by Anna Edwards
“Miss,” Bethany pipes up again, and I stop drawing on the board and turn to face her.
“Yes, Bethany.”
“Why do we have to learn this stuff? I mean…I don’t need to know how a flower has sex. What good is it going to do me?” She pops the gum in her mouth at the end of her sentence. Gum is banned in the school, but it doesn’t seem to stop her, no matter how many times I tell her to spit it out. Placing the whiteboard pen down on the table, I pick up the bin and take it over to her.
“Spit it out, please.”
She raises an eyebrow at me as if to say, ‘make me’.
“Bethany, I don’t know about you, but I’d rather go home tonight than spend it here in detention because you refused to spit some gum out. I’m sure, since it’s a Friday night, you’ve got lots of plans.”
She tuts and rolls her eyes.
“Fine.” She spits the gum into the bin.
“Thank you, and to answer your question, we’re not learning how a flower has sex…we’re learning how it reproduces. There’s a difference, which I’ll make sure to cover in greater depth when we revisit human reproduction. This topic is important, and something that’s essential for all of us to know because without flowers, trees and all the other plants and shrubs reproducing, we would die.”
I return to my desk and pick up the whiteboard pen to continue.
“Have you seen it outside, Miss?” Bethany pipes up a third time, and I will the bell to ring, signaling the end of the school day. Why anyone thought to schedule this class last on a Friday afternoon is beyond me? Bethany persists, “…There are barely any plants and trees alive, but I’m still breathing.”
Before I have a chance to launch into a long debate that’ll no doubt necessitate a large amaretto to go with my bottle of wine tonight, thankfully the bell rings and the class files out. Facing the whiteboard still, I rest my head on it and say a silent prayer for something different to happen in my life. Just once, I don’t want to have to be the responsible one.
“Surely it wasn’t that bad?” The deep masculine voice sends a warm shiver down my spine. I know instantly who it is and that, for the next few minutes anyway, rational thought will be virtually impossible. Alex Underwood is a math teacher here at the school. He’s a couple of years older than me and could speak calculus to me any day of the week and get me hot and bothered in all the right places. He’s well over six feet tall with short brown hair and the most intoxicating ocean-blue colored eyes. I could fall into them and swim around happily for hours. He only started here a year ago but is already one of the senior math teachers. We’ve been spending quite a bit of time together since we were both invited to be joint form tutors for one of the year nine classes. He’s a book lover like me although our tastes are completely different: evidently trashy romance novels don’t do much for him, and we both have a strange love affair with rugby. I keep trying to pluck up the courage to invite him to come and see the next England match with me, but so far, my nerves have won out. As usual, I’ll probably be watching it on TV with a beer rather than with the man of my dreams. I’ve enjoyed getting to know him better. It’s the first time in a long while I’ve felt normal around a man. After everything that happened with my father, I’ve been very mistrusting of men in general. Despite a couple of one-night stands and a month-long relationship, my love life has been nonexistent.
“Bethany, Luke, and a discussion on the reproduction of flowers for an hour.” I shake my head at him and then cover my face with my hands in mock despair. “Please tell me it’s home time now.”
He laughs with a deep chuckle that gets my girly parts tingling. I think I’ll need to bring Peter out to play tonight. He’s my rabbit vibrator, named after Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit…I’m a total dork sometimes.
“It’s home time. No more children until after the weekend.”
I let out a loud puff of air.
“Way to remind me I have to come back on Monday.”
He holds his hands up in a teasing apology and continues to laugh.
“How about I make it up to you?”
Frowning at him, I come closer and can smell his woodsy aftershave. It’s fresh, earthy and dreamy…
“What do you mean?”
“I’m at a loose end tonight.” He suddenly seems to go a little bit shy and looks down at the ground. “We’ve been getting on really well lately, and I wondered if you’d like to come out for dinner with me.”
“Dinner?” I spit out in shock, my jaw almost certainly hitting the floor, cartoon-like.
“Sorry, it was a silly suggestion. Have a great weekend.” Turning quickly, he starts to disappear, but I don’t want that to happen. I want dinner.
“Wait.” I race up to him and tap him on the shoulder. “I’d love to come to dinner.”
“You sure?” He looks nervous, and I can’t help finding it even more endearing. Alex Underwood is a mysterious man, and I want to peel back all his layers.
“Yes, but wait. I’ll need to go home and change first. It’s going to take me a while.” I inwardly curse the fact I live so far away from the school all of a sudden.
“That’s not a problem.” He smiles, and my heart does a double beat at the toothy grin. Damn, even his teeth are perfectly straight. I used to bite my nails, and I’ve got this weird slight crossover thing happening between my two top, front teeth. At least my facial features seem to be thought of as pretty, and my thick brown hair can easily be tamed into a neat style with a pair of straighteners, so that is another plus to my appearance. I have to thank my Italian ancestry on my mother’s side for all of that. My father was the East End boy who’d made good until he ended up back in the gutter.
