Lessons In Corruption (The Fallen Men Series Book 1)

by Giana Darling

  Dreams shine like pearls in her eyes. I become an artist, a collector, stringing salt-water gems on necklaces that she may wear.

  I sighed heavily but the kids didn’t notice. I was a sigh guy by nature so they were used to it. Besides, they were busy working in small groups on reading questions from Paradise Lost and EBA was a good school, the best, so the kids were good ones who were mostly happy to get down to work.

  Only King watched me and I knew he did not because I looked at him (I made it a point to only glance his way when it was absolutely necessary), but because I could feel his eyes like sunbeams against my face. They warmed me always, made me feel watched in a way that was pure admiration, like he was a painter and I his muse. In a way, through his little apple poems and one-line compliments, I was.

  After years of pinning for my dream man, I’d found him. A tall, golden blond Adonis, cool in the way only true rebels can be, kind in the way I’d never known a man could be, totally into me, and completely off-limits.

  I’d never entertained anarchist or blasphemous thoughts in my life but the unfairness of the situation made me want to punch God (if there was one) right in the throat.

  A loud giggle drew my attention to the group working in the front left of the classroom, their single-person desks arranged in a tight clump. I sucked air in through my teeth when I saw it was Talia laughing, her beautiful, professionally highlighted blonde hair pulled over one shoulder so that she could play with it coquettishly while she leaned into King. For his part, he was sprawled across his small seat, a position I’d come to learn was customary for him. He had his pencil to his paper but I could tell that whatever he was writing wasn’t for the assignment because he had a wicked smirk on his face. Talia was leaning over her desk to read what he wrote, uniform unbuttoned to a reveal a deep parenthesis of cleavage.

  “Talia?” I asked, before I could help myself. “Care to share with the class what is so amusing about John Milton’s greatest work?”

  Normally, I didn’t mind if the kids goofed off a little while they worked. I wanted them to like my class, like me, so that the work they did would be less like homework and more like curiosity propelled research. Talia knew this so she frowned at me the way one friend would frown at another who was interrupting her flirtation.

  Too freaking bad.

  “The fall of humanity from Eden was instigated by a fuckin’ apple. You tell me how Paradise Lost isn’t a kind of comedy,” King taunted, leaning forward on his forearms so that his defined biceps flexed beautifully under his dress shirt.

  Focus.

  “Either elaborate or admit you were slacking off in class, Mr. Garro,” I retorted.

  The class raised their collective eyebrow and a few students made ‘oooh’ noses as if we were two boxers entering a ring.

  “There is a thin line between tragedy and comedy, yeah? Well, the comic tragedy of Milton’s poem is the contrast between mankind’s practices and preaching of virtues and morality in the face of reality, which holds temptation after temptation. Basically, they don’t stand a chance of staying on the path to heaven. Satan is so easily able to corrupt Eve because he only has to open her eyes to the endless possibilities of life instead of the narrow scope that God and his religion allowed her previously. One bite of the apple, one taste of temptation, and it’s fuckin’ hard to go back to.”

  “That’s depressing,” Aimee murmured.

  “Yeah, don’t know what kind of comedy you watch, man, but that shit is not funny,” Carson drawled.

  “It’s not funny like that. It’s ironic. Paradise Lost is supposed to be about the fall of man from Eden, the fall of Satan and his angels from Heaven, about their follies as they compare to the grace and power of God. It’s God that’s supposed to be the hero, the perfect character, but it’s Eve and Satan that we empathize with the most.”

  This was, unfortunately, true. It was the very reason that I so loved Paradise Lost, why I was desperate to go back to school for my Master’s degree and eventually my PhD. The idea of delving further into the contradictions that made up Milton’s masterful poem had formed the first time I read it at seventeen. It had appealed to the tension within myself, the need to sin and the learned inability to do so without systemic grief.

  That King got the conflict nearly undid my resolve.

