“Jeez,” I scoffed, and untucked the hair. “Fine, I’ll be there in a sec.”
I shut the door behind her and returned to the desk, sitting down in the chair my mother had just vacated.
“Well that went well,” the Professor said.
“God, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what got into her.”
“No, it’s fine. She loves you, she’s looking out for you.”
“I guess,” I said. “Still, that was a pretty brutal scene.”
“I’ve been through far worse.”
“Yikes. I hate to imagine that.” I laughed. “Hey, thanks for not lying to her. I wouldn’t have liked it if you had, and it wouldn’t have worked anyway, because the woman is a human lie detector.”
“I’m a lot of things,” he said, straightening the cuff of his shirt and rubbing at his wrist idly, then sighing, “but I like to think I’m not a liar.”
“Whoa, don’t get heavy on me now.”
“Sorry.” He sighed again. “Never mind.” His lips curled in a halfhearted smile. “Go on, have breakfast with your mum. We’ll talk later.”
“Okay, later.” I nodded, blew him a kiss and ended the call. I threw on a pair of leggings, an oversize cable knit sweater and stalked to the kitchen to have words with my mother.
Charlotte had gotten to her, I was certain of that. She’d called her, and had poked all of Mom’s Goddess of Protection buttons to instigate the bizarre interrogation that had just taken place in my bedroom.
As I rounded the corner into the kitchen, my brain kicked back a few of the Professor’s words to me. Call it delayed processing, subconscious suspicion, or maybe Mom and Charlie were getting into my head despite my efforts to the contrary.
“I like to think I’m not a liar,” he’d said. What the fuck does that mean?
4
“Charlotte called you,” I said as I walked into the kitchen and made a beeline for the coffee pot to refill my mug.
“She did.” My mother nodded. “She didn’t say much. Just that you had a guy in your life and she’s worried about it, about you.”
“She needs to mind her own fucking business.”
“Language, and yes she does. She’s got some issues of her own that are not being addressed,” she said, pulling a pink pastry box from a bag on the kitchen table. “Which is why she’s distracting herself from them, by obsessing over yours.”
“Good,” I said, sitting down at the table. “I’m glad you see it my way.”
“I see it all ways.” She sighed and sat across from me. “I trust you to know what you’re doing. And I trust my family to take care of each other if, and when, we need extra support.”
“Right, what’s that mean?” I said, reaching for a pastry.
“I do believe he respects you, so that’s points in his favor. He could’ve lied to me, or ended the call, but he didn’t. I read him as a man who respects people in general.”
“But?”
“But, while that’s lovely, that doesn’t mean that you won’t get hurt.”
“Mom, that’s life. People get hurt.”
“Yes. But a relationship such as this one has a higher probability of ending badly.”
“First, there is no relationship. We have plans to fuck, that’s all. You and Charlotte are getting way ahead of yourselves here.”
“Language.”
“Second, why on earth does something between me and the Professor have a higher probability of ending badly than any other relationship?”
“That right there,” she said, pausing on her way to snag a pastry to point her finger at me instead. “You call him ‘the Professor’. There is a disproportional balance of power in this pairing from the very beginning.”
“Because he’s a teacher and I’m a student?”
She nodded.
“Negatory, Doctor Mom.”
“Convince me.”
“We power play, I’ll grant you that, but it’s been flip flopping back and forth and I know that’s a big part of the attraction. Besides, he asked me to call him by his first name, I just don’t.”
“Age?” she asked as she picked idly at a flaky croissant.
“Early thirties.”
“Relationship with family?”
“Daddy issues,” I said and quickly added, “Just like me,” when she raised an eyebrow. “I have no idea about his mom.”
“Siblings? Other family?”
“I have no idea.”
“Ever been married?”
“No idea.”
“How long will he be staying here in the States? When does he go back? What does that mean for the two of you?”
“Again, no idea. Look, I haven’t been interrogating him like you just did. Everything has been organic. We met, and it was immediate combustive sexual chemistry.”
“And yet you haven’t consummated that.”
“Not yet—his rule, not mine.”
“So what did you do last night?”
“Watched Downton Abbey, got drunk and played strip Scrabble. He won by playing an archaic and arguably illegal word invented by Shakespeare. The man loves Shakespeare.”
“Well that’s another point in his favor.”
“He also loves Jane Austen, by the way.”