Rising Star

by Susannah Nix

  Was that a hint for her to shut up and go away? She eyed her computer, wondering if she should pack up and go inside. Or maybe she should open it up and pretend to work. Would that be rude? Or would it let him off the hook? She didn’t want him to feel like he had to spend time with her or make conversation.

  Ugh. Why were interpersonal interactions so hard?

  “Hey, Alice?”

  When she glanced his way there was a frown on his face. She swallowed. “Yeah?”

  “You don’t have to keep doing all that stuff around the house for me.”

  Shit. She’d already failed Rule Number Three apparently.

  “Do you not like it?”

  He sat up and swung his legs to the side so he was facing her. “No, it’s great—but you don’t have to do it. You know that, right?”

  She lowered her eyes to her coffee cup, finding it too difficult to follow Rules One and Two with him looking at her like that. “You’re not charging me rent. I have to do something to earn my keep.” On top of giving her a place to live, Griffin had insisted on paying her for her dog-sitting duties once he left for Atlanta—at a rate far higher than she felt she deserved.

  “You’re going to be taking care of Taco and the whole house for me while I’m gone,” he said. “That’s plenty.”

  “Not for another month. I’m just trying to be helpful.”

  “I know, and I appreciate it, but I don’t want you to think you have to.”

  “I don’t want to be an imposition.”

  “You’re not.” He leaned across the distance between their chairs and tilted his head to catch her eye. “Okay?”

  It was impossible not to smile with all that handsome earnestness directed right at her. “Okay.”

  “Cool.” He pushed himself to his feet and stood up. “Thanks for the coffee. I’m gonna change and hit the gym.”

  Alice watched Griffin go back into his bedroom, realizing too late that she was staring at his ass in flagrant violation of Rule Number One—and right after he’d gone out of his way to be nice to her. There were only three rules, and so far she was failing massively at all of them.

  Five minutes later, he reemerged through the living room door. He’d changed into a tank top and baggy athletic shorts, and had one of his ever-present smoothie shakers in his hand. He twirled his car keys on his index finger as he strode past on the way to his car. “Later.”

  “Have fun,” Alice said, refusing to let herself stare at his exposed arms and shoulders.

  “I definitely will not,” he replied, throwing a wry grin over his shoulder. “But then it’ll be done, and I can spend the rest of the day on the couch watching basketball.”

  That was exactly what he did when he came back three hours later. Alice was still outside, up to her eyeballs in the dissertation research she’d finally dived into—although she’d moved to the shade of the picnic table by then. Griffin greeted her as he walked into the house, and she managed not to gawk at the sweat glistening on his pumped-up muscles. He disappeared into his room, then reappeared freshly showered ten minutes later and collapsed onto the couch—where he stayed for pretty much the rest of the day.

  The patio door was open between them, and the sound of the game floated outside to where Alice sat hunched over her computer on the scenic deck. Her dissertation might be a disaster, but she was lucky to have such a nice, peaceful place to work on it.

  And her dissertation definitely was a disaster. So far, going back over it all had simply reinforced what she’d already known the last time she gave up: she was totally screwed.

  There was no getting around the network analysis. Without it, she wouldn’t be allowed to defend, much less pass. But she didn’t know how to do it. Even after weeks of meeting with Gilchrist and enduring his gross attentions, she hadn’t been any closer to grasping it. Every time she’d felt like she was starting to get it, he’d pointed out new problems in her data that would only succeed in confusing her more. Frankly, even if he hadn’t turned out to be a disgusting human being, she wasn’t sure she ever would have gotten the hang of it.

  Maybe she was just stupid. Or had chosen the wrong field. Or been a fool to think she could handle a PhD in any field. Possibly all three.

  Or maybe making her feel that way had been part of Gilchrist’s plan all along. Maybe he’d hoarded his knowledge and made her confused to cement her dependency and guarantee she kept coming back.

  Only she wasn’t going back. If it was going to get done, she’d have to figure it out herself.

  She could figure out complex social network modeling on her own in a weekend, right? Because that’s what she was going to have to do. It was either that or quit.

  And she wasn’t ready to quit.

  7

  Griffin was having a stress dream. It was the same one he always had, about being on set with the cameras rolling and not knowing any of his lines. When the director started shouting at him, he shot awake in his own bed, his heart racing and the pressure of an oncoming headache in his sinuses.

  A glance at his phone told him it was four in the morning. Only two hours before he had to get up to make his early call. He rolled over, trying to get comfortable and will his body back to sleep, even though he knew it was probably hopeless at this point. That was when he noticed Taco wasn’t in his usual spot on the bed.

  As Griffin lay in the dark imagining all the trouble his dog might be getting into and debating whether to get up and investigate, he heard the sound of someone moving around in the kitchen. Followed by the excited patter of Taco’s paws on the hardwood and a soft shush.

  Alice must be up. But at four in the morning? He was pretty sure background weren’t on the call sheet until the afternoon, so what was she doing awake this early?

  Giving up his futile quest for more sleep, Griffin pushed himself upright and wandered out to the kitchen. Alice was ensconced in the booth at the breakfast table with her laptop open in front of her, just like it had been for most of the weekend.