“Why?” I question.
“You’re out in Harlow, if I remember right? You told me once when we were sorting out the projects for the year.”
“Yeah,” I sigh, knowing it’s a long drive.
“I’m in Hertford.”
“Really?” He knows where I live, but I’ve never discussed where he’s from. I can’t believe he’s only fifteen minutes from me. “How did I not know this?”
“You’ve never asked,” He winks at me, “We just exchanged phone numbers for school business, of course.”
“Of course,” I jest back at him.
He looks at his watch, and I peek down as well.
“It’s three thirty. How about you give me your address, and I’ll pick you up at eight? I know a great little restaurant in Ware, which I think you’ll like. What do you say?”
“Does it have spicy food?” I ask with a raised eyebrow. I’m known as the spice queen in the staff room. Even my boring ham sandwiches are covered in pepper to give them a bit of a kick.
“It’s Mexican.”
“Perfect.” Following me back into my class room, he waits while I write down my address on a bit of paper and hand it to him with a flirtatious smile.
“See you later, Mr. Underwood.”
He leans into me, his warm breath cascading over my skin and sending goosebumps of excitement all over my body.
“I can’t wait, Miss Romano.”
Chapter Two
Alex
“Mrs. White is such a bully sometimes. I mean, she needs to give the children a little bit more leeway when it comes to their subject choice. She’s forcing some of them into classes that don’t interest them at all, and they’ll be unlikely to get good results. They need to look at the scheduling. I’d one girl who wanted nothing more than to do French, math, and English for A-level, but math and French lessons were scheduled for the same time, so she couldn’t. She ended up doing economics because it was the only subject she had a remote interest in. It didn’t work out for her, though, and she didn’t get high enough grades to get into the course she wanted at university.” Chiara begins drinking her second glass of red wine as they take our starter plates away. Sensibly I’d ordered a crab and avocado salad, and Chiara went for a spicy salsa with tortillas. There are times I long
for the more carbohydrate laden options, but they’re just not worth it. I’d rather take less insulin and manage the type 1 diabetes I have via my diet as much as I can. It isn’t always possible, but that’s why carbohydrate counting is so important. I was diagnosed with type 1 when I was twenty-five. It’s old for someone to discover they have it. Most people are diagnosed as children. I’ll never forget the day I went for a health check at a local private healthcare center. It was the routine one I have every year as part of the insurance package my parents paid for after my dad’s heart attack. It was a Friday afternoon, and I expected to be given a clean bill of health. I’d lost a lot of weight during the previous few months, and I’d found myself drinking a lot more water over night and thus using the bathroom more frequently, but I didn’t really think anything about it. I’d been doing a new training regime at the gym and assumed it was down to that. It wasn’t, though. When I mentioned the symptoms during the appointment, the doctor immediately ordered a blood test to be done by a nurse, and I was told my sugar levels were twenty-seven. They should have been between four and seven depending on the time I’d last eaten. I was instantly told to pee in a cup, and my urine was tested with litmus paper. It showed I had ketones in my urine, which meant my kidneys could be in danger of damage. As a twenty-five-year-old who thought he was relatively healthy, this was all a bit of a shock. I was rushed to hospital and spent the weekend learning a whole new way of living with a condition that will be with me for the rest of my life.
Most days, it’s easy, and I don’t need to worry. The process has become almost second nature now, and I don’t think much about it. But some days I become hyperglycemic, which is when my sugar level spikes, and I have too much sugar in my blood. It can lead to kidney damage. On other days I can become hypoglycemic, or hypo for short, which is when my sugar level goes low for no apparent reason. It’s on those occasions when my condition can be hard because there is a risk of going into a coma. I just wish for the normality I had before my diagnosis—but my pancreas is dead, and unless they develop an artificial one, then insulin and finger pricking will be a part of my life forever.
I knew the crab and avocado wouldn’t have much sugar in it, so I didn’t need to inject prior to eating it. However, I will need to inject prior to the fajitas I’m going to consume for my main course. I do a quick mental calculation in my head to work out the amount of NovoRapid insulin I need to inject. This is a quick acting medication injection that reduces the sugar levels in my blood when I’m eating my meal. At night, I take another insulin called Lantis, which releases more slowly into my system and deals more effectively with the internal changes in my body over a twenty-four-hour period.
