by Selena Kitt
“What’s going to happen to him?” Ivy asked once all the police cars except Patrick’s had vacated the driveway.
“Foster care.” Patrick sat at the kitchen table, still in uniform, rubbing his tired eyes. “Hopefully somewhere stable.”
“I thought for sure it was that guy in my barn.” She sat beside him at the table, feeling him shift his weight at the touch of her knee against his. “The escaped convict.”
“We caught him.” He glanced up at her.
“You did?” Her jaw dropped. “I didn’t see anything on TV.”
“It was on the eleven o’clock news.”
Figures. She’d been in the middle of watching the finale of Buffy and shoveling down popcorn.
“So you knew it wasn’t the crazy guy!” she exclaimed, hitting him hard on the shoulder.
“I didn’t know who it was!” Patrick protested, rubbing the spot where she’d hit him. “Could have been anyone. I almost wish it had been a bad guy…”
She met his eyes, feeling his sadness and her own for poor little Brian. She’d already said a hundred times—and Patrick had dismissed her assertion at least as many—that she should have known, should have done something for him the other night while she was babysitting.
“And you, Missy…” Patrick sat back in his chair, crossing his arms over his broad chest. “I told you to stay in the house.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” She traced the edge of one of her mother’s placemats on the table, unable to meet his eyes. “I couldn’t stand not knowing if you were safe.”
He had her in his arms in an instant, and she didn’t resist him. “I wanted you safe.”
“Protect and serve,” she whispered against his chest, settled firmly in his lap.
“It’s what I do.” He sounded so sad, even more sad than he’d been about Brian. “It’s who I am.”
“I know.” She lifted her face to meet his eyes, tracing the line of his lips with her finger. “And I love you.”
“Ivy…” He shook his head, that sad look never leaving his eyes.
“No, listen,” she insisted. “You listen. I was terrified tonight. Beyond terrified. I thought I might die. I thought you might die.”
“No.” His arms tightened around her. “I wouldn’t have let anything happen to you.”
“Shhh!” She covered his mouth with her hand. “Tonight, when you hung up and I thought… anything could happen to you, to me… I suddenly realized what was truly important, what was worth living for. You, Patrick. You. Me and you.”
Slowly, she let her hand drop to her lap, waiting for his response, breath held.
“Do you mean it?” He swallowed, blinking fast, and she thought, just for a moment, there might be tears in his eyes.
“Yes.” She cupped his face in her hands, kissing him softly. “You are the best, bravest man I’ve ever known, and I’ve been incredibly stupid. I was afraid, so afraid of losing you. The thought of you dying somewhere out there…”
She closed her eyes, the overwhelming fear she’d felt resurfacing, filling her heart. Patrick kissed the tears falling down her cheeks.
“I can’t promise you nothing is ever going to happen to me.”
“I know.” She laughed through her tears, shaking her head. “Who can? What guarantees do we ever get? I could have died the other night out on the road, at the hands of some deranged lunatic, if you hadn’t come along. Or tonight, for that matter. Or hell, I could get hit by a bus walking across the street tomorrow. Or you could get diagnosed with some terminal illness. Or the whole world could blow up right now.”
“Well, the odds are against the last one…”
“It’s not the dying that matters, Patrick.” She pressed her forehead against his. “It’s the living. It’s the living that counts. And I want to live the hell out of this life with you.”
He grinned. “You do?”
“I do.”
Patrick leaned back, his gaze appraising her. “Well then we’re going to have to have a little talk.”
“About what?” she asked cautiously.
“If you ever, ever disobey me like that again…”
She raised her eyebrows at him, smirking. “Disobey you?”
“Love, honor and obey, Ivy. I take my oaths seriously. You should too.” He ignored the way she stuck her tongue out at him for the second time that night.
“Wait… was that a proposal?” She blinked at him.
He ignored her question too. “I told you to stay in the house. If you ever do anything like that again… I’ll… I’ll…”
She crossed her arms over her chest, eyes narrowing. “You’ll what?”
