by Vi Keeland
“And you thought I was him, apparently?”
I nodded. “She came in during my shift and started drinking Long Island iced teas. When Owen walked in, she pointed to where he was standing and said he was the one in the blue shirt.”
“And we were both wearing blue shirts, I take it?”
I couldn’t help but smile, thinking of Ava last night. “Actually, no. Ava’s not much of a drinker. Turned out she was more sloshed than I thought. Owen’s shirt was brown—not even black that could be mistaken as navy or something.”
I saw Professor West’s lip twitch.
“Anyway, I’m really sorry. I barely gave you a chance to speak, and then when I realized what had happened, I was so mortified I didn’t even stop to apologize.”
“I accept your apology for last night. Even though you shouldn’t be approaching a man in the hallway to tell him off alone, your intentions were admirable.”
I should have shut up and been grateful he’d accepted my apology. Should have. “Why can’t I approach a man in the hallway?”
He leveled me with a stare. “Because you’re five foot nothing in a loud bar, and no one would have heard you if I’d dragged you into the men’s room and locked the door.”
I folded my arms over my chest. “I can take care of myself.”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t. I said you shouldn’t put yourself in those situations.”
“But you insinuated that I couldn’t by making that statement.”
He zipped his leather bag closed. “Ms. Martin, I just accepted your apology for calling me an asshole last night. Would you like me to retract that acceptance?”
God, I really was an idiot. Being around this man seemed to turn me into a psychopath. “No. I’m sorry. I acted like a jerk, and I’d like to start over, if that’s possible.”
He nodded. “Everything prior to this morning is forgotten.”
“Thank you.”
“But this morning is not. I won’t accept lateness. Don’t let it happen again.”
I swallowed. “It won’t.”
He lifted his worn, brown leather laptop bag over one shoulder. “Meet me here at five tomorrow. We’ll go over the syllabus and the classes you’ll teach, as well as my grading rubric.”
That was smack in the middle of my shift, but I’d figure something out. “Okay.”
“Are you done for the day?”
“I am. I actually have to get to work. I’m covering Ava’s shift because she isn’t feeling too well after last night. We both work at O’Leary’s.”
“You waitress there?”
“Waitress, bartend, occasionally tell off patrons.”
That earned me a full smile from Professor West. God, he should do that more often. No, forget that. He definitely shouldn’t.
“I’ll walk out with you.”
We walked through the halls together and out to the parking lot. When we arrived at my car, I stopped. “This is me. So…five o’clock tomorrow?”
Professor West looked at my beat-up old Subaru. “You’re parked in a spot reserved for the Provost. You got a parking ticket.” He squinted. “Actually, it looks like you have two parking tickets. Was your inspection expired or something?”
Crap. “Umm…no. I keep an extra ticket in the glove compartment and stick it on my windshield when I’m forced to park illegally.”
His brows shot up. “Inventive.”
“Obviously it doesn’t always work.”
“Obviously.”
“They need more parking. When you’re late, it’s impossible to find a spot.”
He studied me. “Lateness is a frequent occurrence for you, I take it?”
“Unfortunately, it is.”
“Then I should clarify something I said earlier.”
“Oh, no, that’s not necessary. I won’t be late for your class.”
He took a step closer and leaned in. “I’m glad to hear that, Ms. Martin. But that’s not what needs clarification.”
I swallowed. God, he smells good.
“Earlier I told you I didn’t bite students.” He smiled, and I felt the wickedness from it shoot down to some interesting places. “I don’t. But I make no promises about not biting feisty TAs.”
Some girls had dads who cleaned their shotguns when boys came to pick their daughters up at the house. I had Charlie.
Even though the City of New York had banned smoking in eating establishments at least ten years earlier, Charlie still lit up behind the bar. Filterless Benson & Hedges. Who was going to tell a burly ex-cop otherwise?
“So who’s this man you’re meeting tonight?” He pulled out the bat he kept behind the bar and placed it on top. “I’m gonna leave this right here for when he comes in.”
I laughed as I lifted my drink tray. “I’m good, Charlie. He’s a thirty-two-year-old accountant from the Upper East Side.”
“Don’t let that fool you. Looks can be deceiving. Salt looks a hell of a lot like sugar, sweetheart.”
I wasn’t even sure why I was attempting to date now. Ever since things ended with Davis eight months ago, I’d been on a self-imposed dating hiatus. I didn’t have the time or energy to put into a relationship. Not to mention I didn’t have a great track record with men, in general. I’d mostly done it to cheer up Ava. Last winter, she and her boyfriend of seven years broke up on her twenty-fifth birthday. They’d been together since their senior year in high school. After months of watching her pout, I finally talked her into signing up for one of those dating websites. I’d signed up in solidarity, too, although I never really had intentions of going out with anyone. Great job I’d done—the dating website was where she met married Owen. With friends like me to cheer her up, she’d be on Prozac in no time.
I delivered the drinks to my table and took an order from table eight, even though my shift was over. Basically, I was stalling to avoid going to change and get ready for my date. Table service at O’Leary’s ended any time we felt like it after eight, and Charlie’s motto was ‘There’s a burger joint down the street. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out’, for anyone who didn’t like it.
