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“I’m not a good teacher.”
His head tilted. “What do you mean? Of course you are.”
He reached for her hands, but she stuffed them behind her back. She couldn’t touch him right now. She was too embarrassed.
“I haven’t been honest about how my recitations are going.” She leaned against the nearby fence. “I’m having a really hard time getting my students to talk. Some of them, like Cole, don’t even listen to me. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Maybe I don’t know how to come up with good discussion questions or they don’t trust me or I’m not interesting or…” She shrugged uselessly. Allison could list every reason she’d collected for why she was failing at teaching, but none of that would erase her lies. Her stomach clenched. “I just can’t do it.”
She’d never struggled so hard with anything. When she stood up in front of her students, watching half of them text on their phones or do homework on their laptops, others scribbling listlessly, all her confidence dissolved. It was like the smart, self-assured version of herself fell away, nothing but a facade. Over the last few weeks, she’d begun to doubt the parts of herself that she’d always loved most, and sheworried, now that Colin knew the truth, he’d start to doubt them, too. “Those first few weeks, we were so competitive. I couldn’t let you think I wasn’t good enough, so I lied.” She fisted her hands and dug them into her thighs. “Then, after things with us… changed, I’d hoped that I’d get better and turn it all into truth.” Which still hadn’t happened. Allison sometimes worried it never would.
Colin folded his arms over his chest, and his mouth pulled tight. “Why are you telling me now?”
It was not the question Allison had expected. Her mouth was gummy with nerves, and it seemed to take forever to find her answer. “Because we…” She cleared her throat. “We…you,deserve honesty.”
“You could have told me.”
Maybe that was true after their trip from Maine. But not before. Before, he would have taken any advantage he could get.
Or was that the old Colin? Their past was such a quagmire Allison struggled to know when exactly he’d become the man standing before her. The one she could love enough to break her all over again if she let him. “I’m telling you now,” she said.
His thin throat bobbed against a swallow, and his eyes pinned her in place. He seemed, not angry, but stormy. As if he didn’t know what to do. “Allison.”
She leaned forward, shivering in her wet clothes.
“I…” He removed his glasses and wiped the lenses with a dry spot on his T-shirt. “I understand why you felt like you had to lie. But that was the old us.” He took her hand and brought her knuckles to his lips the way he always did.
Her eyes widened as she anticipated the warm brush of his breath across her cold skin. She felt open, vulnerable, the last of the lies she was hiding fallen away. Nothing stood between them now. “And that’s not us anymore.”
He kissed her knuckles, then her palm. She felt his smile against her skin. “Definitely not.” A smile of her own blossomed on her lips in return.
Wendy’s mentorship would have been enough to tear them apart back at Brown. Allison’s loss of the Rising Star Award had proven that. But this version of them was built of something stronger. She was sure it could weather anything. Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Grad school.
Whatever happened after their presentations, whatever Wendy decided, they’d get through it. As a team, not as rivals. As long as they were together, they’d be okay.
Allison pressed herself into Colin’s side. The arm he stretched across her shoulders was solid and true.
Pulling her close, he said, “Let’s get a hot chocolate or something. Those elephants look warmer than us.”
Chapter 31
The upbeat chorus of an old song about doing the twist crooned from the speakers of Colin’s car radio as he navigated through Providence’s endless one-way streets. He bopped his head this way and that along with the tune. A smile had not left his mouth since he’d picked Allison up.
She couldn’t understand his calm. Their presentations were days away, the workload for the semester was ramping up, and the encroaching burnout had Allison about ready to crawl out of her skin. Whether she was in class or not, there was always something shecouldbe working on: getting ahead on the readings, grading student work, doing more research for her presentation. Her time never felt like her own. And on the rare occasion when she gave herself a day off, she wasted most of it worrying about how long it would take her to make up for the time she was losing.
Which was exactly what she was doing now as she watched the glow of busy restaurants and crowded stores blur by.
“Where are we going?” What Allison actually wanted to know was how his presentation prep was going and how the hell he wasn’t freaking out. But they’d made a promise to leave all aspects of Wendy’sclass—including the stress—out of their relationship, and she wouldn’t violate that, no matter how curious she was.
So, instead, she fixated on whatever this surprise was. Colin had said to wear a dress, and they were in an older part of the city she had never visited. They’d already eaten dinner. She had no idea what they were about to do.
Colin mimed zipping his mouth, then tossing a key out the window.
“You have seen a zipper, right? They don’t have keys.”
With a sigh, he reached for the window as if retrieving the key, spun it a few times at the corner of his mouth, and chucked it outside once more.
Allison snorted. “I’m pretty sure you turned that enough times that you unlocked it again.”
“I hate you,” he insisted, but the gentle brightness in his eyes and the smile on his lips said the opposite.
