Chapter Three Bram
Chapter Three
Bram
The next afternoon, I walk into my office and find Leo Saint James on my love seat, feet propped on a stack of books, tossing an apple up into the air and catching it with efficient flicks of his wrist.
I skirt around Leo’s long legs to get to my desk. “Busy day at the Saint James* office?” I ask mildly as I set down my leather satchel and start pulling out my things.
“I pay people to be busy for me,” says Leo, not bothering to sit up from his long-limbed slouch.
I sit down and crack open my laptop. “And you didn’t want to be un-busy in your own city?”
“I had to visit the Mount Astra factory, and the idea of driving back was too exhausting. I had to come here and rest.”
“It’s a half-hour drive back to your office,” I reply. “It probably took you twenty minutes just to park and walk here.”
Leo leans his head back against the edge of the love seat and closes his eyes. The apple dangles from his hand. “Exactly. Now I’m doubly exhausted. How is Dr. Loe today?”
“Good. Had my first Bio 1 lecture of the year.” Bio 1 is a massive course; even chopped into three lecture sections, each section has over four hundred students.
Four hundred students with new backpacks and flushed cheeks from having rushed over from some wrong building or another.
Half took unnecessarily detailed notes, while the other half looked like they’d already found a source of cheap beer on campus.
All of them reminded me of unsteady kittens about to fall face-first into a bowl of milk.
“Ah. Science babies,” says Leo. “When do you get to teach the big kids?”
“This afternoon.”
In the interest of fairness, our department divides the 100- and 200-level courses among the teachers evenly, and while I know some professors prefer the smaller, upper-division assignments, I never mind teaching the early stuff.
It’s mostly first-years, and yes, they are exhausting, but they’re kind of adorable too.
And nothing beats watching a student discover that they like science, that they can be good at it, that this is only the beginning and there will be more and more and more, as much science as they want.
“By the way,” Leo says, in a voice that is too casual to be truly offhand, “that cute little hookup of yours was scurrying to Salih while I was walking in.”
Salih Hall houses the psychology and gender studies departments . . . and the political science department.
And I knew Maddie was teaching here, I knew she’d be in the building next to me, and yet—
I guess I thought it wouldn’t affect me. That I wouldn’t immediately think of Saturday night, of the plush curve of her ass while I had her bent over a kitchen table in an abandoned apartment above a dive bar.
Of how wet my cock had been every time I slid free of her body.
I look over at Leo and find him regarding me with a shrewd silver stare.
His lidded eyes and bored expression might fool the poor souls who are ensorcelled by his angelic features and enviable hair, but not me.
Leo and I have enough history that I can recognize when his interest has moved past curious to here be dragons.
“Yes,” I say finally, having found my this is neutral information voice. “She’s adjuncting here.”
“Mm.” Leo gives his apple an indolent toss. And then another. “And this is information she disclosed to you while you were upstairs explaining local parking regulations to her?”
The tips of my ears burn—one of the few things from my awkward childhood that’s followed me into my thirties—and I look back at my laptop. “She’s going to help out with the twins. Actually.”
The apple stops.
“The twins,” he says.
“And Fern. Sometimes. Maybe.”
“Bram, you slept with the nanny?”
“She’s a childcare provider,” I say, a little sternly. “And we didn’t have an employee-employer relationship when it happened.”
“Sure, sure,” reassures Leo. “I mean, it would be the most interesting thing you’ve done since you and Sara went all FernGully on construction equipment in your twenties, but I know our rebellious Bram is all mature and well-behaved now.”
I’m not really listening at this point. I have the semester course listings pulled up on my laptop, and I’ve already found the classroom Maddie is teaching in today. If I go now, I can still catch her.
I stand up before I have a chance to talk myself out of it, and Leo blinks up at me. Then he grins. “Are you going to go find her? Your childcare provider?”
“I should make sure she has everything she needs for this afternoon, since it’ll be her first time alone with the kids,” I say. I think it’s plausible. It’s plausible enough that I believe it myself.
I just don’t know if it’s the entire truth.
Leo surges up from the love seat. “Excellent, I’m coming with you.”
“Absolutely not—”
But he’s already up and walking toward the door, his expensive shoes gleaming along with the apple in his hand.
