Bobby turned to go, but Liam called after him. “You said alumni are coming?”
“Yeah,” the tenor nodded. “Aidan Deitrich said he might swing by. And Colleen Harper, but she’s kind of a flake so I wouldn’t count on her.”
Liam tensed. He would have to go now. He couldn’t have the dean find out that Aidan Dietrich was in the neighborhood, spending time with students from the department, and Liam had failed to take the opportunity to move the deal with his family forward. He nodded a dismissal to his student. “Have a good weekend, Bobby.”
As soon as he was alone again, Liam leaned against his desk, looking at the photograph of his mother in the corner. What would she think if she knew the way he was feeling about his student? His mother’s greatest ambition for him had always been for him to have a loving family of his own, even when neither of them knew what that looked like after years of his father’s infidelity and egomaniacal rages. At least they had always had each other, from the moment he was born to the second she had left this world. His chest tightened with the grief of missing her, a grief that never lessened but merely receded into the background.
He traced her face through the glass with his fingertips. She would have understood that the way he felt about Min was bigger than anything he’d ever felt before. Profound. Like discovery and homecoming all at once.
“You would have liked her, Mam,” he whispered to the picture.
Setting the picture down, Liam tucked the Starbucks cups into his bag to take home with him. He should throw them away – destroy the evidence. But he knew he wouldn’t.
There were lots of things Liam should do that he wasn’t doing – like stop sending secret coffee-cup messages to his student. Stop dreaming of all the ways he’d try to make her happy. All the ways she could make him happy.
But he knew he wouldn’t.
Chapter Seventeen
The bar frequented by the upperclassmen music students was not your typical college bar. They shunned Señor Toad’s, the underclassmen hangout across the street from campus with its pulsating music and strobe lights, its sticky floors, greasy bar top, and rotating cast of reality star headliners. Instead, they went to Micheletti’s, a small place on the edge of town known as much for its burgers as its booze.
Micheletti’s was one large square room with dark hardwood floors and grey textured wallpaper. A deep mahogany bar with four bar tops arranged in a square around a central bartending station stood in the center of the space. Hightops dotted the edges of the room, each with a small tin lantern in the center. The tin ceiling, intricately stamped in geometric patterns, added an art deco flair to the space and bounced beams of light from carefully placed spotlights into the room below. It was dim enough to feel intimate but bright enough not to feel sleazy.
Min and her friends found a group of empty hightops on the far side of the room. They’d only been there a few minutes when she heard Aidan’s familiar voice.
“Good God, they’ll let anyone in here these days,” he laughed as he sauntered to their tables. His eyes flicked to Min and he smirked as he drew up a stool.
Bobby clapped Aidan on the back in welcome as Aidan beckoned a server to take their drink order. “Glad you could make it,” Bobby said. He tilted his head towards the empty seat next to Lucy, who squirmed under his attention. “Lucy was hoping you’d swing by.”
“Couldn’t miss Luce’s birthday,” Aidan said as he slid into the empty seat beside the blushing blonde.
“I thought you’d be too busy for us peons now that you’ve graduated,” Jeff said tightly. Min didn’t miss the questioning glance Bobby shot his way as Jeff took the seat next to Min, boxing her in between himself and Bobby as buffers.
Aidan chuckled. “I always have time for the little people,” he said.
“I hear you’ve been performing overseas,” Lucy said, stars in her eyes.
Min bit the inside of her cheeks to tamp down her irritation. So many of their classmates, Lucy included, fawned over Aidan – with his connections and his sure-fire path to opera glory, who wouldn’t want to hitch their wagon to the rising star that was Aidan Dietrich? If only they all knew what he was really like.
You could have told them, a little voice in the back of her head needled.You could have come forward.
“I heard you were drinking your way across Europe on daddy’s dime,” Jeff sniped.
Aidan shook his head, “Ouch, those are fighting words,” he said, the smile on his face at odds with the acid in this tone. The server returned with their drinks before Jeff could reply. Min watched the way Aidan’s eyes roved the server’s body, lingering on her lowcut top, before he glanced at Min, tossing her a smirk. Her stomach roiled.
She took a long sip of her Sauvignon Blanc, feeling the warmth of the wine spread down her throat and into her belly. By the time she put her glass down, the server was back with a round of shots.
“We didn’t order these,” Phoebe said.
“I did.” Aidan began passing the shots around the table. “So we can celebrate Luce’s birthday in style. Kamikazes,” he said this last to Min with a conspiratorial lift of his eyebrow before draining his shot and holding the glass in the air as if in a silent toast.
“I don’t do shots,” she said, pushing hers back into the center of the table.
“Since when?” Aidan asked.
Since you,she thought.
She looked away and took another sip of her wine. She would not let him bait her. She would not let him get under her skin. She would not let him make her feelanything ever again. And she sure as hell would not let Maria and Jeff talk her into a night at the bar again – not when Aidan could show up out of nowhere and ambush her.