After I changed out of my uniform, I washed up in the bathroom, swiped some mascara on my lashes, glossed my full lips, and looked in the mirror. I was lucky I had my mother’s naturally clear porcelain skin, so I never had to wear much makeup. I considered highlighting my green eyes with some black liner, but then changed my mind. Good enough, I thought. Which was probably not the effort I should have been putting into a first date.
After our initial email exchange, Mason had seemed nice enough that I continued to chat with him over the last few weeks. He checked all the boxes of the right guy for me to go out with: Gainfully employed—check. Polite—check. Over thirty, but not knocking on forty’s door—check. Didn’t use phrases like fo-shizzle and my bad in our message exchanges—check. Nice looking. Well groomed. Check, check. I should have been more excited. It had been a long time since Davis—time to move on.
I noticed him before he noticed me. I’d gone to the stock room to grab a few bottles of tequila for Charlie and saw Mason looking around. He looked like his pictures, so that was a plus. Maybe a little thinner than I’d expected, but nothing drastic enough to surprise me. He was medium height, medium build, and handsome, but not quite the type of looks you felt in your belly. Mason was also wearing a blue shirt. Which reminded me of Professor West last night. Oddly, that made me feel a little fire in my belly.
“I make no promises about not biting feisty TAs.”
I shook my head to physically shake some sense into my brain and took a deep breath before heading to meet Mason.
You know that feeling you get when you think you’re going to taste one thing and it turns out to be another? Maybe water and soda? It’s not that you don’t like either of them, but you were prepared for something tasteless and non-carbonated and instead you get unexpected fizz—a lot of fizz.
Mason was fizz when I expected tap water
. Perhaps it was accountant that had led me to preconceived notions that he would be a certain way in person. But he was way more confident and forward than I expected.
“You’re really gorgeous. Not that I thought otherwise from your profile picture, but you only had a head shot. I guess I didn’t expect Megan Fox to continue from the neck down.”
“Thank you…I think.” While it was a compliment, I didn’t like the way he eyed me. We had gone to dinner a few doors down and then come back to O’Leary’s for a drink. His eyes roamed my body as he sipped his fourth Jack and Coke—which was another red flag—three hard liquor drinks during dinner on a first date? Each one made him bolder in a way I liked less and less.
“You said you were a hundred-percent Italian, right?”
“No. I have a little German in me, too.”
He leaned in, putting one hand on my knee. “How’d you like a little more German in you tonight?”
Ugh. I was just about to tell the idiot he’d be playing with himself tonight, when Charlie interrupted. With the bat. He tossed it on the bar right between us, causing Mason to jump back.
“Everything okay over here?” My girl doesn’t look too happy.”
I didn’t want to cause a scene. Just wanted my bad date to be over.
“That’s your father?” Mason asked.
I ignored him and spoke to Charlie. “Everything’s fine here. We were going to call it a night anyway.”
Mason misunderstood. After he gulped back the remnants of his drink, he stood. “My place or yours?”
“You’re going to yours. I’m going to mine.”
He reached for me, and I stepped back. “Go home, Mason. Before you go home with Charlie’s bat up your ass.”
Realizing he wasn’t getting laid, Mason paid the tab and took off. I smiled at Charlie after he was gone. “Did you double the price of Jack and Coke?”
“Asshole surcharge.”
I laughed. Not wanting to walk out right after Mason, I sat at the bar with Charlie for a while.
“Dating sucks,” I huffed. “No wonder I don’t do it that often.”
“I’m glad dating wasn’t what it is today back in my day. I’d never have met my Audrey.”
Charlie’s wife had been gone at least ten years—heart attack in her early fifties.
“How did you two meet anyway?”
“The old-fashioned way, in the grocery store.”
“That’s sweet. Did your carts crash into each other like in the movies?”
“Something like that. Audrey was in the fruit and vegetable aisle picking out some eggplant, and she put her things in the wrong cart. She was halfway down the aisle before she realized. When she went back to find her cart, she noticed the cart she’d taken had a handwritten grocery list in it.
“She’d taken your cart?”
“Yep. She handed the list back and said, ‘I took the wrong cart. Wouldn’t want you to forget some of the important items on your list’.”
“What was on your list?”
Charlie shrugged. “It said ‘cheese and other shit’.”
I furrowed my brow. “Literally? It said cheese and other shit? Not a list of the other shit?”
“I only cared about remembering the cheese. I like a slice of cheddar at night before I go to bed. The other shit covered the rest and wasn’t as important.” Charlie stared into space. “Anyway, Audrey smiled at me, and my heart did this weird double pump that it had never done before. Thought I was having a heart attack. Had to sit down right there next to the eggplants to catch my breath. Turned out it wasn’t just cheese and shit I picked up in the supermarket that day.”
“Maybe I should try the supermarket. I don’t think online dating is for me.”
