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And tomorrow, he’ll be teaching my daughter addition and subtraction.
This isn’t happening. My chest feels so hot it burns, and not in a good way. It claws up my throat, fuzzing my vision as I try to push the reality aside. I’m jumping to conclusions. Mac isn’t a teacher.
“What does he look like?” Katie says, feet still kicking up in a steady rhythm, the fear gone from her face.
“Umm…” I tap on my screen to pull up the school’s website with trembling hands, clicking through the pages to find the staff page.
Katie sits up, folding her hands on my shoulder as she peers down at the screen with me.
I scroll through faces, young and old, male and female, praying it’s someone else. There must be another Mr. Blair. It’s not Mac.
But then I see him, looking nothing like the motorcycle badass, dressed in a smart blue button-down with his hair combed back, a broad smile on his handsome face.
Katie moves closer to the screen and bites her lip. She tilts her head to the side and studies his face for a moment, then sits back. “He looks friendly.”
“Uh-huh,” I say numbly. “He is.”
He was real friendly when he was telling me how good I tasted. When he was telling me how much he loved his cock in my mouth. When he was buried so deep inside me I couldn’t breathe.
Super friendly.
I don’t really know what happens next. Katie settles down and I put her back to bed. I head downstairs and stare at my forgotten glass of wine, feeling more and more horrified as the seconds tick by.
Then I try to talk myself down.
It’s fine. Right?
We screwed around… So what? We’re adults. I throw back my glass of wine and dump the rest of the soured wine into it, staring at the golden liquid as I lean against the counter, palms on either side of the glass.
Then I straighten up, because a day ago I was standing in the exact same position, but Mac’s hand was down my pants.
I turn away, sliding my hands through my hair and pulling it tight. Okay. Okay, this is fine. It happened before the school year, and it’s casual. We can maintain an appropriate relationship while Katie is in his class. Everything is fine. We’re adults, we hooked up, and now we need to stop because it’s inappropriate.
Then I whirl back around and stare at nothing, because a fresh, horrible thought enters my head:
Did Mac know?
Then it dawns on me. That woman—she said I was “the new one.” The new mom he was screwing around with, and he even admitted he slept with her.
Is this what he does? Does he sleep with his students’ moms?
Has he been playing me this whole time?
CHAPTER 22
Mac
Trina never answered my text messages last night, and as I get ready for my new kids to arrive in class, I try not to dwell on it.
She told me she was busy last night. She’s a mother. Sure, we hooked up yesterday morning, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking of the way she moaned my name, but we’re both busy people. It’s normal not to answer every single text. We’re going to dinner tonight, I’ll tell her about Belinda, and everything will be fine.
That’s how I find myself in my classroom on Monday morning, making sure all the kids’ name tags are stuck to the appropriate desks, and everything is prepped for the whirlwind of seven-year-olds that’s about to walk through my door.
When I first got into teaching, I thought I wanted to be a high school teacher. I thought I’d prefer having older kids and knowing that I’d had a hand in preparing them for their futures. I even considered teaching art full-time when I discovered I loved pottery.
It didn’t take me long to realize I was good with younger kids. I think it was my second year of college, I was a student teacher doing a placement at a school in a first-grade classroom, and I saw a little girl break down and cry when she was asked to write her name. All the other kids knew how to do it already, and she panicked. I sat with her and coached her through the letters of her name—Laura—then watched her face transform from teary to ecstatic. She then proceeded to write her name on every piece of paper she could find. And the desks. And the walls.
I never quite got over the wonder that young kids have in their eyes. Teaching them makes me feel like I’m actually contributing something to the world.