  Instead of looking up when Taco jumped up to greet Griffin, she turned her face away and swiped at her eyes. “Shit,” she muttered in a rough voice. “I woke you up. I’m sorry.”

  Oh, no. Was she crying? Please, no. He wasn’t prepared to deal with a woman he barely knew crying in his kitchen at four in the morning.

  Silently cursing himself for not staying in bed, Griffin lifted his hand to cover a yawn and pretended not to notice the way Alice was hiding her face from him. “Nope. I’ve got stress dreams to thank for that.” He turned his attention to the coffeemaker to avoid looking directly at her. “Is that coffee I smell?”

  She nodded and started to get up. “I’ll get you some.”

  He waved her off. “What’d I say about that? You don’t need to wait on me.” Every time she did something for him, it made him feel guilty, like he was taking advantage. She was supposed to be his guest, not his handyman or his housekeeper.

  “Sorry.”

  He wished she’d stop apologizing too. It felt like she was apologizing for her existence, which made him worry that he’d given her reason to think she needed to. She had nothing to apologize for; she was already the most considerate, unobtrusive roommate he’d ever had. He just wanted her to relax, so he didn’t have to add her to the list of things he was worried about.

  Except now she was in his kitchen crying, and he had no idea what he was supposed to do about that. Ask her what was wrong? Or respect her privacy by acting like he hadn’t noticed? What exactly was his obligation here?

  See, this was why he preferred living alone.

  Griffin rubbed his chest irritably as he selected a mug from the cabinet, still unused to sleeping in so many clothes. Normally, he preferred to sleep in the buff, but he’d adopted the T-shirt and pajamas when Alice moved in. If there was some kind of emergency in the middle of the night, he figured she didn’t need him running around in his birthday suit.

  “What’s got you up so early?” he asked as he pour
ed himself a cup of coffee. “Your call time’s not until the afternoon.” There. That would give her an opening to talk if she wanted to take it. Or not, if she preferred to keep her problems to herself.

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  He heard a muffled sniffle as he added creamer to his cup—definitely crying, then—but by the time he slid into the seat across from her, the only evidence of tears was a slight pinkness around her nose and eyes. Sticking with plausible deniability, Griffin lifted his coffee cup and nodded at Alice’s laptop as if he hadn’t noticed the crying. “What’re you working on?”

  Her eyes lowered to the table. “My dissertation. I’ve got a meeting with my committee chair this morning.”

  Which could very well explain the crying. Griffin had never been much of a student, but he’d probably cry daily if he was expected to write a million-page research paper or whatever the fuck was involved in a dissertation.

  Alice cast a quick glance at him before staring back down at the tabletop. “It’s our first meeting in months, and I’m dreading it.”

  He leaned over to scratch Taco’s back. “Why?”

  “Because I haven’t made any progress since the last time we met, which was…way too long ago.”

  “What’s it on?”

  Alice sighed, pushing her laptop away. “Gender differences in language used to describe political candidates in newspaper articles.”

  “Impressive.”

  “It might be, except I can’t finish it.”

  “Why not?”

  Her shoulders lifted in a tense shrug. “A lot of reasons.”

  Griffin debated whether to drop the subject or keep pressing. How involved did he really want to get in Alice’s problems? This was just meant to be a temporary, mutually beneficial business arrangement. The less they knew about each other, the better, maybe. He had enough anxiety without taking on hers too.

  Except he wasn’t a total selfish prick, despite what his last girlfriend thought of him—or at least he liked to think he wasn’t. Did he really want to be a guy who turned his back on a crying woman at four o’clock in the morning?

  He set his coffee mug down and tilted his head to catch Alice’s eye. “I know I’m not smart enough to understand it, but you could try explaining the problem to me anyway. It might help to talk it through with someone.”

  “It’s not that complicated, really. It’s…” She trailed off and pressed her lips together, turning her face to the window.

  “What?”

  “There’s this professor on my dissertation committee, and I need his help to finish some of the models, but I can’t work with him anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  Her fingers gripped the edge of the table, but she didn’t say anything.

  Griffin took a stab in the dark. “Were you two…involved?”

  Her lip curled in revulsion. “No.”

  “Did he do something to you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Griffin sipped his coffee and waited.

  “He makes me uncomfortable,” Alice said finally.

  “What do you mean?”

  She got up to pour herself more coffee and Taco followed her. “He seemed nice at first. Really friendly and helpful. My advisor was on sabbatical last year, and Dr. Gilchrist agreed to work with me while she was gone. I needed his help to do a network analysis for my dissertation, and he’s the network analysis expert in the department. We’d meet in his office once a week to talk. It was fine the first few times. He had a lot of helpful advice. But then he started to get too friendly.” Her shoulders hunched, heavy with tension.

  Griffin felt a knot form in his stomach. “Too friendly how?”

  She turned to face him, clutching her coffee mug in front of her, but didn’t meet his eye. “Resting his hand on my shoulder or my knee. Complimenting me on what a good job I did ‘taking care of’ my body. Telling me stories about his sex life and asking questions about mine.”

