28
Levi
LEARNING THAT ELLE THREW tea in that asshole's face was the best news I received all week.
Thompson had called me into his office earlier.
I had gone thinking it was something to do with faculty business only to find Wyatt, an HR manager, and Elle, who looked even more beautiful than ever, as righteous fury bled out of her pores.
Wyatt's light blue shirt was stained sepia with what I later learned to be tea.
"Sit down, Levi," Thompson said, motioning to the only other empty chair in his cavernous office.
I dragged the chair he indicated to and placed it between the HR manager and Elle.
Elle did not look at me. She was sitting straight.
Staring at Thompson, who was trying his best to appear authoritative.
He was sitting behind his desk, while we all sat in a row on the other side.
"You must be wondering why I brought you here, Levi," he said.
"I am sure you will tell me."
"He cleared his throat. "Your uh, wife, I mean your subordinate, Miss Edwards, assaulted a professor," he pointed to Wyatt, "in the break room today."
"Assaulted?"
The HR manager, a middle-aged woman I had seen around a few times, but whose name had escaped me, said, "She threw hot liquid in his face, Professor Hawthorne. It's a dangerous violation that could have caused serious harm had her tea been hot enough."
"But it wasn't, was it?" I leaned over to assess 'the damage' done to Wyatt, but all he had were drying stains on his shirt and a massive scowl on his face.
Being the shithead that he is, he probably thought this was an affront that required multiple people having to be summoned to the head of faculty's office.
Also, wasn't this a department affair? Shouldn't the head of department be dealing with this?
"From what I can see, Mr. Carrington only needs a brand new shirt. I can provide one if he doesn't have it."
"I don't want your hand-me-downs, asshole. Your wife , through a scalding hot liquid on me. I could have been burned!"
"But you aren't. I think for something to be considered assault, it should at least come with some damage or potential damage to the victim, and I don't see it here.
All I see is a spoiled, whiny boy who's too fragile to handle lukewarm tea.
" I didn't know how hot the tea was, but the blush on his face was enough to tell me I was right.
With the way he was reacting, if it had been hot, he would have gone to the infirmary, just to add to the dramatics.
"People have endured third-degree burns from hot beverages," the HR manager said.
"Does he have third-degree burns?" I asked.The room went silent. "Or any burns at all?"
"I could have!" he screamed.
"But you didn't. She knew it wasn't hot when she threw it at you, so what's the issue?"
"What the fuck? You weren't even there!" He turned to Thompson flabbergasted. "He wasn't even there."
"Uh…" Thompson turned to Elvira. "Did you know it wasn't hot?"
"It had been sitting there for several minutes," she said.
"Therefore, it was lukewarm, maybe warm, but not hot, not even scalding hot. And Professor Carrington is not a baby. I am sure he can handle lukewarm tea being thrown on his body by his ex."
Thompson jerked back. "You two used to date?" he waved his finger at Elvira and Wyatt.
"And then cheated on her with her friend, if you could imagine," I added.
"Oh." Whatever sympathy Thompson had for Wyatt dissipated. He was looking at him in a different light.
Through gritted teeth, Wyatt said, "What does that have to do with anything!"
"Well," the HR manager jumped in, "it goes to intent." She swiveled her head toward Elle. "Were you retaliating against Professor Carrington because of what he did to you?"
We all turned our attention to Elle. You can do this, I thought. Don't let them intimidate you. "I was responding to what he said to me. He called me a two-timing slut."
"Is that true?" Thompson said.
I jumped in. "Excuse me? Are you calling my wife a two-timing slut?"
Thompson began to sweat. "I didn't mean—what I meant was if what he said, the gist of what he said to be more specific, had any merit in uh…
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. But what does , is the assault.
We can't ignore that, of course. You seem to have poured a lukewarm beverage, but you caused harm to a professor.
That's not good. We can solve this simply. Apologize to Professor Carrington."
"No," Elle said firmly and quietly.
"Apologize! She should be suspended!" Wyatt screamed.
Thompson looked like he wanted to be anywhere but here.
But I knew he wasn't going to suspend her.
Just this morning, before I came in, I had sent him an email telling him my brother's foundation had accepted his grant application and that of several other departments in this faculty.
Suspending a Hawthorne might result in all that funding getting pulled.
Not that I would flex my powers like that, of course. But he didn't know that.
Thompson turned to Elvira. "Can you apologize to him and let this matter rest?"
Elle glared at Wyatt. "Sorry," she muttered. The words coming out as though they're being pulled from her teeth.
"That's it!" Wyatt's voice was becoming shriller the longer he spoke. His face reddening. "She could have burned me, and all she has to do is apologize!" He turned to the HR manager. "What do you have to say for this?"
The HR manager began to him and haw, but that only made Wyatt angrier.
"Oh, come on!" he shouted, standing up, pushing the chair away so hard it fell to the floor.
Thompson jumped up. "You will hear from my lawyers!
" he said, wagging his finger at Thompson.
"This is preposterous!" He got out, banged the door, blowing our eardrums as he left.
We sat in silence for a good minute, and then I said, "Anything else?"
Thompson shook his head. "You're free to go. And, uh," he leaned conspiratorially, "can you talk to him friend to friend? Calm him down."