“Spank you.”
She laughed. “Promises, promises!”
“Little brat.” He kissed her fully on the mouth, his hands already roaming, hitting all the right hot spots. She moaned softly, the thought of those big hands spanking her ass filling her with so much lust she could barely see straight.
“You know, my parents aren’t home,” she murmured, straddling him in the chair, loving the sound of his moan when she rocked against the hard steel of his cock. “Remember what we used to do when they went out of town?”
“I’m not driving into town after midnight to buy a keg.”
“No, not that.” She giggled, sighing softly when he cupped her breasts in his hands, rubbing her nipples until they hardened under her t-shirt. “They’ve still got a king-sized bed.”
He chuckled. “Good, because I’ve got a king-sized erection.”
“Race you.”
They were off, and so were their clothes, including Patrick’s uniform and gun belt, by the time they reached the bedroom. There was no stopping them now, no stopping anything, she knew, whether it involved life or death, but as Patrick held her to him and filled her with everything, not the least of which was his love, Ivy had never felt so safe.
Bailey and the Professor
Epic fail. Those were the words she should have tattooed on her forehead.
Bailey chewed thoughtfully on her pen cap as she watched her chemistry prof unload his briefcase onto his desk, turning to hang his long overcoat on a hook before surveying the room with those sharp, sexy blue eyes of his. He always looked like he wanted to start a little trouble. He didn’t miss anything with those eyes. She shifted in her seat, uncrossing and re-crossing her legs, smoothing her skirt over her thighs.
She knew she’d failed the test. She’d known it when she handed it over to him on Friday, a sinking feeling in her belly. He’d raised his eyebrows in question and she couldn’t do much except bite her lip and shrug. She certainly wasn’t going to tell him, “Yeah, I failed it.” Hours of studying, falling asleep at her little desk, drooling on her keyboard until she short-circuited the letter “b” and her fat, orange cat, Simon, jumped up to remind her it was time for his breakfast—and for what? A big fat F.
The thing was, Jacobs wasn’t a bad prof. He was stern and exact, but she supposed all chemistry teachers had to be. One mistake in chemistry could blow up the whole building. But somehow he still made chemistry interesting—something Bailey thought impossible—and even made her want to learn it. It wasn’t his problem, it was hers. She’d sailed through all her biology classes, dissecting frogs and fetal pigs like a pro, but when it came to chemistry, things just didn’t add up. Literally. She couldn’t do the math.
She’d tried everything. Math tutors—her father agreed to pay for one and the poor old guy practically had a heart attack every session because of Bailey’s constant mistakes. That turned out to be a total waste of time and money. She’d tried staying after class—Professor Jacobs was more than willing to stay and help. Sometimes the line up to his desk was so long she’d have to give up and head to work. American Fitness was open twenty-four hours a day and she got a lot of studying done sitting at the front desk.
Her roommate, Joanna, kept teasing her that it was Professor Jacobs’ good looks that had Bailey all distracted, and Bailey let her t
hink so. Granted, the man was good-looking. And young. She didn’t quite know how young, but not that much older than his students. And he was kind of distracting. She’d found herself watching Dom—he told all his students to call him Dom, short for Dominic—when he turned toward the board to write something on it, wearing jeans and a white button-down shirt, his suit coat thrown over a chair, and wondering about him.
More students filed in, the tangled white wires of ear buds connected to iPhones dangling from their necks, wrapped around yellow and gold hoodies with CMU, CENTRAL MICHIGAN or some variation on the front. Some of the boys looked like they’d just rolled out of bed at the crack of noon, bedhead and PJ bottoms included. The girls were more smartly dressed, short skirts in spite of the cold temperatures outside, and blouses or tight sweaters or button-down shirts so low cut as to be indecent, all of them, she was sure, trying to catch Dom’s attention.
