
Yes, there had been something overtly personal in the way he had looked
at me in the hallway that day, but I simply didn’t have the vanity to presume
he’d seriously ever given me much thought after that.
  
Strange as all this was, it must be
coincidence.

A week passed.
 
A week of much the same, sleep, wake, class,
eat, study, rinse, repeat.
 
As I walked
out of Capen Hall this morning, I was greeted with a particularly beautiful
fall day here in upstate New York.
 
Thankfully
the weather alone was enough to make me forget most of my troubles.
 
While walking to and from my morning’s
classes, I savored the slight nip in the air that the ever present sun wasn’t
chasing away as it had before.
 
Fall was
here, and Fall always brought change.

After a quick
lunch in the Student Union Building food court, I stopped into the school
store.
 
In need of a few things, I picked
up a couple of new notebooks and a thick sweat shirt with NPU emblazoned on it
in purple.
 
The evenings were getting
chilly enough to warrant an extra layer over my tee-shirts.
 
After I dropped it off in my room and
exchanged books, I headed over to the library to do some research.
 
I had a few hours to kill before meeting
Tabitha for a game of racquetball, and I wanted to use the time to follow up on
some leads I’d found last time I’d gone fishing online for genealogy info on
the family.
  

Yes, I know, I
should have been studying for class, but I felt like being a bad girl and playing
mental hooky from my academic endeavors for the afternoon.
 
I was completely caught up in all my classes
anyway, so I didn’t feel too guilty about it.
 
Pulling out my laptop, I settled into my regular table in the strangely deserted
genealogy section of the library.
 
It was
a corner seldom frequented except by me and a few local blue hairs that came to
do research of their own on occasion.
 

Switching on my laptop, I started browsing some of my
favorite research sites following up on the leads I’d scribbled in my
notebook.
 
As it usually does when I get
deep in research mode, time passed all too quickly and before I knew it a
couple of hours had come and gone.

Ready to mop up the court with
Tabitha once again, I exited out the back door of the library and started
across the faculty parking lot towards the back side of the gym.
 
I’d never walked back here before, but it
looked just like the rest of campus.
 
When a stiff breeze began to blow, I heard the sound of dead leaves
scraping across the pavement of the parking lot.
 
Instinctively, I turned and looked in the
direction the wind had come from.
 
As I
did, I unexpectedly locked eyes with Daniel.
 
He was standing on the far side of the small lot next to the open door
of a shiny black car.
 
Before I had time
to react, he quickly ducked in the car and sped out of the lot.
 

It wasn’t until
I finished crossing the lot that it dawned on me what had looked so
familiar.
 
His was the same black sports
car that had been hidden of the trailhead last weekend.
 
I was positive.
 
It was a very distinctive car.
 
Foreign, Italian, if I wasn’t mistaken.

A hundred
questions began to swirl around in the confusion of my mind.
 
Questions with no answers, at least none that
I wanted to admit could possibly be true.
 
Was he stalking me?
 
And if so, in
Heaven’s name, why?
 

Unfortunately, I knew what this meant.
 
It meant it was time for me to confront
Daniel, face to face.
 
I was terrified at
the prospect of knowing without a doubt that only inches would separate us, not
a room or a long hallway, and those steely blue eyes would once again bore deep
down inside me.
 
But I simply couldn’t go
on without some measure of reassurance that, illogical as it was, he wasn’t out
to do me harm.
 
No, he’d never threatened
me with words, it was his body language and the intent behind his facial
expressions that concerned me.
 
Not that
I didn’t think I could take care of myself, but why should I have to?
 
He was my teacher – more or less.
 
All I should be worried about was getting a
good grade in his class.

The next day, I staked out a spot
on the edge of the quad in front of the faculty tower and waited.
 
I was the stalker this time.
 
I knew from Tabitha’s class schedule that
Daniel taught an Early American History class that would start in about thirty
minutes on the opposite side of campus.
 

Leaning against
the retaining wall, I waited anxiously as I watched the grassy knoll in front
of the Faculty Tower’s main doors.
 
If I
was right, he should be exiting the building any time now.
  
My heart was racing in my chest.
 
I knew I was being irrational, but what could
I do about it?
 
Well, I could do
something, but that would require concentration, and I wasn’t sure I could muster
myself into the proper frame of mind in that moment.
 

What was it
about him that both scared and attracted me at the same time?
 
Although I hated to admit it, I guess I was
just as much attracted to Daniel as everyone else, but I didn’t think it was
all about his looks.
 
It was something
else, something I didn’t yet understand about him.
 
Maybe it was that I sensed his confidence or
perhaps a deeper intellect than any man I’d ever known of his age group.
 
He seemed too young to be so melancholy.
 
I’d have thought it would have taken decades
of regret and longing for what one couldn’t have for a person to have his face
form that unsettling expression as its default position.
 
He couldn’t be more than twenty three or
twenty four years old, way too young to have his face wear an expression of
such unfulfilled need.
 
The more I
thought about it, the more I realized I really had no idea what it was that
drew me to him.
 
It was just as much a
mystery to me as the man himself was.

Behind me I
could hear the sounds of the construction crew working on the new classroom
building.
 
It wasn’t slated to open for
another year, yet they seemed to be putting it up at a feverish pace.
 
They were currently erecting the
superstructure.
 
I glanced around to see
what looked like a massive steel skeleton taking shape.
 
Today there were a pair of giant cranes
lifting up the next section of steel beams to the waiting workmen perched
precariously high above me.
  

Out of the
corner of my eye, my attention was drawn to a glint of light as the doors of
the faculty tower opened.
 
Daniel strode
out of the building in a pair of black jeans and a charcoal gray long sleeved
button down shirt.
 
I watched as he made
his way across the quad taking care not to intrude on the gatherings of
students out enjoying the sunny afternoon.
 
He was extra careful to avoid a bunch of girls playing Frisbee who were
haphazardly running all over the quad.
 
He shot them an icy glare as one of their number maybe accidently, probably
purposefully almost collided with him.
  
Rudely
ignoring them, he continued on.

I knew it was
only a matter of moments before he’d spot me.
 
I wasn’t trying to hide.
 
On the
contrary, I was careful to pick this very public place for my confrontation.
 
I may not intellectually have believed he
could possibly want to do me harm, but I wasn’t stupid enough to be alone in a
room with him given the circumstances.
  

A cool breeze
prickled the back of my neck as I watched his approach.
 
Suddenly his head snapped up as he caught me
in his sights.
 
There was that look
again, like I’d just said something to absolutely revolt him.
 
He stopped in his tracks, appraising my
stance.
 
Yes, he wanted to avoid me, I
could see it in his eyes, and at that moment he knew there was no possible way
to get around me.