Chapter 12 The First Exam
The First Exam
Afew days later, I sat in the classroom staring off into space, my brain completely zoned out while I listened to the soft scratching of pencils on paper. The bell rang, jarring my attention back to reality.
“Pencils down, and turn in your exams at the front of the room,” I called over the noise of scraping chairs and zipping bookbags. “And have a great weekend!”
I smiled to myself as I flipped through the papers, counting to make sure I had them all.
This was a champagne milestone—my first exam as a teacher.
I snapped a quick photo of the pile of exams and sent it to Silvia with the caption “one down, one to go!” She knew how much of myself I had poured into these exams.
My anxiety had been turned up to eleven all week while I prepared—reviewing with the students and finalizing the questions with Cooper. Since test scores were the main metric that Cooper and I would be graded against, we had to work together to write the exam. And it had been… awkward as hell.
He had avoided me like the bubonic plague all week. You’d think I had threatened him bodily harm instead of merely almost-kissing him. Though, it hadn’t felt like mere anything. My lips—not to mention other places—still tingled at the memory as though something had actually happened.
Sure, I saw him in passing between classes and around campus, but whenever I tried to talk to him, he would just freeze like a marble statue and insist he had somewhere else to be.
He might have been embarrassed, or maybe he simply had more sense than I did.
We were competing for the same job. There was no way starting something was a good idea.
Either it would go horribly and the rest of the semester teaching together would be even more awkward, or it would go well, but we would have to call it off in a couple of months when one of us (not me) left.
Yeah, he probably had the right idea by staying away, but it made writing an exam together a real pain in the ass. We had no choice but to email and pass notes under each other’s doors.
Of course, Cooper already had an exam drafted up, but I also wrote a few questions that I wanted to include.
Plus, we had old exams from Stephens to draw from.
Eventually, after a lot of back and forth—emails with attachments named “Exam One draft 18 Final Final?” and sliding printed copies marked up with hot pink pen under his apartment door—we had an exam and key that we agreed on.
I was downright eager to see how the students performed after all that preparation. Hell, I was even looking forward to spending my personal time over the weekend grading.
I was still flipping through exams when I left the classroom, and I ran smack into a hard chest. Cooper.
He grabbed my upper arms to steady us, and we instinctively locked eyes.
This was by far the closest we had been since those stolen moments last week.
My breath caught as I took in the heated expression on his face.
He was clearly remembering the same thing.
“Sorry,” I stammered. I wasn’t sure if I was apologizing for bumping him just now or almost-kissing him. I wasn’t actually sorry for either.
He held my arms for a moment longer than was necessary, eyes boring into my soul. When he finally spoke, I was disappointed to hear him say, “it’s fine,” before stepping around me into the room.
I sucked in a deep breath and exhaled slowly to the count of five, taking a moment to collect myself before heading to the library to begin grading.
***
Grading, it turned out, was almost as much of a pain in the ass as writing the test had been. I spent the entirety of second period carefully reviewing questions—correcting mistakes and scoring against the key—and I only made it through four.
Four exams in an hour.
No wonder Stephens only ever drew slashes over missed questions and wrote the total at the top.
Going through each question attentively took ages.
But I was happy to do it, and I was sure the students would appreciate the detailed evaluation.
That, and I would be handing them over to Cooper for a final check before entering the grades.
It wasn’t usual procedure to have another teacher peer check your exams, but under the circumstances, I could see the necessity.
It would be all too easy for one of us to grade too easily, thereby boosting our test scores over the other’s classes.
Having the other person check our work kept us both honest, even if it did mean more work in the short term.
I was not looking forward to regrading Cooper’s exams, but that was a Sunday problem. I had more than enough to focus on over the next forty-eight hours without adding that to my plate.
I continued to grade the first period exams while the third period students took theirs, all the while trying not to dwell on the fact that I would be fully grading forty-three exams this weekend.
I managed to get through five more during third period, bringing my total remaining down to thirty-four.
Maybe if I really focused, I could get them all done this afternoon and evening. The weather had finally turned to fall, and the October Lovers had their first big activity planned for Saturday evening—a bonfire and s’mores party.
The club had done this activity on a small scale in years past, but I encouraged them to take things up a notch this year.
The bonfire would now be open to the whole school—a proper sized party.
We decided to host it on the Cedar Lake beach instead of in the Grove so that there would be plenty of room for all the extra students.
