Rogue Ever After (The Rogue Series Book 7)

by Tamsen Parker

  There were fifteen minutes left of my office hours, but I couldn’t stay any longer. Brandon and Lydia were already waiting for me outside. I stuffed my laptop into my bag, peeked up and down the hall to check for students, and then snuck out. I nearly ran down the stairs.

  The summer sun greeted me as I burst through the doors, warm and bright, accompanied by a gentle breeze, so different from the terrors of a Toronto winter.

  I had never told Brandon this, but I hadn’t been entirely sure about my decision to accept the research fellowship until about a month after moving. Yeah, I’d weighed the pros and cons, tried to be objective, and ran the decision past my family and friends. Everything seemed to line up. But there’d always been that nagging little worry that I’d chosen Toronto because of Brandon rather than the job. Not that there was anything wrong with it, but relationships that flashed in the pan tended to sizzle out quickly, and then I’d be left with only the job whether I liked it or not.

  Turned out, I had nothing to worry about. Because the spark between me and Brandon had only fanned into a flame so strong that I literally could not picture my life without him anymore. He was the air I breathed. It was corny as shit, but true.

  The two loves of my life were sitting at one of the metal picnic benches in front of Sidney Smith Hall. Lydia was up on the seat next to Brandon, leaning into the scritches he gave her behind her ear. He looked up as I approached, lips curling into his beautiful smile.

  “Hey.”

  “Hi.” He stood and leaned down to give me a kiss. “You’re early.”

  “I skipped out on the last few minutes.”

  Brandon frowned. “What if a student showed up?”

  “Then they can email me. I had someone important to meet.”

  I gave Lydia a hello kiss on the head, slipped my hand into Brandon’s, and we made our way across the street.

  “I got the T-shirt design back this morning,” I said, digging my phone out of my pocket. My podcast listeners had been pestering me for merch, so I’d finally caved and commissioned someone to do a mock up. I pulled up the design that said “I’m progressive and I’m NOT SORRY” in bright yellow block letters.

  “Here, what do you think?” I handed my phone to Brandon who studied it with a furrowed brow.

  “You know, the progressives were kind of racist,” he said, handing my phone back.

  “What?” I glanced at the design again to see if I’d missed something.

  “Yeah, during the progressive era between the 1890s and 1920s in the United States, one argument of the suffrage movement was that the vote of white women could negate the influence of black voters.”

  I gave Brandon my best side-eye. “Are you being serious right now?”

  “Of course, why would I joke about something like that?” When I didn’t answer, he glanced at me, eyes widening. “Oh, you mean progressivism of today.”

  “As in my podcast.”

  “Right, I knew that.”

  “Sure you did.” I pulled him to a stop as we reached the green lawn of King’s College Circle and stood on my toes to give him a kiss. “I love you.”

  He flushed a lovely pink before lowering his lips to mine. “I love you, too.”

  THE END

  Thank You

  Thank you for reading Ipso Facto ILU! It was inspired by my podcast-listening addiction and a few of my own celebrity crushes. I won’t regale you about the time I stumbled across one of my favorite Broadway actors in New York and proceeded to turn into a bumbling idiot. Brandon’s reaction to Jonny would seem composed in comparison.

  This story was also inspired by my days in academia where I studied many of the long-dead old white dudes Brandon loves to quote. “Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is rather depressing, but one of my favorite quotations from the canon of Western political thought. It reminds me to live life to the fullest, take advantage of every opportunity, fight the good fight, and indulge your celebrity crushes.

  If you’d like to get periodic updates on what I’m working on, please subscribe to my Newsletter. For ramblings about food, my attempts at exercise, cute animal pictures, and the occasional rant, follow me on all the social media: Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. For discussions on diversity in storytelling, subscribe to my podcast, World of Stories. For everything else, check out my Website!