“Hey, can you stay after today?” His presence was hot beside her, like standing next to the sun, but his voice was low, as if he was telling her a secret. His hand pressed a Scantron flat on her desk, face down, and she saw his red-penned note on the back: See Me. It was the test. He’d been passing them out while she was daydreaming.
“Yeah, sure.” She couldn’t help the flush on her cheeks, spreading lower to her cleavage, just as exposed as any other girls’ there, she had to admit. She wasn’t above trying to catch his attention that way. Like the rest of the female population, she hoped maybe he might take pity on her and pass her through the class. She’d tried everything else, after all. And sometimes, the way he looked at her like he was now, full of warmth and hunger, she thought maybe she’d succeeded. “Am I in trouble?”
“See me.” He pointed to the red-penned words.
He finished passing out the tests, all business as class began, the lecture starting, as it always did, with some sort of funny story or joke—something engaging and easy to listen to. He was magic up there, pulling in even the most bored and disinterested students, and usually she thoroughly enjoyed watching it all happen, but today she couldn’t stop thinking about her test.
See me.
Was she failing? They only had two tests the whole semester and this was the first. But she’d turned in all her homework. And her labs. She’d done the best she could on those. Wouldn’t they count for something?
If she failed, it would mean the end of her future career.
And she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life sitting at the front desk of American Fitness drinking smoothies from the juice bar in lieu of dinner and watching re-runs of Friends on her iPad. Bailey knew what her calling was, and that wasn’t it.
See me.
So he wanted to see her. Maybe it was something good. Maybe she’d done better on her test than she thought. Bailey glanced around the room, peeking at the Scantron papers scattered on various desks. The grades were marked up top with a red pen. The girl next to her, a tall, busty brunette named Shelby who had far more cleavage than Bailey could have hoped for, always set the curve in all her classes. Her test paper had a 92 up top.
Bailey took a deep breath and lifted the top right corner of her test, seeing a number in the corner—seven. Seventy? Could it be? She turned it over, incredulous, and saw that unlucky seven was the only number there. And a big red F circled beside it. Seven percent. How could she have missed so many questions? She knew, when she turned in the test, it wasn’t going to be good. But she’d held out a little hope that maybe, just maybe, she’d passed. Even barely passed would have been okay.
Seven percent.
She was mortified.
Bailey crumpled the test paper and shoved it into the backpack at her feet. She was done. No more graduate school. No more chemistry. No more classes that had little or nothing to do with what she ultimately wanted to be doing in the world. She’d call her father and tell him all the money he’d spent on her tuition was a waste—his daughter was a complete idiot who, apparently, didn’t know a covalent bond from an ionic one.
See me.
She glanced up at Dom who stood at the front of the class, chalk in hand, working out one of the problems on the test that nearly everyone had missed. His back was to her. She wasn’t going to stay after class. She wasn’t going to submit to whatever humiliating lecture he had in store for her.
Bailey shrugged on her coat, grabbed her backpack and headed up the aisle. He was still talking, writing numbers on the board, but she kept her eyes on the door. She jogged left at the front of the class, meaning to hit the door practically running.
“Where are you going, Miss Parker?”
His voice stopped her, hand on the doorknob. She could almost feel the eyes of the entire class on her, front and center. Answers to his question rattled around in her head.
Home.
To bed.
To the nearest store that sells gallons of ice cream.
To kill myself.
She’d considered all of those options, some more than others.
“Miss Parker?” he prompted again.
“I’m…” Her voice trembled. Damn it. Like getting a seven percent wasn’t humiliating enough. She glanced over her shoulder at him, expecting to see anger, disappointment, and mostly judgment. What she saw instead was pity and that turned her stomach.
“The bathroom,” she managed to finally say before throwing open the door and heading for the nearest ladies’ room. Anywhere but there, anywhere but under his watchful gaze.
