Julia’s eyes slowly moved from the pieces to The Professor and back again. He smashed a chair. He smashed a metal chair.
His eyes opened, and she saw a strange and dangerous calmness in their blue depths. Here was the dragon in his den. And she was unarmed.
“If you were anyone else I’d have you expelled.”
Julia shook as soon as she heard the tone of his voice. It was deceptively calm and soft, like silk brushing across bare skin. But the undertone was steel and ice.
“That was the most disgusting display of infantile behavior I have ever witnessed. Your disrespectful attitude is absolutely unacceptable. On top of that, I can’t even begin to express the anger I have over what you said about Paulina. You are never to speak about her again. Do I make myself clear?”
Julia swallowed hard but was too upset to answer.
“I said do I make myself clear?” he growled.
“Yes.”
“My self-control is tenuous at best. You would do well not to push it. And I expect you to fight your own battles and not manipulate Paul into rescuing you from your own stupidity. He has his own problems.”
Julia looked at the carpet, avoiding his eyes, which seemed to glow in the darkness.
“I think you wanted me to lose my temper. I think you wanted me to get angry and make a scene, so you’d be justified in running away. You wanted me to behave like every other abusive asshole that has knocked you around. Well, I’m not an abusive asshole, and I’m not going to do that.”
She glanced over at the twisted wreckage of the chair—(a nice, Swedish chair that had done nothing in its short life to hurt anyone)—and looked back at The Professor. But she didn’t argue.
His tongue darted out, and he licked his lips. “Is this a game to you? Hmmmm? Playing us off each other like something out of Prokofiev? He’s Peter; I’m the Wolf. What does that make you—the duck?”
Julia shook her head.
“What happened in my seminar today will never happen again. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Professor.”
She clutched at the doorknob behind her. It was locked. “I’ll apologize to the class.”
“And expose us to even more gossip? You will do no such thing. Why wouldn’t you talk to me? One phone call. One meeting. I could have spoken to you through a door, for God’s sake. And instead, you finally choose to talk to me in the middle of my fucking graduate seminar!”
“You put a bra in my mailbox…I thought—”
“Use your head!” he snapped. “If I’d mailed it to you, there would have been a paper trail. That would have been far more incriminating. And I wasn’t about to leave your iPod on your porch in the middle of a rainstorm.”
Julia was confused by his apparent non sequitur but decided not to question him.
“I started this clusterfuck by changing my lecture, but you finished it, Julianne, and you finished it with the equivalent of a hydrogen bomb. You are not going to drop my class. Clear? You are not going to drop out of the program. And we’re going to pretend this debacle never happened and hope that the other students are too wrapped up in their own lives to notice anything.”
Gabriel fixed her with an impassive look. “Come.” He pointed to a space on the carpet.
She took a few steps forward.
“Have you returned the bursary?”
“Not yet. The chair of Italian Studies has swine flu.”
“But you’ve made an appointment?”
“Yes.”
“So you made an appointment with him, but you didn’t have the courtesy to send me a two word text message when I was desperate to know how you were,” he growled.
Julia blinked.
“You’re going to cancel that appointment.”
“But I don’t want the money, and…”
“You will cancel the appointment, you will take the money, and you will keep your mouth shut. You’ve made the mess; I have to clean it up.” He glared at her darkly. “Understood?”
Julia held her breath and nodded rather reluctantly.
“The e-mail you sent me was disgraceful, a real slap in the face after all the messages I left you. Did you even listen to my voice mails? Or did you just delete them?”
“I listened to them.”
“You listened to them, but you didn’t believe them. And you sure as hell didn’t answer them. You used the word harassment in your e-mail to me. What the fuck did you hope to accomplish by that?”
“Um—I don’t know.”
Gabriel closed the gap between them, standing only inches from her. “It’s quite possible that your e-mail has been red-flagged by someone already. Even if I erase that e-mail, and I did, someone could still find it. E-mails are forever, Julianne. You are never going to e-mail me again. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“You seem to be the only person capable of pushing all of my buttons, and I do mean all of them.”
Julia glanced over at the door, wishing she could fling it open and escape.