  “Gross.” Griffin had been the subject of some unwanted touching and uncomfortable compliments in the course of his acting career and knew how unsettling it could be. “What a pig.”

  Alice nodded, keeping her eyes on the dog who sat at her feet wagging his tail. “I tried to laugh it all off so he wouldn’t be offended, and I hated myself for it. I felt so ashamed that I was sitting there pretending to laugh when I really wanted to scream at him to get the fuck away from me. It got to where I was terrified of being alone with him, which made me feel even more ashamed. Eventually I just stopped going—to his meetings, to campus, to all of it. I tried to keep working on my dissertation but I still needed his help to finish, and by that point the whole thing made me feel sick. Even just looking at the data files made me nauseous. So I quit. I let him make me quit. And that made me even more ashamed.”

  Griffin swallowed, at a loss for what to say. “Did you tell anyone what was going on?”

  She let out a bitter laugh. “Tell them what? That he was flirting with me? It’s not exactly a crime.”

  “It doesn’t sound like flirting to me. Flirting’s not supposed to make you feel bad.”

  “No, it’s not.” Alice shook her head. “It’s not that easy to explain though. It’s like death by a thousand paper cuts. No one single thing he ever did was that bad, so you have to keep asking yourself if you’re overreacting. It’s just a little thing, right? It’s not that big a deal. But when it keeps happening, you start to wonder if it’s all in your head, or if it’s your fault somehow.”

  “It’s definitely not your fault.”

  She was silent, gazing into the coffee mug she’d refilled and had yet to drink from.

  “Alice.” He waited for her to look at him. “It’s not your fault,” Griffin repeated. “And it’s not in your head.”

  For a second he thought she was going to start crying again. Instead she turned around and dumped her coffee in the sink. “I can’t drink any more caffeine. I’m giving myself heart palpitations.”

  Griffin waited while she washed the mug out, dried it, and put it back in the cabinet. When she was done, she came back and sat down across from him. Taco followed her and lay down on the floor at their feet.

  “What are you going to do?” Griffin asked when Alice didn’t say anything else.

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe I could teach myself what I needed to know to run the remaining models. That’s what I’ve been trying to do all weekend. But I can’t get them to work right and I have no idea why. I’m screwed.”

  “And you haven’t told your advisor about any of this?”

  “She was on sabbatical. I’ve been avoiding her since she got back.”

  “But you’re meeting with her today, right? Are you going to tell her?”

  Alice stared out the window. The sky was just starting to lighten in the east, revealing the silhouette of the trees outside. “I don’t know. I don’t know what she’ll do, or if she’ll even believe me. But I don’t know what else to tell her either. I think I might just quit.”

  “You mean drop out of graduate school?”

  Alice raised one shoulder and let it fall in a halfhearted shrug. “I don’t want to stay in academia anymore, so what’s the point?”

  “To finish your PhD so you can make everyone call you Dr. Carlisle, obviously. Haven’t you been working toward this for like four years?”

  She pressed her lips together. “Five. Plus four years of undergrad.”

  Griffin tapped his fingers against his coffee mug. He definitely didn’t think Alice should let this one asshole make her quit school and give up on her dreams, but he wasn’t sure what she should do instead. The whole situation was seriously shitty. “Is your advisor friends with this guy?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. They’re in the same department.”

  “You think she’ll try to defend him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The agitation in Alice’s tone made Griffin pause before asking his next question. “What’s the
worst that could happen if you tell her?”

  “I won’t graduate.”

  “You’re dropping out anyway. What do you have to lose?” Maybe it wasn’t his place to question her, but she’d opened up to him. He couldn’t help feeling she needed to talk all this through with someone. That part of the reason it had paralyzed her was that she hadn’t felt able to tell anyone what she was going through. If she could talk to him about it, maybe she could talk to her advisor too. Maybe someone would do something to put a stop to this guy.

  Alice’s shoulder shifted in an uncomfortable fidget. “If she does believe me, she could initiate a Title IX investigation.”

  Griffin was confused. “Isn’t that good? Don’t you want him investigated?”

  “Do you know what an investigation is like?”

  “No.”

  “They’ll interview me, him, and everyone we know. All my professors and the rest of my cohort, all his colleagues and friends on campus. They’ll all know what’s going on, and be asked to give an official statement about it. What they think of me, what they think of him. Who they believe. And then you know what’ll happen?”

  She paused for him to answer, and Griffin shook his head. He had no clue how these things worked.

  “Nothing.” Alice practically spat the word out. “They’ll decide they don’t have enough information to support the report, because it’s just my word against his, and that’ll be the end of it.” She scowled down at the table. “My academic career will be ruined, and his will barely even be tarnished.”

  Griffin didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. Instead, he got up and went to the pantry. He got out a canister of flour and the baking powder, and carried them over to the counter. Then he went to the fridge for eggs, milk, and butter.

  “What are you doing?” Alice asked when he got down his mother’s old batter bowl and started measuring out the flour.

  “I’m making you pancakes.” He dropped four tablespoons of butter into a small glass bowl and threw a glance over his shoulder. “You like pancakes, don’t you?”