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The first people I’d called from my burner phone had been my parents. They’d been inconsolable. They’d told me I was going too dark. My mom... I knew I’d broken her heart.
But I was a man on a mission.
It began with applying for a teaching spot at East Harbor University.
35
Rory
Istood in front of Elijah's door, my heart hammering in my chest. What if he turned me away? What if he told me I had no business knowing anything about his past?
All I knew was I had to take the chance. Without this, he’d be lost. He’d be consumed by his urge to get even, and this was not something he could handle alone.
I’d known this the day I met Orville Butler and realized there are moments in life when you have to fall back on friends instead of family.
Chelsea had come through for me at the time. She hadn’t even asked me what was going on or why I looked so bleak and distraught when I showed up at her apartment.
Instead, she showed me in, made me sit down on the couch, and threw a blanket over me. She got me a tub of ice cream, and we watched TV together.
Halfway through, I did cry into my ice cream tub and caterwaul like a fire alarm, but she just sat beside me and held my hand until I was ready to talk.
Maybe that was all I could do today. Just sit with him and hold his hand. If he didn’t want to let me in on his past or what had destroyed him, I wouldn’t push it.
But he meant something to me. I couldn’t look at a man this haunted and simply walk away. I couldn’t love him and not care enough to try and comfort him.
When he opened the door, my heart jumped from my chest and into my mouth. I didn’t know what I would say, or where I would even begin.
So, I just started with a “Hi.”
He took me indoors. Sally was sitting with her nanny, deep into some homework. By the look on her face, she was very close to setting the notebook on fire.
The comical look in her nanny’s eyes told me she wasn’t too far from giving up either.
Sally ran up to me as soon as I walked in. I knelt down to kiss her soft curls and handed her a box of oil pastels and a new sketchbook.
She smiled up at me with that innocent wonder in her eyes. Every time I looked at her, I felt a little bit broken and entirely mended.
“Sally, I need to talk to your daddy for a little bit. But after I’m done and you’ve finished today’s math lesson, what say you and I make a drawing together?”
She nodded and wiped her eyes. She’d been crying. Oh, the damn school system and how it could pressurize the little souls. I gritted my teeth together.
“We’ll also make it a date. I have some M&M’s in my bag. What say you just ace those stupid numbers and then we eat some candy and go visit Fairyland?”
I opened the sketchbook and showed her the little blank illustrations of fairies and forests. Her eyes brightened, and she gasped. “So pwetty!”
“They’ll look even better once you sit down and do your magic on them. Let’s do it in an hour?”
Sally turned to look at her nanny, her eyes beseeching. The nanny smiled encouragingly. “Of course you can, Sally. All we have to do is finish this lesson. Come on then, let’s get it done!”
I almost told Sally to kick some ass and solve the shit out of those numbers, but I managed to control myself at the last second. Instead, I gave her another kiss. “Go on, angel. You can do it.”
Elijah took me to his study room. This had to be the prettiest place in the entire apartment.
The space was bathed in warm sunlight, which cascaded through the tall, arched windows that lined one wall. Each wall was painted a soothing shade of cream, which only served to amplify the sunlight's glow.
My eyes were immediately drawn to the massive bookshelves that took up an entire wall of the room. The shelves were lined with volumes upon volumes of beautiful books, their spines carefully arranged in alphabetical order.
Ornate covers and intricate typography—the professor liked to keep his books in style. It made me smile. It was the kind of study I could envision for myself.
