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Thank God he left—I don’t think I could hang around him for very long. He is definitely an ass. But an ass who makes my knees go wobbly. Better to never see him again in this lifetime, if possible.
I have to swallow a few times to get back to standing straight up. Apparently Diego set my hormones racing and now they’re totally out of control. If I don’t watch myself I’ll grab the next half-hunky guy who comes across my path and never look back.
“Belinda?” comes a voice. “You can just come in.”
Taking a deep breath, I walk to the dean’s door and push it open. She is sitting behind the desk with her forehead perched between her long, elegant fingers.
“Is… Is everything okay?” I stammer.
She looks up as though she is surprised to see me. Even though she just invited me in.
“Okay? Yeah, I mean… if tolerating insufferable, entitled jocks is your definition ofokay, then yes. I am perfectly okay.”
She rolls her eyes and shakes her head as though pushing the thought away, but as her gaze sweeps the room she sees the piece of yellow paper in my hand.
“Is that…”
I step forward abruptly, handing it to her with my awkward hand. “I guess I was supposed to give you this? Or something?”
“Simon!” she yells out over my shoulder.
In a few moments, I hear footsteps in the hallway just outside her entrance and the door swings inward. Simon tips his head around the perimeter, letting a fringe of blond bangs sweep over his manicured eyebrows.
The dean holds up a piece of yellow paper.
“I thought you were at your desk,” she sniffs.
Simon strides in, one hand in his pocket, and the other hand extended for the paper. He looks like an advertisement for boating lessons or something.
“Just dashed out for a half-caf,” he explains. “Transfer paper? I’ll take that.”
Turning on his heel, he sweeps back past me and closes her door on his way out.
The dean sits back in her chair and slides open a drawer, pulling out the rectangular cartridge of a vapor pen.
“You mind?” she asks me.
“No. No, of course not,” I answer immediately.
I don’t love it, but what am I going to say? It’s her office. Until recently, most instructors just openly smoked cigarettes in their offices and in the hallways. The whole campus looked like a 1980s disco.
It was a time-honored tradition, and everybody fought the health department regulations that said that smoking was supposed to be sequestered in small, fenced-off areas like miniature zoos around campus.
In fact, the new laws were in effect for two years before the university finally acknowledged them. Before that, it was a kind of insolent pretension that they just didn’t know yet. But they knew. They just didn’t want to do it, and sort of hoped the new governor would roll the laws back. He didn’t. We’re stuck with them.
Consequently, a lot of people quit smoking and took up vaping. At least vaping smells like strawberries or melons or even French bread sometimes. A lot of the time, it smells intensely like pot, even worse than the real thing.
But as Dean Rhodes leans back, her eyes half closed, sucking thoughtfully on the nozzle of her vape pen and blowing clouds of steam along the surface of her desk, I can smell that it is apples. Maybe some cinnamon or vanilla. It’s not bad. She smells like a scented candle.
“Do you like football?” she asks me all of a sudden.
“Do I what?”
Puff. Puff. Clouds of steam settle below the legs of my chair.
“Football. I was just informed that everybody likes football. Is that true?”
“Jeez, I don’t know,” I shrug. “Kind of hard to avoid around here, you know what I mean?”