  Also by Hudson Lin

  Stepping Out in Faith

  Inside Darkness

  Three Months to Forever

  Fly With Me

  Between the Tension Series

  Between the Push and Pull

  Embracing the Tension

  Anthologies

  Lessons for a Lifetime (Teacher’s Pet anthology)

  Dare to Dream (Rogue Nights anthology)

  About Hudson Lin

  Hudson Lin was raised by conservative immigrant parents and grew up straddling two cultures with ofttimes conflicting perspectives on life. Instead of conforming to either, she has sought to find a third way that brings together the positive elements of both.

  Having spent much of her life on the outside looking in, Lin likes to write stories about outsiders who fight to carve out their place in society, and overcome everyday challenges to find love and happily ever afters. Her books are diverse romances featuring queer and disabled people of color.

  When not engrossed in a story, Lin knits, drinks tea, and works the 9 to 5 in the beautiful city of Toronto, Canada. You can find her online at:

  Website: hudsonlin.com

  Newsletter: go.hudsonlin.com/newsletter

  World of Stories Podcast: worldofstories.podbean.com

  A Little Rebellion

  KD Fisher

  About This Story

  Veteran public school teacher and union rep Ruth Chan is always ready for the curveballs life throws at her—an updated curriculum, a new principal, a replacement superintendent… But she’s not ready for a cute woman at the dog park to divert her attention the day before a new school year. Ruth can't afford to pursue love when her students need her.

  The last thing Mia Davis needs is a distraction. It’s her first year teaching and she’s going to do things right, dang it! No matter how much she wants to fantasize about a certain colleague she met at the dog park, Mia has to stand up to the intolerant jerk of a principal and help her students learn despite the horrible new test-prep curriculum.

  As a close friendship develops between Mia and Ruth, the women must fight to save the school they both love and decide if their friendship can turn into something more.

  1

  Ruth

  August

  “Frida! Wait! No!” My voice was a rusty squeak as my dog slipped her collar and dashed across the park lawn toward the off-leash area. Last week, a very angry white lady shouted at me for letting Frida loose before we were safely within the confines of the fenced-in dog run. Her threats to call animal control echoed in my ears as I jogged after my damn dog.

  “It’s okay. I got her.” I slowed to a halt, only to find my greyhound jumping all over a young woman while her dog looked on with great interest. Quickly I rearranged my features into a placating smile and gently pried my dog off, stopping her from attacking the woman’s face with kisses. “She sure is fast, though.” The woman shook her head, laughing as I wrestled Frida’s collar back on and tightened it one notch.

  “Thank you so much. Sorry. She just gets a little excited sometimes. Thanks for grabbing her. Not that she was going anywhere but here…” When I finally stopped rambling and glanced at the woman, I lost all my words. She was incandescent. The late afternoon light caught the golden threads in her chestnut hair, messily pulled back into a braid. She resonated a kind of fresh athletic wholesomeness, with the kind of healthy glow achieved only by spending a lot of time being active outside. Really, she looked like she’d stepped off a soccer field or out of a Nike commercial from the 90s. Her pretty brown eyes, framed by dark lashes, widened.

  “Everything okay?”
The woman cocked her head to the side, expression slipping from amusement to light concern.

  I shook my head and raked my fingers through my hair. “Oh, yeah. Fine.”

  We walked into the dog park together, Frida bounding after the woman’s brown-and-white boxer who seemed wholly committed to sniffing everything in sight.

  “I don’t get him. He practically pulls my arm off on the way over. Then once we get here, he ignores all the other dogs.” She rolled her eyes.

  “Yeah, Frida definitely loves it here.” Usually I dreaded making small talk with people at the dog park because I was horrible at coming up with adequately light chitchat. But I would talk about the weather for days if it meant I could keep talking to her.

  “She’s beautiful. How old is she?”

  “Two. It’s my first time having a dog, and I was worried when I adopted her that she’d need tons of exercise. Turns out, she’s lazy as hell.”

