6. Chapter One Georgia Philips
Chapter One: Georgia Philips
Present Day
H ave you ever had one of those days where everything that can go wrong does so catastrophically?
Today was one of those days.
I woke up late because I’d spent all night cleaning the apartment while my mom was on her trip to the Hamptons. She so rarely took vacations that I didn’t want her to think I couldn’t handle living on my own at the ripe old age of twenty-three. So, I’d sent her off assuring her everything would be fine. When I finally dragged myself out of bed, I realized I only had half an hour to make it to campus, which was twenty minutes from our apartment.
But when I went to the garage to get my motorcycle, there was an enormous scratch along the side. After my bike had fallen over yesterday when I drove over a pothole, I’d hoped it was fine. Now, my last dregs of hope fizzled out when it died following several attempts to start it.
Shelling out the cash for an overpriced Uber to campus, I hightailed it into Art History 201, the last class I needed to finally walk the stage the following November in a graduation gown.
After I sprinted into class and ran down the stairs of the cavernous lecture hall to the front row, I threw myself into the last available seat. Thank God there was still an empty chair in the packed room. Pulling out my pens and a notebook out of my bag, I opened it to a blank page, as I let my heart rate slow.
But my heart couldn’t catch a break when the teacher turned around.
George Devereaux.
My former fake fiancé.
He stood in front of the whiteboard, on which he’d scrawled ART HISTORY 201 in his messy handwriting. Behind his beard, he wore the same quietly amused smirk that still made my heart do a flip.
One of my pens rolled off the desk and landed at his feet. He picked it up and leaned down to place it on my desk, and as he did so, he said quietly, “You’re late.”
Checking my Seiko Lukia watch, I saw that it was 9:03. A mere three minutes after the class’s start time of nine o’clock. Not bad, since I was sweaty, out of breath, and flushed from running up three flights of stairs instead of taking the elevator—which, of course, happened to be broken today. “I’m sure I didn’t miss anything important.”
The sass was a defence mechanism, especially as I currently felt naked without my layers of armour: cat-eye liner, foundation, and bright lipstick. Then again, George Devereaux had always made me feel more vulnerable than I liked .
He straightened, avoiding my gaze, and I saw that behind his lazy confidence and quiet amusement, he was shocked to see me here. Clearly, George hadn’t expected us to meet this way. I was just as surprised, since I’d signed up for this class at the last minute. I’d barely skimmed the syllabus, too busy hoping I could get in and acquire my final option credits for my degree.
George glanced away from me and faced the rest of the class. “Please try to be on time. We have a lot of material to cover in the next two months, and the last thing I want is to have to wait for you to catch up.”
He launched into a spiel about the syllabus and I started writing, hating how my fingers trembled as I scribbled down the date and name of the class. I’d hoped this class would be a fresh start, a blank slate—but this wasn’t any of those things. Not when the lecturer for this class had tangled my heart into more knots than a game of cat’s cradle.
I jotted down dates of quizzes and essays, hearing him talk about the artwork we would cover in this course. Behind me, two girls whispered about how they were only taking the class because they’d heard the lecturer was a quasi-celebrity in the art world and how they wanted him to autograph their prints of his work.
“… Also, to do something fun for this class, there will be an optional field trip to see various art pieces during the reading break,” he said.
His voice jolted me out of my daze, pen poised over my notebook. I shouldn’t have been such a sucker for museums, but I loved them too much to dismiss the possibility of one, even in an undergraduate art class filled with bored students.
“We will be going to Italy and taking guided tours of several museums, exploring the Sistine Chapel, and going to other historical sites of artistic and cultural significance,” George continued .
A wave of murmurs cropped up around me, winding through the students. Some of them darted their gazes up from their phones or sat a little straighter in their seats.
“If you cannot bear the financial burden of this trip right now, I completely understand. There will be some study abroad funding available from the university, but I’ll have to get back to you on the exact amount. Obviously I can’t take all two hundred of you on a trip, and I know many of you have other classes.
“So, I have also arranged a journaling assignment for you to do, since the Met is also holding an exhibit on Christian art for the next two months. I understand the exhibit will also be available virtually on their website, although I highly recommend you all go see it in person. Any questions about that?”
A cluster of hands shot up around me. But all I could think about was the sunkissed memories of eating pasta on the Amalfi coast; the gorgeous, intricately designed buildings that had stood for hundreds of years; and George’s hand in mine as we wandered around Rome. I shook the memory away as questions sprang from several students.
“How long is the trip?”
“When will it be?”
“What museums will we be going to?”
