Brave the Skies by Kennedy Ryan #2
The hummingbird beat of my heart is almost painful.
Dread, embarrassment, anticipation, and—dammit—hope tumble inside me on a spin cycle of confusion.
My feet are glued to the floor while I struggle to compose myself.
A stream of students flows around me and out the door.
I glance over my shoulder to find him moving papers on his desk, not looking at me.
He seems relaxed and casual, like he couldn’t care less if I left or stayed.
If he can, I can.
I contort myself into the role of guileless student instead of the wanton woman who would fall to my knees right here if he gave me any sign he wanted it. That he wanted me. I walk slowly back toward his desk, pacing myself so I won’t reach him until the last student is gone.
“Yes, sir?” My voice comes out hushed, like the feelings I’ve been harboring for weeks. Months.
“Don’t…” He straightens and releases an extended breath. “You don’t have to call me sir, Ms. Wallace.”
“And you don’t have to call me Ms. Wallace, Dr. Lowe.”
His eyes snap to my face, and my heart stutters at the intensity there, like smothered flames. Like something barely held in check. Incongruous for someone who always exercises such restraint.
“Your poem was very good.” He shoves his hands into his pockets and frowns. “You’re a talented writer.”
It’s not the first time he’s told me this, but it’s always been in front of others—in front of the class.
I’ve never been this close when he’s said it, and his approval spoken with only the two of us to hear feels intimate.
It washes over me just as surely as if he’d breathed the words into my ear.
Across my lips as sweet as a first kiss.
“Thank you.” I force myself to glance up, even though he has looked away again.
He’s always looking away, never lingering long enough for me to see what’s behind those dark eyes.
This is supposed to be my Hail Mary, my last-ditch effort before I leave Finley to discover if this could be anything beyond my imagination.
“It’s about you,” I blurt. “The poem, I mean. It’s about you.”
He stills, no part of him moving except for his eyes that lift and lock with mine. He’s a blinking statue and I almost shatter where I’m standing at the expression on his face. Is it frustration? Anger?
Desire?
Okay. That last one I may have made up.
“I picked up on that, yeah,” he finally says, his mouth creasing into an almost smile. “It was clever—the soldier thing. Playing on the complex situation with my father. How my choice not to enlist ruined my relationship with him.”
Ruined?
“I didn’t mean to…” I swallow. “I didn’t think—”
“No, you didn’t think.” His eyes bore into me. “You didn’t consider how I’d feel when personal things I shared with my students to help them find their way creatively were tossed back in my face.”
“But I—”
“You didn’t think about how it might endanger my job if someone figured out I was the ‘soldier’ and assumed I had been somehow…involved with you inappropriately.”
“You’ve never—”
“You didn’t think about the trouble you might cause for yourself as a young woman who should be respected and hired on merit, and how you might be perceived if someone believed you got an A in this class because of a romantic relationship with your instructor, not because you’re one of the best writers in this class. ”
I let his praise soothe the sting of his chiding. The sharp breath I draw into my lungs does little to clear my head.
“That was reckless, Ms. Wallace,” he says, for once not looking away. The mild reproach in his gaze almost makes me wish he would.
“Did you know?” I ask. “How I felt, I mean. Did you know?”
A muscle flexes in the squared line of his jaw and he smooths all emotion from his face.
“You did,” I breathe, satisfaction coursing through me. “You knew I had feelings for you.”
“Celine,” he hisses, glancing sharply at the open door and barely giving me time to enjoy the first time he’s used my Christian name. “Don’t say that. You do not have…That’s not what this is.”
“I’m twenty-one, not twelve. Old enough to know what I feel. I’m an adult.”
“Then act like it.” His brows snap together and his full lips thin. “It was irresponsible to broadcast that shit in front of everyone. What were you thinking?”
“That Monday is our last class.” I bite my lip and blink at tears, feeling like the child I claimed not to be. “That I’m going to New York and you’re going…wherever you’re going once the semester is over. And that this was my only chance to tell you how I feel.”
“But you didn’t tell me how you feel. You read a poem about soldiers and white flags. You didn’t tell me anything.”
“Then how do you know it all?” Ragged breaths heave my chest. “If I said nothing, then how did you know?”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t mean—”
“Tell me the truth.” I step closer, until my head almost touches his chin. Tipping my head back to stare up at him, I lose myself for a stolen moment; the class, the campus, the world fall away, and our roles and inhibitions follow. He’s not the teacher and I’m not the student.
He’s just him. I’m just her.
The tight space barely separating our bodies boils with heat and tension.
He doesn’t step back and I want to tip up on my toes and kiss him.
His pupils are a dark flare, blown wide in the blaze of his eyes.
He has such a beautiful mouth, and I can’t drag my gaze away when he licks his lips, a gesture one could mistake for nervousness.