  “Totally,” Benny agreed, his voice dreamy as he stared across the room at the biker boy. “It’s like Milton kept trying and failing to make God and Michael and Jesus his heroes but even he couldn’t get behind them.”

  “Even God thinks it’s fuckin’ funny,” King continued, gazing lazily around the class at his captive audience. “During the battle between the angels, he literally sits ‘above and laughs the while.’”

  “Because?” I prompted as I stood up to round my desk and rest my bottom against the front of it.

  Typically, I didn’t like to be behind my desk when I was discussing with the class but lately, I’d been using it like a shield against King. I remembered why when his eyes raked up and down my body. My outfit was conservative, a thick, chunky knit sweater with great woven ropes up the arms and across the front in a cool stone color over a tight black knit skirt that came to the tops of my knees. There was no reason for his eyes to darken, for them to linger over my tidy braid like he wanted to dig his fingers in it, use it to hold me still while he plundered my mouth. No reason at all because I was careful with how I dressed now that he was my student.

  Yet, I knew he wanted me. Badly. And the thought sent power and lust spiraling through me.

  “Because even God knows he has created creatures who will only ever be imperfect and he has given them impossibly lofty fuckin’ goals,” King said.

  “Some would say that they aren’t ‘goals,’ that he doesn’t expect them to live up to all the ideals he sets for them but that he gives them those aspirations to guide them towards a good path,” I countered.

  He snorted. “Look where those got ‘em, kicked out of beautiful places and unable to appreciate the beauty of their new reality. Only Satan, the ‘bad guy,’ makes something of his new circumstances.”

  “Yeah, but only because he’s angry,” Margaret countered.

  King shrugged one shoulder. “Doesn’t matter why. If you want to evolve you gotta accept your circumstances, your reality. That’s one of the problems with the pious in Paradise Lost.”

  I had never heard King speak so eloquently, with so few curse words. The effect was staggering. He was wonderfully intelligent, which wasn’t surprising given that he passed the rigorous exams to get into EBA. It was surprising because I had bought into the cliché, a biker as a dense, potentially violent man without social mores.

  King was nothing like that.

  I on the other hand, was exactly the suburban housewife stereotype; small minded, bigoted and afraid of the unknown.

  My eyes caught on his bright gaze as I surveyed the students, still caught in debate. He watched me as if he knew me, knew the horrible bits of me but accepted them. Even more, he looked at me like he could see the dark heart of me and liked it.

  Later that night, after a long day of back-to-back classes because I’d taken on teaching both grades eleven and twelve advanced English and History in an attempt to make some much-needed money, I finally closed my online grade book and got ready to head home. It was late, after six thirty, so most of the students and teachers had long ago headed home unless they were part of the basketball team currently practicing on the other side of campus in the gymnasium.

  It was knowing this that I finally allowed myself to open the left-hand drawer in my desk and pull out the little pile of apple poems that I’d tied the other day with the pink ribbon I’d worn in my hair. There were nine of them, tiny scraps of paper, some written on the backs of receipts, some on standard issue notebook paper and one on real, old school parchment. It was that one that I smoothed out with shaking fingers now.

  How could a boy so young write something so exquisite? I fel
t each word throb through me, in tandem with my heartbeat so that I found myself re-reading the poem in that intimate cadence.

  He couldn’t love me, of course. He didn’t know me. I was a game to him, an older woman he wanted to conquer so that he could crow to his friends about his prowess in the bedroom.

  At least, that’s what I told myself. Even though I didn’t know him very well, it felt fundamentally wrong to think he was capable of such calculated cruelty. His sense of right and wrong was his own but I didn’t think he was a deliberate heartbreaker. I saw him flirt shamelessly with girls in my class and the halls of EBA but he never took it too far and despite speculation, I hadn’t heard concrete evidence that he’d slept with any of them.