Due to the scale of the event, I enlisted a few other teachers to help chaperone. The October Lovers seemed like a good group of kids, but I remembered what I had been like in high school. There were definitely going to be a few teens trying to sneak in booze or sneak away to make out in the woods.
These exams needed to get graded and off my plate, so I could direct all of my focus on making the bonfire a success.
By Friday evening, I had the first period exams completely finished, and I was halfway through the third period exams. I tried to push them out of my mind as I met up with Ashley and the hens for a quick bite, before we all headed out to the stadium for the Friday night football game.
I hadn’t missed a single home game while I was a student, and I didn’t intend to start now.
Cooper sat a few rows behind me with his friend Alan Rathbone, the physics teacher, who he had been using as a human shield to avoid me for the last week.
With a shaved head and a toothy smile under a thick beard, Alan was one of those amiable guys that had never met a stranger, and he seemed more than happy to run interference for Cooper.
“What are you looking at?” Ashley asked when she caught me peeking back for the third time.
I swore I felt eyes on me more than a few times, but each time I looked back, the men were both watching the field. “Nothing,” I replied with a sigh.
Ashley regarded me with a raised eyebrow, but didn’t mention it again.
Paranoid. I was being paranoid.
Just because I was thinking about Cooper (constantly) didn’t mean that he was thinking about me. I needed to get over myself. I rolled my neck and flexed my fingers closed and open, trying to expel the feeling, and turned my attention back to the game.
Watching the game was a lost cause as distractions went.
I hadn’t cared about football when I had been a cheerleader—we always faced the crowd, not the field—and I still didn’t give a shit now.
In my youth, I would have just been biding my time until I could see my football-player-boyfriend after the game.
Now, I was looking forward to going back to my cozy apartment and crawling into bed under a mountain of blankets. Alone. And definitely not thinking about the tall man with dark eyes across the hall—who was also alone.
Ugh. I was hopeless.
When I finally did make it back to my room, I went through my nighttime skincare regimen on autopilot, and only paused for a moment when I thought I heard a door close in the hallway.
Luckily, I fell asleep quickly. Unluckily, I had a highly inappropriate dream about the time I hooked up under the bleachers my senior year. But instead of my then-boyfriend, Travis, it was Cooper pushing me back against the concrete pylon.
Cooper’s stubble rasping at my neck.
Cooper’s fingers sliding under my cheer skirt and the elastic of my panties…
I woke up gasping, my sleep-shirt sticking to sweat-dampened skin and my core throbbing at the apex of my thighs.
I splashed some cold water on my face and gulped down a couple of mouthfuls straight from the tap for good measure. It did little to cool my heated body. Back in bed, I lay awake staring at the ceiling, debating whether or not to employ my vibrator. Again.
This little crush was getting out of hand. He was an itch in my brain—and other places—that I just couldn’t scratch, and it was starting to cause problems. My sleep was being impacted, which was unacceptable.
I used to have a lot of sleep issues when I was younger.
I would fall asleep fine, then randomly wake up in the middle of the night unable to fall back to sleep.
Concerned about my development, my parents took me to doctors and sleep clinics.
Nothing helped. I was perfectly healthy.
Doctors gave me meds to help me sleep, and later, I self-medicated with alcohol.
Neither worked. I would just wake up groggy or, worse, hungover.
It wasn’t until I had been living on my own for a while that I was able to sleep through the whole night consistently. It didn’t take a sleep clinic to put the clues together. The problem wasn’t me. I was carrying stress from my parents, and it was keeping me awake.
The situation I was in now wasn’t like that.
Cooper wasn’t stressing me, per se. But the net result was the same.
I was lying awake, listless, with my brain flipping through progressively more inappropriate thoughts at one hundred miles per hour.
And tomorrow, I would be groggy and dragging if I couldn’t sort myself out.
The October Lovers deserved better than a groggy zombie chaperone. I was the one that pushed them out of their comfort zones with the scale of this party. They were counting on me to make sure everything ran smoothly, so they could relax and enjoy themselves.
I rolled over and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to push thoughts of Cooper—and his mouth and his hands—out of my mind. I was never going to sleep if I couldn’t relax…
Fuck it.
I huffed in exasperation with myself as I retrieved my vibrator from my nightstand.
It took less than five minutes of stimulation, my brain conjuring visions of a dark-haired man thrusting into me, before a wave of pleasure rolled through me, and I was finally able to relax. It didn’t mean anything, though. It was just a little crush. I just needed to get some sleep.