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"What do you mean?" I asked. I remembered that look that Damien had given me. It was more than just protecting his own skin – I could see it now, he was embarrassed by whatever it was that he had said about me in here.
"Acting inappropriately towards fathers and other caretakers," he explained, checking the notes that he had made. "Does that sound familiar?"
"I didn’t do anything of the kind," I protested at once. "I mean, I spoke to them, sure, but that was it, it never went any further-"
"Are you sure about that?" He asked, tenting his fingers and looking over the top of them at me. I just stared at him, open-mouthed, for a long moment. How was I meant to respond? When it came to doing gate duty, everyone flirted a little bit; it was just politeness, after all. But I couldn’t say that now, not while I was under this amount of scrutiny. Everyone would just take that as an admission of my guilt. I hated that everything that I did now was some sick proof that I was a sexual predator out to pick up whatever men came into my line of sight.
Up until a few months ago, I had been firmly celibate, had nothing to do with men for years, and now this was all happening so fast that I hardly had time to wrap my head around what it actually meant for me.
"I’m sure," I blurted out, but the tone of my voice made me sound like I was making it up. I had to bite the insides of my cheeks to keep from continuing to talk and just digging myself into an even bigger hole.
Fuck.Jonah made a note of something on the paper in front of him, and I had to fight the urge to reach across and snatch it from him just to find out what it actually said about me. What were people saying? What were people thinking? How could they all view me this badly, this quickly, when I had poured so much love and effort into this job over the years?
"Jonah, you have to listen to me here," I told him, steadying my voice and trying to pull myself together; I knew that I couldn’t walk out of here letting him think that there was an ounce of truth to whatever Damien had told him. Damien had been the one flirting with me, and he was probably just throwing this out there to cover his own ass in case his wife found out that he had been enjoying my company a little too much during the school run.
"I know how this must look to you, but I’ve never done anything like that," I continued. "I’m committed to this job. I wouldn’t have been here for so long if I wasn’t. I wasn’t just – I wasn’t playing the long game all this time. I met this guy and we got together and I had no idea that he’d even been to this school."
I fell silent again, and I stared at him, waiting for a response. He didn’t hurry to give me one. My toes curled in my shoes, and I fought the urge to slam my fist down on the desk in front of me and beg him to listen to me. I knew it wouldn’t have changed anything. Jonah had to take these accusations seriously; the trouble that he could land in if he didn’t would ruin his career. But when he looked at me, did he see anything other than someone who had been falsely accused of something heinous? I wanted to know. I needed to know. These last few weeks, they had been an exercise in learning who truly stood by my side, and who was basically out here causing me trouble no matter how hard I pushed against it.
I had to go back to class after that and act like nothing was wrong, even though I felt like I needed to scream at the top of my lungs. Had all of this been worth it? Had it? I kept asking myself that, a million times over, until the words had lost all meaning inside my head.
And the truth was – the answer was yes. I loved him. I hadn’t said the words to him yet, and I knew that now wasn’t the time, but I loved him. I loved him fiercely and with a passion, I loved him more than I had loved anyone before in my life. I loved him like my life depended on it, and sometimes, these days, it really felt like it did.
He was there for me, without question, in the face of all of it. He made it clear that nothing that happened was going to draw him from my side. He spent more time than he should have beating himself up over not telling me the truth of where he knew me from sooner.
"If I had just told you about all of this," he murmured to me, as we sat on the couch; he had offered to pick me up from school, but I had turned him down. Last thing we needed was for anyone to see us together. It would just give his mother more ammo against us, and God knew that that was the last thing we needed right about now.
"Then none of this would have happened," he continued, his face wracked with guilt.
"None of this would have happened," I echoed after him. "I never would have even met up with you. We’ve never have gotten to know each other. Do you really think that would have been worth it?”
"Do you?" He replied, turning those soft, worried eyes on me. My heart ached; I wished I could tell him, a hundred times over, that I would have done it again in an instant. I wasn’t sure that even then he would have begun to believe me. I got the feeling that it wasn’t going to be as easy as that. He was heavy with the guilt of having been the one to put me here, but I needed him to know that it wasn’t him at all. That I had made this choice once I’d known the truth, and that I would have made it again if he had asked me to. Because what I felt when I was lying in his arms, that was worth all of the pain and all of the suffering and all of the sadness that came with this. I loved him, it was that simple, and love was worth going through anything for.
Right?
"I don’t," I promised him. Sometimes, at times like this, I could see just how young he was; how vulnerable he could be. It made me want to take care of him. But that was what love did, right? That was how it felt when you really loved someone, when you knew there would be nothing that the world could throw at you that you wouldn’t take on. I was so lucky to have him and I wanted him to know that. Despite everything, I wanted him to know that I wouldn’t have changed this.
I would have changed how everyone saw it, though, if I’d had the chance. I would have made it so that when they looked at us, they saw a funny story, not something that needed to be capital-A addressed by the school and apparently the community as a whole. It made me so mad to think about everything that we had been put through – and for what? Because we loved one another. Because we were filled with the kind of hopeless care that came when the only thing that mattered was the way the other person made you feel.
That was what hurt me the most. Knowing that this could be held up as something so wrong. I wished that I could find some way to put forth the way I was feeling about him to the rest of the world – God, if I could have just told them all how he made me feel, the way he made my skin feel like it was buzzing with energy, they would have understood then. If I told them that I had never felt alive the way I did when I was with him before, maybe then, they would let it happen.
And look, okay, yes, I knew that to some people this would have looked strange. He had been a student at the school, and that had happened in the time that I had been teaching there. But people were exploding it way out of proportion, making out like I had practically swept in when he had been in short trousers to make him mine. Sure, he might have noticed me then for the first time, but the same did not go in the other direction. I hadn’t even been aware that he existed until the day that he had appeared on my screen, and I had felt my stomach twist with the thrill of seeing his face. I would never have known anything beyond that, had it not been for the fact that he reached out to me.
And now I loved him, and it seemed like everyone around us wanted nothing more than for us to forget about one another. But how could I do a thing like that? As I lay there in his arms, I knew that it wasn’t an option for me, not even close. I could have tried a million times over to leave him behind and none of it would have worked. Because he was a part of me now, the same way that I was a part of him. Losing him would be like cutting off a limb, and I was so far removed from being ready to take that on, I knew there was no chance I would go there.
"I feel like I caused all of this," Joseph murmured, as he smoothed his hand over my head. "If I had just told you everything in the first place..."
"We can’t think like that," I told him firmly. "We’re here now, right? I don’t want anything to change that. I don’t want you to go anywhere."
He managed to grin at me, despite the severity of the conversation.
"And there you were, kicking me out the first morning after we slept together," he reminded me. "You remember that?"
"Of course I do," I replied, flushing slightly. "But that was different. You sprung that on me then. I barely got to know you first..."
"You felt that way?" He replied, lifting his head so he could look at me. "Because I was pretty sure that I was in love with you even back then."
The words made something stutter in my chest. He had never said theloveword to me, and though I wanted nothing more than to say them back, I had to take a second to wrap my head around what had just come out of his mouth.
