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Except I just felt as unsettled as my roaming body.
The sun was long set as we pulled into a station in Oklahoma.
It was time for me to get off. This bus was headed back to California and that was one place I’d never go back to. No way, no how. Jeff had too much influence and he always would. My most impassioned prayer was that he’d look for me for a while, maybe six months? And then move on.
I bit my lip even as I wished it, gathering my backpack and pulling it on over my shoulders. Because I knew Jeff better than anyone else. I had no illusions that he loved me.
But he hated to lose. More than anything. An insult to his pride galled him like nothing else.
The thought of me of all people besting him, his prey, his mouse… that would gall him until the end of his days. And that made me very afraid of what it might make him do. The extremes it might drive him to in order to find me.
I pulled my hoody up over my head to block my face from any cameras as I stepped down off the bus and made my way into the bus station.
It was cold and mostly empty inside. I pulled out the burner phone I’d bought in New York to check the time. It was eight at night.
I hadn’t really checked ahead, and when I got inside, was dismayed to see there weren’t any buses heading south until six a.m.
Looked like a night of sleeping in the super comfortable bus station chairs was ahead for me. Oh goody.
At least I was tired. I hadn’t done much sleeping today in spite of the soothing rumble of the bus tires on the highway pavement.
A chatty woman had sat herself beside me, hellbent on telling me her whole life story. She talked for three hours straight without ever asking me a single question. Not that I minded, I didn’t plan on answering any questions. Not honestly, anyway, but still. And her perfume was overly strong.
Thankfully, she’d gotten off in St. Louis but I hadn’t been able to fall asleep since.
I found a spot by a plug and plugged in my burner phone that doubled as an mp3 player and FM radio, and settled in.
It charged fairly quickly while I people watched, and then I put my earbuds back in and listened to a couple of podcasts, settling my backpack in my lap and tucking my arms through the straps in case anyone tried to mess with it if I fell asleep.
Then I let my eyes finally settle shut.
The podcaster’s voice droned soothingly and I drifted, and drifted, and drifted…
“Penelope, can you stay after class?”
I blinked and looked up from my paper. There was a bright C- scribbled on the top of it. My nose stung, which was stupid. It was stupid to feel so wounded over a grade. So what if I’d always gotten all A’s in high school.
This was college, and of course I wouldn’t ace every paper. It was just… I’d worked really hard on this one and thought I had done a good job.
The C- glaring at me said otherwise. C- was almost a D.
I nodded at the TA, Jeff Chambers, and my heartbeat started racing for entirely different reasons. He was beloved in the English department, and there’d been much ado about how this was the last class he’d be TA’ing for before switching to his law degree full time. He was already taking classes for it and there was hubbub about how everyone in that department expected great things from him too.
This was the person who’d graded my paper. And now he wanted to see me after class. It couldn’t be for anything good, and yet being singled out by him still made me feel special and brought a flush to my cheeks. Which was even more ridiculous. He was going to chew me out for how bad my paper was and here I was blushing because he was so handsome and all the freshman girls had a crush on him, a graduate student.
I hurried down the row of desks to where he sat typing away on his laptop by the lectern.
“Just a moment,” he said, not looking up from his task as everyone else filed out of the room. I was the only one he’d asked to stay behind. I stood, nervous, trying not to shuffle back and forth from one foot to the other.
Five minutes of waiting, after everyone else was gone, he finally closed the lid of his laptop and looked up at me.
“Have a seat,” he said, gesturing toward the front row of chairs.
I did. “What’s this about?” I asked.
He frowned and brought his hands together, one rubbing the fist of the other. “I’m not sure how to put this delicately,” he said slowly. “Your paper was…”
