Chapter 4
TINA
He knows.
Marcel Hale knows I'm A. Connolly, and he hasn't told anyone, and it's been five days, and I'm losing my mind.
I've checked my anonymous poetry account seventeen times since Thursday.
No spike in followers. No comments referencing Grizzly Ridge or English teachers or anything that would indicate a leak.
Maggie hasn't said a word beyond her usual pie-and-coffee routine.
The town gossip channels, which run faster than the broadband internet, are silent on the subject of Tina Ackley's secret writing life.
He kept his word.
Of course he kept his word. He's a man who spent fifteen years carrying classified information in a job where a single breach could get people killed. My poetry is a padlock on a garden gate compared to the vaults he's accustomed to guarding.
But he reads it.
He reads it and he understands it and he sat in my classroom and told me that Still Water is about learning to survive by becoming the current rather than fighting it, and I have been a wreck ever since because no one, not my editor, not my most devoted readers, not a single reviewer, has ever read that poem the way he did.
It's Tuesday evening. I'm on my front porch with a glass of wine and my laptop, and I'm not writing.
I'm staring at a text message.
It arrived thirty minutes ago from an unknown number.
Your fourth session is confirmed for Thursday. Same time. I'm bringing something different. — M.H.
My heart has been doing complicated things since I read it.
Sawyer McKenna called me yesterday to ask if I wanted a fourth session with Marcel, and I said yes so fast that Sawyer actually laughed, which is notable because Sawyer McKenna does not laugh easily.
He's the sheriff. He projects steady authority the way some men project cologne.
The fact that I cracked his composure tells me exactly how transparent I'm being.
I type a response to Marcel. Delete it. Type another. Delete it. Type a third.
Looking forward to it. The students have been asking when you're coming back.
Send.
Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.
Just the students?
I press the phone against my chest and close my eyes.
The September evening is warm. Crickets are starting up in the grass.
The mountains are turning purple in the fading light and the first stars are emerging above the ridge where, somewhere on forty acres of carefully chosen land, Marcel Hale is probably sitting in his observation tower with a rifle scope and a volume of Langston Hughes.
I type back:
The teacher may have mentioned it once or twice.
His response is immediate.
Once or twice.
Then nothing.
I sit on the porch until the stars are fully out and the wine is gone and my body is humming with something I haven't felt in so long that I almost don't recognize it.
Want. Specific, targeted, consuming want for a specific man.
Not abstract longing. Not the safe, poetic ache I've been writing about for six years. This is concrete. This has a name and a scar and hands that shape walnut into something holy and a voice that drops half an octave when he says my name.
I go inside. Shower. Stand under the water with my eyes closed and my hands pressed against the tile and think about Marcel's dark brown eyes and the way they tracked me across my classroom like I was the only thing in the room worth watching.
My hand slides down my stomach. Lower. I press two fingers against myself and think about his hands. Those steady, capable, patient hands. The hands that spent three hundred hours carving beauty into steel because a man who knew how to destroy needed to prove he could create.
I come with his name on my lips, biting down on the sound because the walls are thin and Mrs. Patterson next door has ears like a surveillance system.
Afterward, I lean against the shower wall and let the water run cold.
This is not part of the plan. The plan is to teach English, write poetry in secret, visit my mother on Sundays, and live a quiet life in Grizzly Ridge that doesn't involve risking the kind of humiliation I experienced four years ago when David Mercer left me standing at the altar in front of two hundred people in a dress that cost more than my first car.
David looked at me that morning and decided I wasn't worth staying for. He didn't even have the decency to tell me himself. His best man delivered the message fifteen minutes before the ceremony. David's not coming. He's sorry. He left a letter.
The letter said I was too much. Too emotional. Too intense. Too wrapped up in my own interior world to be a real partner to a real man in the real world.
I burned the letter. I kept the lesson.
Don't let anyone see the real you. The real you is too much.
I dry off. Put on pajama pants and an old university t-shirt. Sit on my bed with my laptop and open the A. Connolly document.
The cursor blinks.
I write.
