Chapter 10 #3
I stopped.
Beth’s Story
Carlos Rafael Rivera
Countless young men sitting around us stared at us again before returning to their conversations.
“What's wrong?” He took off his glasses and Zach paused beside him. “Don't you want to sit with us?”
I took a deep breath.
“Your sexist comments are insulting.” It became quiet around us. “And I don’t want to surround myself with people who care whether I’m a man or a woman.”
A murmur went through the fellow students around us, but I didn’t let it turn into a scene.
“I thought we could be friends,” Lucas laughed as if I had made a joke, but when I just stared at him seriously and crossed my arms, he took off his sunglasses and something in his tone shifted. “Believe me, princess. You'd rather have us both here as friends than enemies.”
Friends. His gaze and the way he had leaned toward me and talked to me earlier triggered a strange gut feeling in me. One that I preferred to trust.
No woman was safe in a man's world.
“I don't need a man to survive here.”
I even preferred Brittany to one of these show-off dandies.
A shadow flitted across Lucas's face, but Zach turned away from him and continued walking, accompanied by other young men who immediately started talking to him as if he were actually someone famous here.
“Whatever you say, judge's daughter. In case you change your mind.” He laughed, but his smile was cold. “You still have one chance left.”
I turned away, pressed my lips together, and made my way to one of the empty seats in the upper middle section.
I could still feel his gaze on my back, wandering down my black pants, but when I turned around and sat down, he had already turned away, and young men were now crowding around him, occasionally glancing at me before talking to him, and the whole group of men took their seats seven rows in front of me.
Had the others been afraid of me? Or had Lucas wanted to play with me from the start?
Slightly disgusted by his behavior, I decided not to concern myself with my fellow students any further and took out my notebook instead.
I randomly made my first notes on how law school worked, how lawyers behaved, and jotted down possible quotes that had popped into my head throughout the day.
The door diagonally behind me closed audibly, and some of the students looked around, while others hurried to their seats.
Borgov II
Carlos Rafael Rivera
Someone walked swiftly down the stairs, past me, but it was the smell of coffee and cedar wood that made me look up from my notes to the man in the dull dark blue checkered tailored suit and brown leather bag slung over his shoulder, his hair a light ash brown streaked with soft gray.
With a strangely familiar feeling, I watched him stride calmly across the parquet floor to the table behind which he turned around to set his bag down.
I lowered my pen completely.
No...
My hand clenched around the fountain pen as if I could hold on to it while the ground was being pulled out from under my feet.
He looked up and the traitorous lump in my chest made an overwhelming leap.
It really was him.
Shakily, I drew in my breath.
No... This isn't happening.
He took off his suit jacket, hung it over the chair, and I looked at the matte dark blue vest that hugged his slim, masculine body over his white shirt and midnight blue tie, but I lost myself in the way the shirt stretched across his broad shoulders.
“Good afternoon,” he said in that calm voice I had missed so much. Just like his relaxed smile, which he flashed at students who nodded to him. “I’m Professor Rydell.”
This couldn’t be real...
His features relaxed completely and he began to roll up his shirt sleeves. My eyes automatically focused on his hands, decorated with prominent veins, following the ink-filled threads across his wrists and up his forearms.
The swarm of moths in my stomach came to life, and I returned my gaze to his fingers until my face felt as if I had stared into a fire for too long.
“I will do my best to teach you all the common debating techniques and explain the philosophy behind law.”
His gaze wandered through the rows as he unpacked a stack of papers.
The fragile lump in my chest began to pound.
Never in my life had I wished so urgently to be invisible. To simply disappear. To be swallowed up by the earth...
Nothing could have prepared me for the moment when his eyes locked onto mine, like brittle autumn leaves clinging to dry grass. The moment when all relaxation drained from his face.
The entire room turned to look at me, but I only had eyes for the one man who could read me like a book, guide me like a quill pen on the parchment of this world, and change the lines of my existence with the ink of my very being.
My best friend's father...
The look in his eyes. My downfall.
What had I done?
The feeling when you've written something, but all of a sudden you bump into the inkwell and have to watch as the ink bleeds everything you've worked on.
That's all I could feel the moment I saw you sitting there.
– Leaking Batteries Diary