  “You’re lucky. Gary is a wild child. I usually try to take him for a run most days, and I’ve probably played more games of indoor fetch than my downstairs neighbors can handle. But he has so much dang energy.” The woman drifted toward one of the benches along the fence and gestured for me to sit next to her.

  I slid onto the bench, feeling weirdly self-conscious. Not wanting to gape openly at this woman, I glanced around the dog park. For a sunny August afternoon, it wasn’t very crowded. A couple of women chatted in the shade of a tree at the opposite end, leashes draped over their shoulders. A young dad and daughter threw a tennis ball for their dog, a dopey smiley mutt, the little girl shrieking with delight each time the dog caught the ball. The air was warm, not quite hot. A storm had blasted through the city the night before, leaving lush green and sun in its wake.

  The woman stretched her arms overhead, revealing a strip of golden skin between the hem of her loose tank top and bright pink running shorts. I swallowed hard and looked back to where Frida was now sprinting away from a tiny white puppy. Desperate to keep the conversation going at any cost, awkward or not, I blurted out the first words that bubbled to the surface of my mind.

  “Do you, uh, come here often?” As soon as the words left my lips, I had to suppress the urge to cringe. I was a thirty-three-year-old woman who couldn’t have a damn casual conversation with a very cute, probably very straight woman at the fucking dog park.

  The woman giggled, a surprisingly bright, warm sound, and shrugged. “Smooth.” Her eyes flicked to my face then back to watching the dogs frolic on the grass. “But yeah. I just moved to Shadyside in July when I finished up grad school. It’s about a five-mile run here and back, so just barely enough to keep Gary calm. What about you? Do you come here often?” She lifted her eyebrows and laughed again.

  Was she…flirting? Hoping like hell I was being subtle, I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. No visible signs she was queer. No rainbow shoelaces. No astrology-themed forearm tattoos. No undercut beneath her thick, messy braid. Just cute, brightly colored athletic clothing, dewy skin, and a smile that lit up her whole face. Not that how people present necessarily says anything about their sexuality, but rainbow shoelaces certainly would’ve given me a handy clue.

  I could practically hear my best friend Joey’s voice in my ear. Ask her what her name is! Ask about grad school! Say something, Ruth!

  “What made you choose Gary? I mean, the name. Why did you name him that? It’s kind of a…human name for a dog, isn’t it? Then again I guess so is Frida. But yeah.” Wow. Totally crushed it.

  That bright clear laugh again. I didn’t even mind that I had been rendered incapable of carrying on a normal conversation if it meant I could keep hearing that beautiful sound. Hell, I would even bust out some of my worst dad jokes if that was what it took.

  “His name was Jerry when I got him. But I knew a really awful dude with that name growing up. He wouldn’t respond to other names, though, so this was close enough. Plus you know Gary the snail and everything.”

  My nose scrunched in confusion. “The snail?” Was he a sports mascot or something? God, I really needed to get a TV. My students never let me live this kind of shit down.

  The woman turned toward me fully, and I had to try really hard not to stare directly into her eyes. The color was intoxicating, a lighter brown than I’d ever seen before, like perfectly brewed tea. She narrowed her gaze at me. “Like from SpongeBob. You know, Gary. His pet snail?”

  I shrugged and rubbed by hand over the soft, buzzed hair at the back of my neck. I really needed to stop doing that when I was nervous. Which, why the hell was I nervous? “I know what SpongeBob is. I just never watched it, I guess.”

  “Never watched SpongeBob, huh? Please don’t tell me I have a dog named after a kids’ cartoon and yours is named after, like, Frida Kahlo.”

  I grimaced. “She is, actually. But I didn’t come up with it. My mom did.” My mother, a retired art history professor, had insisted that an animal this goofy needed a classy name. It didn’t exactly suit the gangly greyhound, but I loved both my dog and the painter, so it worked out just fine for me.

  “Oh man, I feel like a total pleb.”

  “Nah.” I batted at the air. “I promise I’m not a pretentious asshole or anything.”

