“Oh, Eden,” she said, yawning and rubbing her face. “Thank god you’re here – it’s a zoo.”
I chuckled. “First day always is,” I told her as I got to work helping clueless freshman with their textbooks. The two hours passed quickly and just as my stomach was rumbling and I was taking off my smock, I glanced up and looked out to the main floor of the student union.
Professor Marks was standing there, talking to another professor and nodding. He was so handsome that just the sight of him took my breath away. His hands gesticulated and motioned in the air and he smirked as the other professor – an attractive woman – laughed.
Instantly, I felt a hot bolt of jealousy seize me. It was completely irrational: especially considering that Professor Marks likely wouldn’t have known me from Adam.
I felt it all the same, though, and I sighed as my cheeks grew pink and hot. Look at me, I thought as I stared at the professor through the thick glass window of the bookstore and the union.
Look at me.
Professor Marks didn’t look. He didn’t even turn his head. After nodding once more at the woman professor, he merely chuckled and walked away.
“Eden?”
I glanced up and saw Karen standing to the side with a concerned look on her face. Realizing that I was still holding my smock in my hands, I flushed.
“What?” I asked. “I mean, yes?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are you okay?”
I nodded. “Of course,” I lied. “I’m fine. Just tired – you know, first days and all.”
To my relief, Karen didn’t push – she just laughed.
“No kidding,” she said. “You’re off to lunch, yeah?”
I nodded.
“Have fun,” she said. “And if you feel like picking up a couple of extra shifts this week and next, I know we could use the help.”
I nodded again, still feeling distracted by Professor Marks and his gorgeous, cocky smile.
“See you,” Karen said. She ducked her head at me and then walked away to deal with a freshman who appeared to be crying over the condition of her ‘new’ textbook.
Shit, I thought to myself. This semester is going to be a lot harder than I thought.
2
Will – Tuesday
“Any questions?”
I surveyed my class – the last of the day, a group full of freshmen who, judging by the blank looks on their faces would have preferred to be doing anything but sitting in a lecture hall.
They shook their heads.
“Then I’ll see you on Thursday,” I said. “And please, email me if you have any questions about the assignment.”
The looks on their faces changed to pained – of course, I’d just reminded them of their College Obligation: a five-hundred-word essay on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a book which they were supposed to have read over the January break.
When the head of the department had approached me and asked if I wouldn’t mind taking on a class of students who had spent their first college semester completing a remedial English class, I’d of course said yes.
I basically would have said yes to anything. Years into my career and I was finally in a tenure-track position, something that I’d worked my entire life to get to.
I figured that teaching a bunch of eighteen-year-olds couldn’t be that bad.
I had been wrong, of course – I could already tell by the end of our first class together that these students would basically be useless, that I’d have to work my ass off just to get something smart and insightful out of the back corners of their brains.
But it was my cross to bear, I figured as I watched them depart my class solemnly, as if they were on their way to the executioner. Rolling my eyes as the last student left the room, I flicked off the lights and made my way down to my office.
Already, the unpleasant miasma of the last hour and fifteen minutes was beginning to wear off. I made myself an espresso from the machine in the lounge, then went into my office and left the door open behind me. I didn’t think anyone would really attend my weekly office hour, but it couldn’t hurt to be sure.
Tenure track, I told myself as I sipped my coffee. Tenure track, tenure track. This is all for tenure, and I can’t fuck it up.
The next hour and a half passed relatively quickly and painlessly. I’d been correct – not a single student appeared to darken my doorway – and I spent the time thumbing through The Waves and debating what to go over in my next senior seminar, the class that was surely going to be the highlight of the semester for me. It was a reward to teach smart, engaged students – especially after dealing with those bovine freshmen – and I’d try to have as much fun with the class as I could, all while managing to maintain a professional demeanor.
That, at least, was easy. I’d seen the way things used to play out in academia: lecherous professors taking advantage of their nubile young students, like something straight out of a porno. My best friend in grad school, Amy, had even dealt with something similar herself: her advisor had ... exposed himself to her during one of their meetings and when she’d reported it, she’d nearly been kicked out of the program, even though the old asshole had done it before. Academia was still very much a boys’ club, but I was determined to make it as equal as possible.
Not that I would have ever stooped to such antics, of course. Even at Oakbrook, which was incredibly liberal even for a liberal arts school, there were whisperings and rumors of bad behavior on part of the faculty. I couldn’t understand how even the tenured professors would be willing to sabotage their livelihoods just for a piece of ass here and there. It wasn’t that some of the girls weren’t attractive – of course, they were – but sometimes, I marveled at how men could be so utterly stupid.
It didn’t help that I was quite attractive. Ever since I’d began teaching, my female students – and even some of my male ones – had made it quite clear that they thought I was hot. It was the reason why I’d stopped allowing students to close my office door during office hours and appointments, the reason why I had become so hesitant to mentor female students, or conduct independent studies with them on subject matters of their choosing.
Academia was a tricky walk when it came to proper conduct, at least for some.