It only takes me a few strides to catch up with him—despite being much shorter than him for the first part of high school, I’m every bit as tall as he is now—and then we’re pushing out of Gerhart (molecular biosciences, ecology, and undergraduate bio) and into the late August sun.
Leo tosses his apple as he walks, silver watch flashing on his wrist, the lines of his Italian cotton shirt pulling at his shoulders and arms. His trousers have somehow kept their perfect crease even after he’s sprawled all over my office, and the sun catches the sharp perfection of his jaw and cheekbones.
Undergrads of every gender stare open-mouthed at him as we pass, something we both ignore.
When it comes to Leo Saint James, admiration is to be expected.
Particularly when the admirers have no idea how cutting, cunning, and cruel Leo can be when he’s in the mood.
Leo suddenly stops just before we reach the steps up to Salih’s glass doors. “Bram,” he says in a whisper, yanking at my arm. “What the fuck is that thing?”
I follow his eyes to the bench by the stairs, where a gray and brown beast is watching us with unimpressed gold eyes.
Its ears barely emerge from its fluff, its face is framed by drooping whiskers and what looks like a beard, and it’s so round that the shadow it casts on the sidewalk is a perfect circle. It gives a low growl of warning.
“Oh. That’s Dr. Monty Python.”
“Dr. Monty Python?”
“The humanities department gave him an honorary doctorate in litter-ature last year,” I clarify.
“I— This makes no sense.”
Oh my god, finally! A kindred spirit! “I’ve been trying to say this!
It makes no sense to name the Astra University campus cat after a python when our mascot is a copperhead snake, which is a type of viper!
Pythons are nothing like vipers! Pythons strangle their prey!
Vipers strike! Vipers are venomous! I don’t even know who came up with this stupid name; probably somebody in Fine Arts—”*
“No,” Leo interrupts. “No, this creature makes no sense. That is not a cat.”
“We’re certain it’s a cat,” I say. And then amend, “Well, maybe like seventy-thirty that it’s a cat. Actually, the oSTEM club is trying to get an internal grant* to run a feline DNA test on him.”
“You should do that,” Leo says, fear and disgust edging every syllable. “Because I’m pretty sure that thing came from hell. We’re very close to Stull, you know.”*
Leo follows me cautiously up the stairs, careful to keep me between him and Dr. Monty at all times, and then we go through the doors and find the large tiled staircase up to the second floor.
I haven’t been in this building since I was an undergrad myself, so it takes me a minute to find Maddie’s class.
The door is closed; she’s still teaching.
I can hear the appealing alto of her voice, and when I come up to the window set into the door, I can see—
“Oh, she’s poli-sci, all right,” Leo says. “Look at her. She looks like she’s running for mayor of a mid-sized town in the upper Midwest.”
Leo isn’t wrong. If yesterday Maddie looked like she’d just come from Sunday brunch, then today she looks like she just came from a casual sit-down with the morning news.
Wide-legged trousers and a white silk blouse, both of which look understatedly expensive.
She’s wearing a tidy strand of pearls that nestle at the base of her neck, and her long, blond hair falls in loose curls over her shoulders. She looks focus-grouped.
She looks beautiful too.
“What is this section?” Leo asks.
“Intro to US Politics.”
“She doesn’t have the room,” observes Leo, taking a bite of his apple. Juice shines on his lower lip and he licks it away, and a student walking toward us accidentally drops a stack of handouts onto the floor.
I turn away from Leo’s latest convert and see that he’s right about my brat—ah, childcare provider. Maddie doesn’t have the room, and while I don’t know her well, it feels completely out of character based on everything I do know about her.
She’s in the front, futzing with an uncooperative laptop (something we’ve all lived through but that can be extra brutal on the first day), and I can see at least seven sleeping students from where I’m standing.
A clump of football player–shaped boys are talking openly in the back, and several students are looking at their phones under their desks.
This close to the door, I can hear Maddie clearly as she starts speaking again, the words coming out lilting and a little uncertain, almost like she’s waiting for someone else to tell her the right answer.
Nothing like the fearless brat who unflinchingly negotiated herself to a 25 percent raise yesterday.
“So . . . that will be the judiciary section. We’ll have one final section on the media and politics, and . . . did you have a question? Just stretching? Sorry. Um, media will be the last section, and then we’ll have the final. And—that’s it. That’s all. Does anyone have any questions?”