  It was more than that though. I kept telling myself that I didn’t know him, but secretly, I felt like I did. I knew that he was smart as a whip, both intellectually curious and thoughtful in my classes and in others. He’d been given a scholarship to EBA, though rumor was his father was richer than Crocus off his illegal drug trade, and even though everyone kept waiting for him to screw it up, he was a model student. Everyone loved him; even the acerbic teachers mentioned how well he was doing in their classes despite coming in at mid-term in the second trimester.

  I knew that he was a shark at pool, that he liked local IPA beers and tequila shooters, preferred burgers above all other food, and bizarrely, loved Elvis nearly as much as I did. I felt I could guess at the other stuff too, the abstract that made up the spirit of him. He was tender but possessive, soulful but cruel when crossed. I’d witnessed these things but more, he’d given me a window into his elemental self by writing me those poems.

  He wanted me to know him. How could any woman resist a man who opened his beautiful heart to her without knowing what she would do with it?

  I could have turned him in for inappropriate behavior the second I found out he had been lying to me about being my student, or the first time he spent me an apple poem. I didn’t and it astounded me that he knew I wouldn’t.

  I sighed heavily as I rewrapped the poems and placed them back in my desk before I gathered my things to walk home because my car was still at Hephaestus Auto.

  Entrance was also not exactly the picturesque west coast town that I had been imagining when I moved here. The downtown core was sizeable and beautifully maintained, with a huge main plaza dominated by an elegant fountain, wrought iron chairs and a tended garden. The buildings were old, Victorian inspired or red brick and all meticulously restored. The only blight on the town was a sprawling industrial lot on the east side of town beside the river where a garage, a tattoo parlor and a little strip mall stood. This was the side of town that the down and out citizens of Entrance lived. There weren’t many of them and they weren’t truly impoverished even if the single level bungalows had seen better days. No, it was the chain link fences locking in frightening beasts that had maybe, at one time, been dogs, and the pungent scent of marijuana that seemed integral to that specific burg. As a girl who had spent her entire live in the affluent and posh neighborhood of Dunbar in Vancouver, the seedy side of Entrance terrified me.

  The little cabin I had bought sight unseen online was ramshackle; the heat was on the fritz, which had been fine when I first moved in during September but during December, January and even now in February, required me to wear at least three layers of thick knits and invest in multiple blankets. The hot water held out for about three minutes and I was the kind of woman who took half-hour showers. Most of the kitchen cabinets were broken, the fridge groaned like a bear emerging from hibernation, and the sloping garden that led to the ocean—my entire reason for buying the house—was an overgrown thicket of thorns and tangled bushes. I was still reeling from my disappointment even though I’d already been there for six months.

  Still, a thrill shot through me at the sight of the little cabin on the side of a steep cliff beside the ocean. There was a thick coating of moss on the steepled roof, the screen door was hanging crookedly on its hinges, the garden was so overgrown that it crawled up the sides of the peeling, shingled walls and onto the sparsely graveled driveway. It was an absolute mess. But it was mine; I owned it outright. The real estate agent had balked at the plastic bag of cash I handed to him to complete the transaction but he took it all the same and now, for the first time in my life, I owned something just for myself.

  I named the house Shamble Wood Cottage and I planned on painting a little sign to put on a post at the start of the long driveway. It was well down my priority list but I couldn’t wait to claim the land the way I wanted to, making it exactly my own.

  The interior wasn’t much better. The best thing about it was the open plan layout, unusual in an older cabin. The kitchen led to a slightly sunken living room and dining nook that was delineated with an old, hand carved oak bar that was decorated with raised designs of ivy and delicate tree branches on the front so that it was visible from the living room. The entire front wall at the back of the house was constructed of large windows and sliding glass doors so that every room had a perfect view of the sloping yard and the gorgeous sprawl of the blue ocean unfolding from the rocky beach.

  I didn’t have much furniture, but the deep leather couch and huge matching chocolate brown armchair I had perpendicular to each other in the seating area in front of the enormous stone fireplace were cabin chic and super comfy. I’d finagled a makeshift coffee table out of wooden crates until I had the time and money to buy a real one but I was desperate for a few bookcases that could house the boxes of books I had set to one side of the couch.