“If you’ll excuse me a minute?” I stand. “Call of nature,” I inform Chiara before disappearing off into the bathroom with the little bag I always carry around with me, containing all my medical equipment. I haven’t told anyone apart from Mrs. White, the headmistress at the school, I have diabetes. I’ve faced a lot of prejudice about it in the past, and so it’s easier not to mention it and just disappear into the bathroom when I need to inject. I like Chiara though, and if tonight isn’t a one-time-only thing, then I know I’ll need to tell her. I prepare the injection by attaching the needle to the insulin and setting the dial for the required dose to two and compress the button at the top of the needle to get rid of any air bubbles. I then reset the dial to four. That should be enough, given I’ve had a glass of wine as well, or ‘poison’ as my dietician calls it. Alcohol forces my body to work harder to get rid of it, making it more difficult to figure out the amount of insulin I may need to administer. As I push the needle into my stomach, my mind drifts back to the Italian beauty I’m on a date with. The first time I met Chiara, I couldn’t keep my dick down. It wanted her…it wanted me to jump on top of her and hump her like a rabbit from the moment I saw her. Thankfully, my brain overruled the part of my body that likes to think it’s my brain, and together they agreed on getting to know her better first. Sometimes there’s a sadness behind Chiara’s eyes, and I wonder what’s the cause. I know she still lives at home with her mother who’s unable to work because she suffers with terrible anxiety. Her mother doesn’t often leave the house unless she’s accompanied. Chiara confided all this to me when we had spent the day together at school during the summer holidays, planning out what we would be doing with our joint tutor group this year. We had a wonderful time together—it was the most enjoyable day of the holiday. A holiday that also included a week in Tenerife for my best-friend’s stag party, and also his wedding, which was held at one of the poshest hotels in Hertfordshire: a county known for having more than its share of the rich and famous living there. Chiara is funny and witty, and her smile lights up the room. She often makes me lose my head with desire. It took me a while, and a good deal of courage to ask her out. I had a bad experience at my last place of work and trusting people is hard for me now, but I know she’s different. When I tell her about my diabetes, I’m certain she won’t judge me like my previous colleagues did.
I finish administering the injection, tuck my stuff away, and wash my hands before returning to the table.
“So, tell me,” Chiara asks. “Who is Alex Underwood? Where did you grow up? University? Best friends? Deepest, darkest secrets?”
I can’t help but laugh at this. It’s been me quizzing her for most of the evening, but now she’s turning the tables on me. I know she’s always been an Essex girl—she even went to university there. She had two best friends: one who’s married with a two-year-old, and one who’s working in New York at a fashion institute. She loves them both to bits and confides in them. She was a little cagier about her parents, especially concerning her mother’s anxiety, so I didn’t press the issue any further.
“Who is Alex Underwood?” I sit back in my chair and stroke my chin as the waiter brings out the fajitas: mine beef, hers chicken. “He’s a teacher.”
“Well, duh!” She rolls her eyes and layers the sour cream, salsa, and guacamole onto the tortilla. “I think I know that, Mr. Underwood. I’ve seen your math skills, remember? How you carry all those figures in your head amazes me. Give me biological functions any day…they’re so much easier. It’s why I drew the line at physics and chemistry as they are more mathematical, and I can’t for the life of me add up.”
I laugh at her playing dumb act. I’ve seen the sparkle behind her eyes when she’s looking into the biological make-up of matter. Whatever the subject, it’s just about loving what you do, and despite her protests, when it comes to some of the unrulier children, I know she enjoys her job.
“Ok.” I’ve finished folding my fajita and take a bite, chewing and swallowing while I think about my answers to her questions.
“I grew up here in Hertfordshire. My parents owned their own paper printing business. It was pretty successful, so I didn’t want for much as a child.”
“Explains the flashy car,” she says, winking at me. She’s referring to my Audi A3, which I decided to bring tonight instead of the Ford I normally drive to school. The Ford is a smaller car and less likely to attract the attention of the pupils when I’m at work.
“Yes. It was a present from them, a couple of years ago. It’s my baby.”
She laughs. It’s breathy and goes straight to my dick.
“Did you go to University in Hertfordshire as well or somewhere else?”
“Would you hold it against me if I said Oxford?”
“Oxford!” She accidentally spits out her small mouthful of food. “Seriously?”
I nod. “It was hard work, but yeah, I’ve got a first-class math degree from Oxford.” She picks her napkin up while I’m speaking and wipes the corners of her mouth and the little bit of food that landed on the table.
“So why are you working at a school in the East End rather than on some great math project to solve world peace for the government?” she inquires before placing the napkin back down and then taking a mouthful of wine.
“I’
m not sure math could solve world peace, but it’s an interesting theory I might have to explore one day. I got offered a contract with the government, and I worked there for a few years, but my circumstances changed, and it just wasn’t right for me anymore. I don’t miss it. I love teaching, helping people learn new things, even if they act disinterested because it’s math.”