“Stop that.” He drops his head and it brings our lips even closer. It tangles our breaths. “Stop looking at me that way, Ms. Wallace.”
“Oh, we’re back to Ms. Wallace, are we? And how exactly am I looking at you, Zekiah ?” I barrel on, not waiting for him to respond. “Like I’ve been wondering how you taste? How our first kiss would be? How you would feel in—”
His big hand claps over my mouth, and for just a second, I lean into it.
He’s touching me. Not the way I imagined in my fevered dreams—with sensual strokes and worshipful kisses and let me take my time with this caresses—but we are skin to skin for the first time, and I will take this enforced silence just to have this touch.
In the elongated seconds, his labored breaths are the only sound in the classroom.
“You are my student,” he says on a frustrated huff of breath. “And we cannot…we can’t do any of that.”
I lean my lips into the press of his hand, relishing the warmth of his palm for a few seconds before I jerk my face away. “I’m your student for another week. After that we could—”
“I’m engaged, Celine.” He drops his forehead to meet mine for the briefest of seconds before lifting his head again, his face stripped of vulnerability, of all expression. “I’m engaged.”
The protests queued up on my tongue to convince him wither and die. I blink at him, reeling at this heart-wrecking information. My thoughts have run off the road and into a ditch. I’m stuck.
“She’s in L.A.,” he says, stepping back, but nothing could put more space between us than his words just did.
“She teaches?” I ask, my tone hollow and dull. Eyes fixed on Chuck D and Flavor Flav sketched on his T-shirt.
“She’s an actress.” He grimaces. “An aspiring actress.”
I bet she’s gorgeous and charismatic and perfect. “Congratulations,” I manage to say through jaws that feel sewn shut. “I wish you all the best.”
Soaked in humiliation, I turn, stumbling back and toward the door.
I feel like the little girl who got caught playing dress-up.
He’s engaged? And all this time, this whole semester, like a lovesick teenager I allowed some fantasy to overtake my life.
I concocted his reciprocity when this grown-ass man has been engaged.
“Celine,” he calls. “Wait.”
But I don’t wait. I keep going, my vision blurred with tears of shame.
How could I have gotten it so wrong? It wasn’t just mixed signals.
On some cellular level, I felt we were connected.
Like every time we were in a room together, a live wire stretched between us.
It felt solid and real, not like infatuation.
I thought he’d felt something, too. And if I could be so certain and so very wrong about him, what else am I getting wrong?
Over the weekend, I can barely focus and only hope the things I’ve learned this semester will save me—will be there when I reach for them during the exam.
I don’t know how I’ll face him, but I have no choice.
I need this grade to maintain my GPA and graduate with honors.
I won’t compromise four years of hard work for a crush who didn’t even know I existed.
At least not the way I’d thought he did.
When I walk into Hayes Monday morning, I’ve marshaled all my defenses.
I’ve talked myself out of the humiliation enough to hold my head high as I approach the classroom.
My eyes are trained on my seat and I refuse to even look toward the front of the room.
As little eye contact as possible. I brace my body for the deep rumble of that voice that has never not made me shiver.
“Good morning, class,” a woman says from up front.
My head snaps up. One of the English department’s associate professors stands where Dr. Lowe should be.
“Where is he?” I blurt, my face burning as the other students turn their scrutiny on me. “I mean…Dr. Lowe…is he okay?”
“He’s fine,” she replies. “He had an emergency and won’t be administering your exam, but it’s all here.”
She points to the whiteboard behind her where three writing prompts are scrawled.
“You have an hour.” She smiles and settles in the seat behind Dr. Lowe’s desk. “Good luck.”
I’m so dazed that for a few minutes I am completely still. My classmates scribble their responses all around me, but I’m practically catatonic, eyes fixed on the floor. A hot tear plops onto my hand, startling me out of whatever reverie has me in its grip.
Damn.
Am I really going out like this? Letting a man whom I know even less than I thought I did derail my final? Dent my hard work?
Hell no.
I glance up at the board to read the first prompt and begin writing, my pencil flying to make up for lost time.
The things I felt seemed real, but they were a girlish delusion.
I need to compartmentalize this irrational heartbreak and focus on the last days of my college career.
Like any self-respecting journalism student, I have a low-paying, entry-level, grunt-work job waiting for me in New York.
As complicated and sometimes difficult as my relationship with my father has been, I find myself dodging his shadow but following in his footsteps.
He began here at Finley, and the whole world opened to him.
I believe those same possibilities can open up for me if I’m focused and don’t let my emotions rule me the way they did with Dr. Zekiah Lowe.
Even thinking his name makes my heart pound a little faster, harder, but I ignore that misguided organ and focus on the exam in front of me.
Focus. That’s the key.
I won’t lose sight again.