  After putting away the groceries, I made myself a bowl of oatmeal with fresh berries and maple syrup. Breakfast for dinner or lunch and breakfast for breakfast was pretty much my go-to. I was a morning person and I loved everything about the first meal of the day, including coffee. After eating, I grabbed my mug of decaf and moved to the huge armchair in front of the crackling fire. It had taken me a couple of tries to get it lit but I was glad I had bothered because the sea salt in the logs turned the flames a gorgeous blue and green.

  It was quiet and beautiful and I wanted to love my life now that I was free, but even liberty couldn’t close the yawning abyss of loneliness in my soul. It overtook me in the darkness between falling asleep and slumber and in the fragmented moments of quiet between periods at school. When lovebirds brushed together beside me, intrinsically bound to each other like magnets, like two things elementally meant to be. I knew it came mostly from being isolated my entire life, cloistered away by my ultra-conservative parents because of the mistakes they had made with my brother. I’d had no friends, only family, and even that was fractured irrevocably by the time I was eleven.

  It also came because I was a romantic and yet, I had no romance. Not ever. Lusting after King and the brief time we had spent together was the greatest connection I’d ever forged.

  Before I had left, I might have had a home and a husband, but I’d never been loved, neither had it or lived with its pulse inside of me. I’d lain awake while William snored softly beside me, imagining the kind of life I might have lived if I had been strong enough to run away, to fight against the destiny that had been plotted for me by my parents. I dreamt of a man who would utterly possess me, rip me from comfort and safety and plunge me into passion and chaos. A man who would look at me, instead of through me like my husband had. A man who was a real man, maybe one who chopped his own wood and fixed his own leaky pipes. Not a thirty-six-year-old lawyer from a small, deeply religious town in the prairies who had befriended my parents and took me as an eighteen-year-old bride because I was pretty, practically virginal and had no greater aspirations for myself than those set by my parents. I’d dreamed the dream for eight years before finally doing something about it.

  Now, I had my beautiful, ramshackle little cabin in a lovely town with a teaching position at one of the best schools on the west coast. I should have been content; I should have been the happiest person in the world. Yet, as I sat by the fire and del
ved into one of my countless paperback romances, I found myself crying silently as Loneliness sat beside me, my only companion. At one point, I imagined the throaty thrum of a motorcycle moving past the mouth of my long driveway and thought about a future I could never have with King, and the tears feel a little harder.

  “Go out with me.”

  It was a chilly but bright late winter day in Entrance. The sun filtered through the thin layer of clouds like silver, falling across the blossoms that burst forth early on the west coast, as soon as the last of the snow melted. The air was cold and clean, so fragrant I kept dragging in deep breaths that made my lungs tingle with cold. I was still bundled up in an old white suede coat with a fur collar that I’d bought at a vintage store in Vancouver for a steal, pale pink gloves on my hands and toque on my head. I was also holding a coffee from Honey Bear Café. It was a dirty Chai latte, my favorite. How King had known that, I couldn’t be sure, but it was sitting on my desk after third period, which I knew he had free (because I’d used my teacher’s authority unethically and printed off a copy of his schedule).

  I knew it was from him because instead of my name written on the side of the cardboard, it said ‘babe.’

  I hadn’t had any interactions with him outside of class and those crazy beautiful apple poems in two weeks and he was still trying to get to me. I was terrified that it was working.

  “Cressida?”

  I jerked out of my thoughts and finally tuned to Warren, who had been sitting beside me at the picnic table while we ate our lunches. Ostensibly, we were meant to keep an eye on the kids as they loitered about the soccer field, the tiny copse of trees to the left and the ultra-cool outdoor gym to the right. Many of the students lay on the grass drinking sodas and enjoying the sunshine even though it was still uncomfortably cold out.

  At some point, Rainbow and Tay had been with us but evidently, they’d left sometime during my daydreams about King.