For me, though, it was my life.
It was nearly the end of my office hours period when I heard a knock at my door and looked up. Gina Grant, a fellow professor, was standing in the doorway with a smirk on her face. She yawned as I motioned her in.
“How were your kids today?” I asked.
Gina sat down in the chair across from my desk and rolled her eyes.
“It’s the first day of the second semester,” she said. “It’s not new anymore, but they know they’ve got weeks ahead of them.”
“So, not very fun, I take it,” I said with a smirk.
She shrugged. Gina was an attractive woman, somewhere in her late thirties, which put her only a few years younger than myself. With dark hair and a brassy, deep voice, I knew that students found her intimidating ... and I knew that she liked that just a little too much. For all the talk of academia being a world of creepy old men, I sometimes thought that Gina brought a little sinister energy of her own to the table.
That being said, I liked her a lot. We had even been hired at the same time: brought in for the same group interviews and everything. We’d attended the same conferences over the years, taught joint seminars, and co-authored more than one paper together. Publish or perish had been the saying in academia for decades, and Gina and I had worked together to ensure that neither one of us perished.
“It was okay,” she said comfortably, like a cat settling into her favorite recliner. “How about you? You got that freshman seminar at the end of the day, right?”
I groaned. “That class is going to be a huge pain this year,” I muttered. “Those kids don’t want to be there. They just wanna be back in their rooms with Halo or whatever.”
Gina laughed brashly. “God, you sound like
such an old man sometimes,” she said. “We need to get you out,” she added, her dark eyes sparkling. “What’re you doing tonight?”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Prepping for tomorrow,” I told her. “And you?”
Gina wrinkled her nose. “I was supposed to have dinner with Patrick,” she said. “But he canceled. Again. I think he’s getting bored with me.”
I didn’t reply. In all of the years I’d known Gina, she’d gone through a series of tumultuous relationships with men and women. We’d always been friends, but sometimes I’d had the oddest feeling that she was trying to push the boundary with me, inch by inch, until we’d wind up in a clandestine encounter in some office somewhere, or even a school stairwell. Dating another faculty member wasn’t against the rules, but I was so leery of involving my personal life with my work life that it wasn’t something that I would ever consider.
“That’s too bad,” I said smoothly. “Well, it is January, after all. New year, new man?”
Gina groaned. “You’re awful,” she said teasingly, pressing her arms together and showing just the vaguest hint of cleavage under her silk shirt. “We should get dinner. I’m starving, and I’m sure as hell not going to the dining hall tonight.”
It prickled me, the way she kept being so suggestive. I’d told her before that I wasn’t interested, but all that had gotten me was a wounded look. Oh, Will, she’d said, sounding hurt. You know I have someone in my life. I just want a friend. And we’re friends, aren’t we?
We were friends. At one of the conferences we’d attended, on the importance of Victorian woman authors to the modern canon, Gina had gotten so drunk in the hotel bar that I’d had to carry her up to her room. I’d thought it had just been another excuse to put the moves on me, but she’d wound up crying all night and telling me that I was the only person in the world who understood her. It had shown me that she wasn’t nearly as tough as she projected.
Now, I just tried to remember that night and think of how she always liked to make sure that she was on top of the situation, be it her students or her fellow professors.
“I’ve got to get home,” I said. “My buddy got tickets to a whiskey tasting. Thirty-year Talisker, if you can believe that.”
Gina glanced up. “That’s Scotch,” she said.
“Right,” I replied. I took her silence as my cue to stand up, where I made a show of shuffling a bunch of papers on my desk together into one large pile.
Gina – somewhat reluctantly – got to her feet and nodded her head at me.
“Oh, well,” she said, managing not to sound terribly disappointed. “I’ve got an early day tomorrow, I should call it a night, too.”
I waited approximately five minutes after she’d left my office before checking to make sure that the faculty office was clear and empty and that Gina was gone. I felt almost like a coward, but the last thing I wanted was for her to approach me again – even with the whiskey tasting excuse, I had a feeling she’d still try to con me into spending time with her outside of an academic setting.
I shouldn’t have been living my life in fear, but I had seen too many lawsuits and allegations to even think of doing otherwise.
It was already dark in the parking lot even though it was only five-thirty, and by the time I got home it was practically black outside. I pulled into the driveway of the house I’d just purchased, parked, and went inside with my bag. After making myself a drink and settled down into my armchair. I reached into my bag for my laptop but instead came out with the handful of papers I’d grabbed in an effort to convince Gina that I was really and truly leaving.
They were all term papers from almost two years before, a solid three semesters ago. I laughed under my breath – I’d grabbed the wrong pile of papers, just like the idiot that I sometimes was.
Still, there was one at the top that caught my eye. Death and Rebirth in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland by Eden Cooper.
Eden Cooper.
That was a name I knew I’d never be able to forget, and not just because of how ridiculously sexy – and biblical – it was. Eden had been in a few of my classes in the past, and coincidentally, she was in my senior seminar, the one that I was so looking forward to teaching this year.
