Page 69 of Teach Me Your Ways

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CECE

Iwas pouring coffee into a travel mug when I got a text. I glanced at my phone and saw it was from Dean Carver. “Shit,” I muttered.

That was not the way I wanted to start my day. I used my finger to hit the button to open the message and then went back to fixing my coffee. The text was a request for me to meet her in her office before lunch. It was cute that she phrased it as a request when we both knew there wasn’t really an option to decline.

I sent back a quick reply promising to be there after my first class and shoved the phone into my back pocket. Whatever Carver wanted, it couldn’t be good. Nothing good ever came from being summoned to the dean’s office.

“Sophie, baby, come give Mama a hug before I go!” I called out, screwing the lid onto my travel mug.

The sound of tiny feet thundering down the hallway preceded my daughter’s dramatic entrance into the kitchen. Her red curls were already escaping from the ponytail I’d wrestled them into this morning, and she had what looked suspiciously like marker on her cheek.

“Are we going to finish the castle today?”

I crouched down to her level, smoothing one of those rebellious curls behind her ear. “Yep. When I get home, we’ll finish the whole thing. The castle, the drawbridge, even those tiny little knights.”

I didn’t know who the creator of the Lego sets was, but I would love to have a conversation with them. I wanted to know why they thought thirty-two million pieces the size of a pen tip was a good idea for kids. But Sophie loved the kits. Every Christmas, birthday, and whenever she could persuade us to buy her a new set led to us owning enough to start our own Lego store. But I told myself Legos were better than screens.

“Promise?” She stuck out her pinky finger with the solemnity of someone negotiating a peace treaty.

“Promise.” I hooked my pinky with hers and sealed it with a kiss to her forehead. “Granny’s going to take you to the park today.”

“Really?”

I grinned and stood up. “Yep.”

I collected my things and headed out. I sat through my first class thinking about the looming meeting with Carver. I had a feeling I knew what was coming. She wanted to know if I had any information on the professor.

Me telling her I got the goods in more ways than one was not a smart idea. I was supposed to be a spy. If there was a spy school, I assumed fucking your target was a bad idea. No, that wasn’t entirely accurate. Some spies were supposed to fuck their targets to extract information. But that did not apply to my situation. My mission was a failure. Well, she would see it as a failure. I saw it as mind-blowing sex that rocked my world and made me question what I wanted in life.

And then it all exploded. That was definitely a failure. But she couldn’t know about that.

At appointed time, I knocked on Dean Carver’s office door at exactly eleven-thirty, hoping to get it over with quickly. Her voice called out for me to enter. I stepped inside to find her seated behind her oversized mahogany desk like some kind of dictator. Her hair had been fluffed and she’d smeared on a red lipstick that did not look good on her.

She gave me that placid, polished smile. “Cece, thank you for coming. Please, sit down and shut the door.”

I did as she asked and turned around to see it wasn’t just me and her in the room. Professor Stone was seated across from her.

He looked calm, unreadable, professional. Too professional. Like someone about to testify under oath. He barely looked my way.

Alarm bells started clanging in my skull. Danger! Danger! Danger!

My palms prickled. What do I do? Where do I sit? Should I just run and never look back?

I just nodded and stepped forward on numb legs. My throat was dry and the room felt too hot. I sat down in the chair next to Grady. I had to resist the urge to scoot the chair away from him. That would be just a little too obvious. I was close enough to catch his scent. He hadn’t looked at me yet. Just sat there, hands folded politely on his lap.

No one said anything. The tension in the room was thick enough to make me gag. I started sweating. If I ended up with pit stains, she was going to notice and that would make her think I was guilty. I was guilty but she didn’t need to know it.

Did Grady confess? Did he crack under pressure? Or had Carver somehow found out on her own? My mind raced, my stomach twisting into knots. I couldn’t look at him, couldn’t risk even a glance. If I did, I’d give everything away. My face would betray me, my body would betray me—hell, even my breathing would probably scream guilty. I would look at him like I’d seen him naked. She’d see it and we’d be busted.

I was supposed to be the spy, the one gathering intel on Grady’s so-called “philandering.” Instead, I’d become the philanderer. The irony wasn’t lost on me, but it wasn’t exactly comforting either. I’d crossed a line when I chose to fuck him. I’d obliterated it and now I was sitting in the suffocating room with the two people who could ruin my life with a single sentence. I wanted to scream.

Carver’s smile was too sweet, too calculated. She was waiting for one of us to break. Was this an interrogation? A negotiation? A trap? I didn’t know the rules, and that made it worse. My palms were slick with sweat, and I clenched them into fists to keep from wiping them on my jeans. If I moved too much, she’d notice. If I stayed too still, she’d notice. There was no winning here. What did a normal person sit like?

I wanted to speak, to fill the silence with something—anything—but I bit my tongue. Speaking first felt like admitting guilt. But staying silent felt like guilt too. My heart pounded so loudly I was sure they could hear it.

Dean Carver finally spoke. “I called you up because I’d like to discuss your TA appointment under Professor Stone,”