The door closed behind him, and he was entirely certain she was about to retreat to her desk, out of sight to passersby who might peer through the window in her door. She would cry alone, where no one could see, no one could hear. No one could offer her support or affection or anything else she needed, other than her pride and her privacy.
Dammit. He understood that too.
He needed a minute before entering the meeting, despite his increasing tardiness. So he went to the men’s faculty bathroom. Splashed water on his face. Dried himself with a paper towel. Pushed an overlong hank of hair behind his ear and studied his own damp reflection.
How long since he’d last cut his hair or groomed his growing beard?
How long since he’d seen himself without those dark pits beneath his eyes?
Gripping the sink with both hands, his knuckles nearly as white as the chipped porcelain, he acknowledged another unwelcome truth, asked himself another agonizing question.
How long since his own grayness had disappeared? Because he might be unkempt, but Candy’s particular stage of numb, half-dead sadness had passed at some point.
Part of his brain kept insisting he should be ashamed of that.
Marianne wouldn’t have wanted him to mire himself in his grief forever, though. It was a cliché, but also the hard, hard, truth.
Now he had to decide what he wanted for himself.
And as he met his own gaze clearly for the first time in—
Well, he didn’t know how long.
But he noted, as if viewing a stranger, that he had green eyes. Weary, complete with bursts of lines at their corners, but green nevertheless.
Forest green, one might say.
At some point, he was going to have to look at that bit of subtext. Decipher it. Then decide whether he wanted to make it text instead. Clear. Undeniable.
Loud as life.
Three
“I thinkwe have the poetry slam mostly planned out. So that brings us to our next task: the morning announcements.” Candy hooked a finger in her pearl necklace, rotating one of the milky spheres idly as she frowned at her notebook. “Which poems do you propose to include? Either they have to be short, or we have to choose brief selections from longer poems.”
To Griff’s relief, Candy had resumed her schoolmarm cosplay when the official report day for teachers arrived. Other than the bun and her cast, everything remained the same from last year. Her eyebrow-length bangs swept diagonally across her high forehead, the rest of her hair tamed by a wide headband. Her pearl necklace nestled just above the collar of her blouse, while her cardigan and long skirt covered almost every inch of her sturdy frame.
He considered that bit of reclaimed normality a good sign, even though she didn’t quite seem herself yet. That, of course, would take time. Months. Maybe years.
To his surprise, he kind of missed some aspects of her more casual clothing. The way those stretchy pants clung to her long, dimpled thighs. The squeak of her sneakers, and the wide scoop of her necklines. How her t-shirts cupped her bottom, much as he’d tried not to notice.
These days, that small triangle of bare flesh at the base of her throat, where her collar gaped open, drew his eye again and again. So did the pale stretch of her neck, and the peek of vulnerability at her nape.
Those glimpses distracted him during conversations with Candy, and he sometimes missed questions and cues to speak. Luckily, she didn’t get impatient, most likely because she blamed his slow reactions on his hearing loss. A convenient excuse, he had to admit.
“Griff?”
Especially at times like these. “I’m sorry. I was just trying to remember my list of poems.”
“Why are you trying to remember it?” Behind her bangs, he could just barely spot the wrinkle of her brow. “Didn’t you write it down?”
“Oh. Yes.” Hurriedly, he flipped open his notebook. “Yes, of course I did.”
Now she was definitely side-eyeing him, and he couldn’t blame her.
“Okay,” she said, drawing out the word. “So tell me one of the poems you chose.”
Dammit, he needed to be a professional, not a man absurdly fixated on a patch of creamy skin he couldn’t—wouldn’t—touch. “A few of my favorites weren’t appropriate for the morning announcements. Notably, Philip Larkin’s—”