I gave Thompson a tight smile, took Elle's hand, and left the office. When we were in the hallway, Elle snatched her hand away from mine.
"Thanks," she said. We strolled down the corridor, side by side.
My hand was itching to touch hers, so I thrust it in my pockets so I wouldn't grab her.
Elle glanced at me and continued to walk, her head straight ahead.
"But I am pretty sure your friend is going to sue the entire school because of this. "
"Why does everyone think we're friends?"
"Aren't you?"
I shook my head."We used to be. But we haven't been for a long time."
"Why?" Elle sounded curious enough to want the truth, so I told her.
"Because of you."
She stopped in her tracks. I did the same and faced her.
She was so pretty today in a cute yellow blouse and black pants.
I desperately wanted to touch her. Kiss her.
She would not like that, though. She might do worse than throw a cup of lukewarm tea at me, and I would deserve it.
We were in the courtyard now, and a few people passing by, but I didn't care.
Elle looked around us. "You can't just drop bombs like that. At work, of all places."
I shrugged. "What did I say except the truth?"
She crossed her arms. "So are you saying I ruined your relationship? Is that it?"
Oh shit. "I didn't mean it like that. I meant—"
"Whatever, Levi."
She marched past me. Not to our office but in the direction of the library.
Probably going to work on her thesis. Yeah.
I wasn't going to see her for the rest of the day.
I doubt she was even working on the letters anymore.
How was I fumbling this so badly? Ever since we came back from the wedding, Elle had been acting cold.
Not just then, but even during the wedding.
Something changed after we came back from that serene little cottage.
I thought we were finally turning into a real relationship, only to find out that I was completely wrong on that account.
Not only did she not want that, it turned out, she was only using me.
I was angry at first. I might have lashed out somewhat, and that only further degraded the little that was between us.
When we came back, I didn't want to speak to her.
But the separation did not help. I wanted her more than ever, and she was pushing me away.
I went back to my office dejected. The research had become an uncontrollable alien.
Its paper limbs filling and stretching into every part of the room.
I stepped over a stack of papers, stumbled over a pile of books, on my way to the desk.
A psychiatrist might say it was a sign of how stressed and lost I was in this project.
I opened my laptop to check my emails. I was expecting one from Beth.
Beth and the MMQ society had begun to help as well.
Providing books that could not be found here, but at places like Oxford and Cambridge.
The society was full of academics and amateur historians like Beth.
The kind of people who had time on their hands and the stubbornness of a dog with a bone.
Even so, all that help was not enough to decipher the letters.
The good thing was that we seemed to have narrowed down the ones we thought might contain the information we needed.
Beth: I found nothing :(
That was all she sent. Damn. I was hoping her research at the Bodleian would give us more clues about the code.
A dark cloud settled above me. Maybe we will never find it.
Maybe this quest was useless. For all I knew, the letters were about Johnson's mundane daily routine.
How anticlimactic that would be. What a waste of money that would have been.
My phone beeped. A text.
Elle: Come to the library.
I got up at the speed of light. The library was quite a distance from my office, but I covered it in record time.
When I reached the door, another text came in with the section she was in.
I marched over there, my shoes echoing in the quiet, almost empty building.
She was upstairs, alone, between two shelves, her desk cluttered with books and scripts.
She didn't see me come in. Her gaze was on her laptop.
"I've solved it," she whispered without looking up.
Maybe she did see me. I drew a chair next to her and sank into it.
"Or at least I think I did," she said and slid the laptop to me and got up, stretching her limbs.
I watched her stroll behind the bookshelves.
My gaze went back to the laptop. I could not believe it.
She was right. She had solved it. The code was so simple now that we knew what it was.
Comically simple. The solution involved simply numbering the letters backward, then selecting the middle letter as the first, and so on.
When he got to the end, the first letter became the fourteenth letter.
That's it. That was the code. We attempted all these sophisticated ways of decoding, and it was simple as fuck.
What made the code a little hard to break was Johnson's spelling. It was inconsistent and at times deliberately meant to deceive. Sometimes he would spell them phonetically, and sometimes he would use a different, more complicated spelling.
The code was solved. She had done it. I read the letters.
Almost crying as I did so. It was right there.
The evidence was right there. He even mentioned the burial site where they put the two boys.
If possible, we could dig the place up. And if we were lucky, we could solve a five hundred-year-old cold case.
Elle had just solved a five hundred-year-old case!
I could not believe it. I was possibly the happiest man on the planet right now.
My eyes scanned the library searching for her.
She had gone down several bookshelves further away from where I was sitting.
I got up and went to her. She was casually perusing books like she had just finished a homework assignment and not just solved one of the most famous and oldest cold cases of all time.
I had so much to say to her, but words failed me.
"Do you know what you've just done?" I said.
"Are you sure that's the code? I could be incorrect. I've been wrong before."
"It's the fucking code." Fuck. I whisked her by the waist into my arms and what I had been yearning to do for weeks.
I kissed her. Not just that. I did what I wanted to do all this time.
I made love to her. Silently. Covering her mouth when she moaned as she came.
It was not a thank you. She deserved a bigger, but better show of gratitude than a fuck in the library.
No, this was an outlet of the emotions I held back for a long time spilling out.