  The woman’s lips parted, and I could see a mischievous glint in her eye, but before she could say anything, her phone pinged loudly from where it was strapped to her arm. As her eyes flicked over the screen, her face fell. “Wait…how is it four already? Crap.” Her whole demeanor transformed as she sprang into action. Calling for Gary in an almost frantic tone, she clipped his leash onto his harness and started jogging toward the gate.

  “Sorry,” she called over her shoulder. “I start a new job tomorrow, and I have a million things to do. See you around?”

  And in my only genuinely composed moment of the afternoon, I flashed her my best smile and called back, “I hope so.”

  …

  The first day of school was unmitigated chaos. Dr. Garcia, the principal who’d hired me at Edison High School, not to mention my social justice pedagogy superhero, had announced her retirement at the end of the previous school year. To the teachers in the building who cared about equity and authentically supporting students, the announcement had been a blow. But Dr. Garcia was seventy and, after an almost fifty-year career in the Pittsburgh school system, deserved to spend some time with her grandkids.

  As the building union representative, I’d been tangentially involved in the search for new leadership, and we’d pre-interviewed a number of promising candidates. Then, in July, things fell apart. The center, or in this case, the superintendent, did not hold. In a rambling memo addressed to the entire school system’s listserv, the new superintendent quit his five-year term only one year into the position. The board’s reaction was swift, harsh, and unpopular. They’d brought in the founder of a charter-school chain in North Carolina with a reputation for being tough on both teachers and students. This new superintendent was brash and intense and took it upon himself to become intimately involved in the hiring process for the new principal at Edison, the lowest performing and lowest-income school in the district. He’d hired Bob Christensen, despite a veritable chorus of concerns raised by vice principals, grade heads, and other principals in the district.

  Before I’d even looked at Christensen’s bio, I knew who he would be. An Ivy League grad who did Teach for America for one year before jumping right into administrative roles. A young white man who spoke before he listened and filled his monologues with buzzwords. Basically, an underqualified dick. And he was. At the first all-school faculty meeting, Mr. Christensen stood in front of dozens of public school teachers, sweating and anxious in a stifling auditorium, and told us we were failing. The focus of his diatribe was test scores. Test scores and accountability. Efficiency and high standards. Grit, a word I’d hoped I would never hear again after grad school, was another popular term.

  “Remember how Dr. Garcia used to make us banana bread?” Joey, Edison’
s gym teacher and beloved basketball coach, not to mention my best friend in and outside of the building, whispered in my ear. “And when she found out DeAndre doesn’t eat gluten, she started making two different kinds.” He sighed heavily.

  My snarky response was on my lips when I felt the energy in the room change. That gut-drop feeling of all eyes on me.

  Mr. Christensen stared intently at Joey and me, wearing an expression I’d worked hard never to show my students. Patronizing irritation. I half expected the man to ask us if we wanted to share our thoughts with the whole class. It was worse.

  “Respect is vital.” He’d been trying for militant, but he sounded nervous. “If you cannot be respectful, I suggest you leave.”

  Numbing blue-hot rage rushed through me. It was a feeling I hadn’t known since high school, since days of lying to everyone I knew and shoving myself into a mold that didn’t fit. Was this twenty-something white boy really going to try this shit? Was he really going to start off like this? Talking down to Edison’s only two openly queer faculty members? Dismissing people who’d given up countless hours advocating for students?

  Next to me Joey bowed his head and inched down in his seat. I did the same. “Sorry, sir.” Our voices twined together in the tense air.

  Christensen nodded. The meeting went on, but I heard nothing.

  As I dragged myself up the stairs to my classroom for the first ninth-grade cohort meeting of the year, I knew the entire day would be a wash. My carefully orchestrated plan was shot to shit. My warm welcome for the new biology teacher and outline for giving helpful student feedback would dissolve into a complaining session. A few teachers would like Christensen. Our resident conservatives, with their camo T-shirts and endless stream of racialized complaints about students, would love his “no nonsense” approach.