She took refuge in a stall, sitting on a public toilet and crying because her dream of being a nurse-midwife was circling the drain simply because she couldn’t do the math. Ryan, the manager at American Fitness, had hinted a few times that she could move up the ladder if she was willing to perform certain favors. Was she going to be reduced to giving blowjobs just to keep a crappy ten dollar an hour job?
Fucking chemistry. Her nemesis. Her downfall.
Bailey sat and cried, she didn’t know how long. Long enough she felt stupid going back to class after being gone. But she had to go back. Otherwise she was admitting defeat. Wasn’t she?
“Oh holy hell!” a female voice, low and gasping.
Bailey stiffened on her lavatory perch, considering pulling her feet up to hide herself completely. A low moan echoed off the tiled walls. Whoever she was, the girl sounded like she was in pain. Great, now I’m going to catch the stomach flu on top of everything else, Bailey thought, standing to grab her backpack off the hook on the back of the pink painted door where someone had scratched Fuck This!!!!!! with not one but six exclamation points. She knew the feeling.
Bailey winced when the automatic toilet flushed at her movement, an announcement of her presence. She had no choice but to open the stall door and head out. Ignoring the girl—and it was a girl, probably a freshman or a sophomore, no older than twenty, her hair cut into a short, dyed-black-with-blue-streaks pixie, nose, eyebrow and lip each sporting a silver ring. Bailey tried to ignore her, going to the sink to wash her hands.
The girl straightened from her bent-over stance at the sink, looking at Bailey in the mirror and attempting a smile. Bailey smiled back, turning off the water and grabbing for a paper towel, in a hurry to get out of there. She just wanted to go home and lock herself in her room with her iPad, a Netflix subscription with unlimited reruns of How I Met Your Mother and a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Phish Food. Or maybe a gallon. How many pints were in a gallon anyway?
Oh fuck math!
“Ohhhhhhh noooo not again!” The goth girl bent far over the sink and Bailey was sure she was going to puke and shrank back against the stark white tile, hoping to stay away from any splash. But the goth girl just moaned and rocked and held her belly.
“Are you okay?” Bailey put a hand on the girl’s shoulder.
“Fine.” The girl snarled, shrugging her hand away. “Fuck off.”
Okay then. Bailey picked up her backpack and left the bathroom. She stood at the crossroads of the hallway. If she went left, it was back t
o chemistry. Right, home. Bailey sighed, made up her mind and turned left, trudging down the hallway. Professor Jacobs was amusing the class—they were all laughing and in a good mood when she slipped back into the classroom and tiptoed toward her seat.
She didn’t look up to see if he noticed she was back. Instead she pulled out a notebook and pretended she was writing notes while all the while her pen insisted on writing the number “7” over and over and over again. It was the scurry and bustle of students filing up the aisles toward the exit that broke her magic-seven spell. Time to go.
Then she remembered.
See me.
There was a crowd around his desk already. She could just slip out. But then what?
“Bailey.” His voice stopped her at the door. Again. Déjà vu. She glanced over her shoulder at the students parting like the Red Sea at his desk so he could see her more fully. He crooked his finger at her and she felt her belly sink. He wasn’t going to let her go.
She walked slowly toward his desk, bypassing the throng of students and sitting at an empty desk when he asked her to. It was another half an hour before the last student had left. Bailey just sat there with something gnawing in her belly looking for a way out. Then he got up and went to the door, closing it and shutting out the noise of students with it.
“So you wanted to see me?” Bailey chewed on her lower lip as he approached. She expected him to sit down at his desk but instead, he came around the front to lean against it, looking down at her.
“So…” He took off his glasses—somehow his eyes seemed even bluer when he did that—and pulled out the tail end of his button-down shirt to clean them. “What happened?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged, feeling a lump growing in her throat at her denial. She couldn’t tell him the truth—that she was a complete idiot and couldn’t handle anything past fifth-grade math. “I guess I didn’t study hard enough.”
“If you were another student, I might believe that.” He put his glasses back on and they brought his eyes into sharper focus. “What really happened?”
