Chapter Five #3
Maggie didn’t think anything of the exchange and went back to her grading, but after a moment, Taliesen made a strangled sound that could only be described as abject disapproval.
Maggie looked up from her grading and stared at the back of his head.
She waited for him to turn around and explain himself, but his shoulders just arced into his ears and his foot continued tapping as he muttered a quiet “hm.”
“Do you have something to say?” she snapped.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to. Clearly you have an opinion about what just happened.”
“What I think doesn’t matter,” he muttered, flipping the page in his book.
He stretched over it to type a note on his computer, his arms awkwardly bent around the pages.
Then, as if he just couldn’t stop himself, he turned in his chair to face her.
“Was that wise?” His voice was tense, like he was holding back from saying more.
Maggie leveled a glare at Taliesin that even he should have found impressive. “Was giving my student an extension on a paper that I assigned for my class wise?”
She thought she had appropriately emphasized all the Is and mys in that sentence, but Taliesin went on. “Our jobs are to prepare them for the real world, for real work. Do you think they’re just going to be able to get extensions whenever they want?”
Maggie barely contained her eye roll. “Extensions do exist in the real world, you know.” Maybe he doesn’t know, she thought.
He’s never worked in the real world. If Dean Clearwater hadn’t begged her to be nice to him, she might have said that out loud.
“And not that I need to explain my teaching methods to you, but I allow my students to ask for an extension when they need it. It’s in my syllabus. ”
“You’re going to get taken advantage of.”
She scoffed. “They’re adults.” Her voice was rising with each word, close to shrill. “Let me guess, you’re the kind of professor who expects someone to finish their work at their grandmother’s gravesite. Bereavement be damned.”
“I wouldn’t have to be if students didn’t have grandmothers who died during Alchemy 101 only to get resurrected and tragically die again during 102,” he said with a sniff.
“If you respect your students, they won’t have to lie to you.”
He looked taken aback. “Of course I respect my students. I respect them by not giving them an opportunity to waste my time or theirs, which is finite.”
She barked a laugh, but his expression was empty of any humor.
He was one to talk about wasting time, considering how much they’d all already wasted thanks to his mistakes.
“We’re going to have to agree to disagree on what exactly constitutes respect, I think,” she said.
They stared at each other, the small space between them thrumming with unspent words.
Taliesin looked like he wanted to say something else, but Maggie shifted her chair and tore her gaze from him.
She felt his eyes on her, but she refused to give him the satisfaction and didn’t look away from her work.
Finally, Taliesin’s desk creaked as he returned to his reading, flipping pages in his ancient books and making notes on his computer.
The rest of the afternoon passed in a strained silence before Taliesin stood, sliding one of the thick tomes into his bag along with his laptop. He caught Maggie’s eye and said curtly, “Have a good weekend, Maggie.”
He was nearly in the hall before Maggie remembered the dean’s plea and she returned a halfhearted, “You, too.”
As much as she wanted to bask in the silence of her now-vacated office, Maggie and Dahlia had a standing date at their friend’s bar in downtown Galloway.
Somehow Dahlia had also persuaded her to look for the masked man.
She had no idea what, if anything, would jog her memory about the man, but she had to try.
Her stomach gave a sort of leap at the thought of finding the stranger.
If nothing else, maybe it would banish thoughts of Arthur Taliesin’s strong arms from her mind.
She had just finished turning off the lights that lined her bookshelf when Dahlia appeared. “Ready?”
“Please,” Maggie replied, locking the door to her office. “I need to get out of here. This was the longest week of my life.”
“Longer than the week when we trained for that half-marathon together?” Dahlia asked as she looped her arm through Maggie’s. Neither of them were runners, and they’d given up after only a week of training, thighs sore and knees wobbly.
“Longer.”
“Longer than that week Dean Clearwater observed all our classes?” It was standard for all first-year teachers, but they’d both spent the entirety of the week nearly shaking from the nerves, hopeful their contracts would be renewed at the end of it. Thankfully, they were still here four years later.
“Longer.”
“What about that week I made you workshop stand-up jokes for my new career?”
“No,” Maggie admitted. “Absolutely nothing on this earth could be longer than that week.”
“Just wanted to establish a baseline. Needed to see how strong I should ask Rodrigo to make our drinks tonight.”