He answered each question with ease, speaking with all the grace and charisma of a well-spoken museum tour guide. Yet I knew him better. I knew underneath all that bravado, he was so much more than anyone here would ever know. More than all the girls not so subtly snapping pictures of him could ever find out online. The worst part was, he still provoked a reaction from me.
He wasn’t just my sort-of ex. He was my cousin Alexander’s brother-in-law, so we had to cross paths at family gatherings. So this class meant we would be seeing far more of each other than usual .
After assuring us that more information about the field trip would be posted online, George moved onto the lecture portion of the class and I kept taking notes. “Now, who can tell me the artist who painted this?”
It was an image of a horse looming over a man who must have fallen on the road. The painting’s subject was mostly in shadow, the horse taking up most of the frame.
Someone blurted out an answer from a few rows behind me. “Someone who really loved horses?”
George chuckled. “Try again.”
“Raphael?” A girl seated to my right guessed. Her lips pressed into a smug smile, her colour-coded sticky notes and highlighters sitting next to her notebook with perfect handwriting. I shouldn’t have despised her just for speaking to him or for being so organized.
Yet part of me hated being in this class with all these people, not wearing my usual full face of makeup with my hair perfectly braided. Part of me wondered if they could all read the emotions written on my face without the mask I typically wore. If they knew what I was thinking about George.
“A good guess. It’s Caravaggio, and no, I don’t know how he felt about horses. This is Conversion on the Road to Damascus , which depicts the conversion of which famous saint?”
When I didn’t hear anyone else speak, I raised my hand. I knew this one, from listening to my cousin-in-law, Katerina, talk about it at a Bible study that she hosted at my uncle’s penthouse. “Paul.”
“Correct.”
I finished the next two and a half hours of the class without any incident. Class ended and everyone filed out. Unfortunately, I was stuck at the bottom of the grand lecture hall since I was in the front row. Which severely dampened my plans of escaping George’s presence .
Whether he was my professor or not, George Devereaux and I couldn’t be together in private.
It could only end in tears, flames, or both.
“Georgia.”
I stuffed my things into my bag and started taking quick strides up the stairs, but the strap of my bag caught on the rail. The frustrated growl I’d been muffling all morning ripped from my throat.
George’s eyes widened a smidgen, but he didn’t step back.
“I just want to talk,” he said.
As if that were any better.
“You’re my professor. This is inappropriate.”
“I’m a guest lecturer, not a professor,” he said. “I got the gig from your uncle’s friend, remember?”
Right, after the investor dinner that Uncle Aaron had arranged for George to attend so he could find a job.
“Good for you. That doesn’t explain why you want to talk.”
“Georgia,” he said again, instead of an explanation, his tone pleading, his hazel eyes wide and desperate as he ran a hand through his dark, wavy hair. “Please.”
“You have no right to ask anything of me.” My voice should have been calm, but a sliver of barely restrained fury threaded through it. “Not after you broke things off.”
“We were never real.”
Somehow, that makes things worse , I wanted to scream. “That doesn’t change that my feelings were—”
No. Not real. My feelings couldn’t have been real since I knew who he was: a player, not a saint. A nomadic, wandering artist, not a man capable of commitment. “My feelings were mildly impacted.”
“I’m sorry.” He stepped closer to me, slightly taller than me on the same step of the staircase. At five-ten, not many men towered above me. But George had never been like most men in my eyes. Until he was. “I know the way we ended things was less than ideal. Still, I’m going to be teaching this class for the next two months. Unless you want to withdraw—”
“No.” I couldn’t do that when getting a degree was so close to the finish line.
My degree mattered, even though I’d had lucrative modelling gigs for the past few years of my life, which made more in a month than most people made in a year. Seeing my framed Anthropology degree, the symbol of my accomplishments—something I’d actually earned—would be a milestone.
It would be concrete evidence to disprove the mocking in the back of my mind. The voices that said people only cared about me because of who I knew or how I looked. Not what I knew or could do.
“I’m not dropping the class,” I said firmly.
“Then we’ll have to be friends.”
“Are you planning on being friends with all two hundred of your students?”
“There are one hundred and ninety-seven of them, actually, but no.”
“You and I have been a lot of things, Mr. Devereaux , but friends has never been one of them.”
“Say that again.” The smirk playing on his lips shouldn’t have been legal. It was bad for my health to be three feet from him while he looked at me like that.
“Friends—”
“No. Mr. Devereaux .”
I rolled my eyes. “We are not friends. I am your student, and you’re teaching this class. I’m going to pass with flying colours, graduate, and spend the rest of my life avoiding you. ”
Turning on my heel, I bolted up the rest of the stairs, taking them two at a time. If only I could have convinced my heart to believe the words I’d just spoken.