He said the distance isn't uncrossable. He looked back at me when he said it, and his eyes were the scope and I was the target and for the first time I didn't want to run.
I stare at the poem. Close the laptop. Open it again. Post the poem to the account before I can talk myself out of it.
Within an hour, it has three hundred likes.
Within two hours, four hundred.
By morning, six hundred and fourteen.
The top comment reads: Who is this person you're writing about? Because I would like to fall in love with the way you see them.
I would too. That's the problem.
Wednesday passes in a blur of lesson plans and grading and a staff meeting where the principal announces budget cuts that will eliminate the after school creative writing program unless someone finds alternative funding.
I volunteer to write the grant proposal before my brain catches up to my mouth, and then I'm committed to another sixty hours of work on top of everything else, and the only thing keeping me from spiraling is the knowledge that tomorrow is Thursday.
Thursday morning. I change outfits three times. End up in dark jeans and a fitted cream blouse that buttons up the front and doesn't hide anything but doesn't announce anything either. I leave my hair down. Put on lip gloss. Take off the lip gloss. Put it back on.
I am thirty three years old and I am applying lip gloss for a man who could kill me from a quarter mile away. This is what my life has become.
By ten, the students are in their seats and buzzing.
Marcel's sessions have become the highlight of their week.
Dakota, the girl who writes about her grandfather's hands, has started a journal specifically for recording things Marcel says.
Marcus the quarterback has mentioned twice that he's thinking about a career in precision engineering.
The doorway fills.
Marcel is carrying a chess set.
Not a standard one. A handmade set, the pieces carved from two different woods.
Light maple for one side, dark walnut for the other.
Each piece is detailed enough to be displayed in a gallery.
The knights have actual manes. The bishops have robes with folds.
The queens are regal and sharp and the kings are solid and commanding.
"I made this," he tells the class as he sets the board on my desk, "over six months. Each piece took between twelve and forty hours. The queens took the longest."
He begins to talk about chess as a discipline.
About patience and strategy and the ability to think seven moves ahead while remaining fully present in the current one.
He plays a demonstration game against Marcus, narrating his thinking, explaining why he sacrifices a bishop to set up a checkmate twelve moves later.
The students are rapt.
I am something beyond rapt. I am watching this man, this quiet, lethal, poetry reading man, teach a seventeen year old how to think strategically while carving the air with hands that could just as easily dismantle a weapon or cradle a piece of walnut or press against the small of a woman's back in a way that she would feel for the rest of her life.
He catches me staring. His eyes hold mine for three full seconds while he continues talking to Marcus without missing a beat.
The corner of his mouth shifts. Not a smile.
Something more dangerous. An acknowledgment.
A recognition that we are both aware of what's building between us and neither of us is doing a damn thing to stop it.
The bell rings. Students leave. Dakota touches the queen piece on her way out, gently, like a benediction.
Then it's us.
Marcel starts packing the chess pieces into a felt lined wooden case. Each piece has its own slot, fitted precisely. I watch his hands work. Those long, scarred, beautiful fingers settling each carved figure into place with the tenderness of someone putting children to bed.
"You carved the queens to look different from each other," I say, moving closer to the desk. Close enough to see. Close enough to smell gun oil and sandalwood and the clean warmth of his skin. "One is taller. More angular. The other is softer."
"The dark queen leads from the front. She's the first into battle, the most dangerous piece on the board." He lifts the maple queen. Holds it up so the light catches the grain. "This one leads from behind. She watches. She waits. She writes the strategy that everyone else executes."
"She writes."
"She writes." He sets the queen down and looks at me. Full eye contact. No evasion, no deflection, no social buffer between the intensity of his gaze and the soft, melting center of me that is dissolving under it. "Like someone I know."
"Marcel."
"Tina."
My name in his mouth sounds different from anyone else saying it. He gives it weight. Texture. He says it like he's tasting it, deciding whether to swallow.
"This can't..." I start.
"Can't what?"
"You were my classroom speaker. You're a veteran in a community program. There are boundaries that are supposed to..."