“I never tried it, but seems dumb. Causes you to make this mental checklist of what you’re looking for in a mate and then try to find people who can check all the boxes. But the reality is, doesn’t matter which boxes are checked. When you meet the right person, your heart will let you know.” He winked. “And other parts of your body.”
Rachel
I wasn’t late. I was really freakin’ late.
I also needed a shower, a mechanic, a bottle of wine, and quite possibly a new job—not necessarily in that order. And to think, I’d been running a half hour early just four blocks from the college. Plenty of time to find a parking spot and still walk in fifteen minutes before I was supposed to meet him, showing Professor Punctuality that I could be on time. But then…a blowout. A loud boom followed by a long whoosh. I tried to ignore it and kept on driving, but eventually the repeated flopping and tug of my car to the right made me pull over.
It sucked. But I had time, and my ex-roommate, ex-whatever he was for a little while, Davis, had taught me how to change a tire. All was good...at first. I whipped out my jack, lifted the car like a pro, and went to work on the flat. Everything was moving along nicely until I got to the very last lug nut. The damn thing was stuck. Really stuck. At one point, since the lug nut was at the three o’clock position, I had the wrench on it and used my foot to try to bear down—it still wouldn’t budge. Then I had the bright idea that maybe I should put all of my weight on it. So I jumped up on to the long handle of the lug-nut wrench, hoping the sudden force would pry the sucker loose. But instead, the wrench slipped off and somehow snapped back to smack me right in the shin.
Now I was twenty minutes late, my leg was killing me, and I’d just limped to school in ninety-degree heat, smelling like tire grease. My only hope was that maybe Professor West had also gotten a flat and was late himself. It was a long shot, but I had to hold on to something in order to keep from having a total breakdown as I rushed through the hallways.
Arriving at the lecture hall, I peeked in before opening the door. Of course, Professor West was sitting at his desk.
I took a deep breath and went inside to face the wrath.
“Before you say anything—I was a half hour early. I swear.”
He’d been writing in a planner, and when his head came up, I saw he was wearing glasses for the first time. Damn. They make him even sexier. Was I insane for even finding his scowl kind of hot?
“And what happened today, Ms. Martin? Did you get distracted somewhere between parking illegally a half hour ago and finding my classroom? Stop to play in the dirt, perhaps?”
“What?”
He looked me up and down. “You have dirt all over your face and clothes.”
My hand rose to my face, where I began to rub at my cheek. “Oh. This isn’t dirt. It’s grease.”
“That makes it much better.”
“I got a flat tire on the way over here.” I had no idea where the dirt was on my face, but I was nervous and rubbed at random spots all over as I spoke. “The lug nut was stuck, and I couldn’t get it off. I tried to—”
“Ms. Martin,” he interrupted. “Stop doing that.”
“But it’s true. I really tried to get here early. I built in all this extra time and then boom—a flat tire. It wasn’t my fault this time.”
“I wasn’t referring to your elaborate story. Stop rubbing your face. Look at your hands.”
I examined my palms. Shit. They were full of grease. “Did I get it all over my face.”
He pulled some napkins from inside his desk, stood, and walked to me. “Your face is covered in grease. Why don’t you go to the ladies’ room and wash up.”
I nodded. Turning, I took a few steps toward the door and then thought of something. “You’ll be here when I get back?”
Professor West smiled. “Yes, Rachel. I’ll be here waiting. It seems to be our thing.”
After I scrubbed the grease from my hands and face, I considered trying to wash the big spot from my shirt, but it was no use. So far I’d met my new boss three times. The first time I told him off, the second time I interrupted his class wearing a shirt stained with coffee, and the third time I made him wait almost a half hour and walked in covered in grease, looking like a disaster. It just kep
t getting better and better.
When I arrived back at the classroom, Professor West was already packed up.
“I’m sorry. Do you have a class now?”
“No. But it’s going to start to get dark soon so we better get going.”
Dark? “Ummm…okay. Can we reschedule? Maybe I can come before class tomorrow, and we can quickly go over what you’d like me to do?”
“No. We’ll do it tonight.” He put his hand on the small of my back, guiding me to start back up the stairs of the lecture hall with him. “You don’t have to work your other job, do you?”
“No. I took the evening off.”
“There aren’t any other classes in here tonight, so we can come back after we’re done.”
“After we’re done?”
“With your car. I’ll get your spare on and follow you to the tire shop. Then we can come back and go over what we need to discuss.”
“You’re going to change my tire?”
“I’m not going to leave you stranded, Rachel.”
“You don’t have to do that, Professor West.”
“Of course I do. And call me Caine.”
Caine had some muscles to match that perfect face. He’d been wearing a white dress shirt, but removed it before starting to change my tire. Wearing only a thin, white undershirt, he worked the lug nut wrench while I fixated on the way his muscles bulged every time he flexed. He was able to dislodge the jammed lug nut, although it took a little elbow grease. He had the most incredible biceps, carved and tanned, with a vein that popped from the middle and ran all the way down to his forearms. If there was a such thing as arm porn, I was watching my very own channel. It felt wrong to look, but God, was I enjoying the view.