Eden was a bright girl – obviously intelligent and more dedicated than a lot of her peers – and yet, she was so shy. I remembered her because although she’d always been engaged and present in class, with few absences, she’d seemed almost painfully awkward. Whenever she’d contributed something to the discussion, her cheeks had flamed pink and she’d bitten and sucked on her plump lower lip. It was more than just her mind that had me remembering her – it was her ripe, round body that was more of a woman’s than a student’s.
I sipped my drink and found myself wondering just what curvy little Eden Cooper was planning on doing after graduation. Her senior year was coming to a close – was she aiming for graduate school?
Or did she just want to be a corporate drone and have a nine-to-five that would enable her to party, just like other early twenty-somethings that I taught?
I knew I shouldn’t care. She was a student, after all. Students came and went – after a while, I found myself forgetting about even the most brilliant ones.
But Eden had such potential, that I found myself hoping she’d somehow follow in my own footsteps, into the ivory tower of academia.
And somehow, manage to get over that crushing shyness of hers and become a real, confident woman.
3
Eden – Thursday
When class with Professor Marks let out that morning, I had to rush into the bathroom and splash cold water on my face. The Liberal Arts building was an old one, and the steam heat gushing from the radiators only made me feel hot and dry as I looked at myself in the mirror. I was practically panting.
Like an idiot schoolgirl, I thought to myself. Like a dog in heat, like someone who can’t control herself!
That day in class, I had been stunned. Professor Marks had singled me out, called me out and made a reference to a paper that I’d written almost two years ago, to tell the class how good it was, to tell the rest of the class that I clearly understood Modernism after no one failed to catch a similar allusion in The Waves.
I hadn’t been able to stop blushing – it had been both embarrassing and exhilarating at the same time. The other kids in class had looked at me like I’d had two heads, but cool Professor Marks had merely praised me and my writing, then moved on. The sentences he’d read out loud had made me cringe – thank god, my writing had hopefully improved since I’d been a sophomore.
But what really stood out was that he’d remembered me at all. For all of the effort and time I’d put into making myself stand out in his classes, I was sure that I hadn’t come across as memorable, or even as smart.
Obviously, Professor Marks thought differently.
The bell rang in the hall and I groaned, realizing that I’d be late to my basic technology class. I was even tempted to skip, which wasn’t like me at all. The class was mostly made up of freshman and the occasional sophomore – I was clearly the only senior, and the professor had already began treating me like I was some kind of unofficial TA, which made me blush and the other students roll their eyes like, why’s she so special? She should’ve just taken this class years ago, like the rest of us are doing.
I didn’t skip, though. I dutifully went and took notes on everything the professor said, even though my mind was on Professor Marks the entire time. I had been right about his seminar: the number of students had dwindled down to seven, and he’d even had us arrange our chairs in a circle so it would be like a real graduate class.
God, if I couldn’t stop thinking about him, I was really going to be in trouble when it came time for my other class exams.
After my basic technology class, I went to the bookstore and put on my smock. Karen was rushing around, trying to help a girl find the last copy of The Iliad for her Ancient Studies class, and I took my place behind the counte
r to help clueless students find their books.
An hour passed quickly and Karen sent me down to the stock room to load up on copies of Shakespeare anthologies. The books were heavy and I walked back slowly with a stack of them in my arms, trying not to trip. Just as I was making my way back to the counter, I tripped over an extension cord and nearly fell flat on my face. A pair of hands caught me and I flushed as I stumbled and tripped and crashed straight into my best friend.
“Oh my god, Eden!” Petra gasped. She helped me pick up the fallen anthologies, laughing under her breath. “You poor thing, these are really heavy!”
“Tell me about it,” I groaned. “I’ll be so happy when the add and drop period is over, at least then I won’t have to lug these things around.”
Petra nodded sympathetically. With her help, the stack of books was much lighter and we arranged them in a display in front of the counter. Thankfully, the bookstore was nearly empty – all of the kids had filtered out to the dining hall or the on-campus café, and Petra handed me an energy bar.
“Figured you could use this,” she said.
“Thanks,” I told her. “I appreciate it.”
In the days since the semester had started, I felt like I hadn’t had a chance to talk to my best friend since our talk on Tuesday morning. Now that she was here, I was so tempted to tell her about Professor Marks, but deep down I had a feeling that was a bad idea.
“So,” Petra said. “I was thinking, let’s get lunch together. I have an hour before my next class. You in?”
I nodded, then turned in my smock behind the counter. Petra and I walked slowly outside – the weather was cold and dry, but the sun was out and everything looked brilliant and icy and beautiful.
“How’s it going?”
I shrugged. “Okay,” I lied. “I really hate that core tech class. I should have just gotten it over with years ago.”
Petra giggled. “I did it when we were freshmen, remember? Mine was all about nanotechnology. Like, what even happened to that? I haven’t heard the word in years.”
The Temptation: A Professor Student Romance (Forbidden First Times Book 6) Page 2
