“Not now. Tomorrow.”
“But Professor, I…”
“Tomorrow, Mr. Norris. Don’t push me.”
Paul gave Julia a very worried look and mouthed the words, “I’m sorry.”
The Professor waited until Paul had disappeared around the corner before stepping aside to let Julia in. He closed the door behind her and walked over to the window.
Abandon hope all ye who enter here…
The Professor’s office was dark, illuminated only by his desk lamp. He’d drawn the blinds and was now leaning as far away from her as possible and rubbing his eyes with his inky fingers.
Julia moved her knapsack in front of her like a shield, clasping it with two hands. When he didn’t speak, she busied herself by glancing around the room. Her eyes alighted on a chair — the very uncomfortable Ikea chair that she sat on back in September during her first ill-fated meeting with The Professor. The chair had been smashed to bits and was lying in small, bent pieces that were scattered across the Persian carpet.
Julia’s eyes slowly moved from the pieces to The Professor and back again. He smashed a chair. He smashed a metal chair.
His eyes opened, and she saw a strange and dangerous calmness in their blue depths. Here was the dragon in his den. And she was unarmed.
“If you were anyone else I’d have you expelled.”
Julia shook as soon as she heard the tone of his voice. It was decep-tively calm and soft, like silk brushing across bare skin. But the undertone was steel and ice.
“That was the most disgusting display of infantile behavior I have ever witnessed. Your disrespectful attitude is absolutely unacceptable. On top of that, I can’t even begin to express the anger I have over what you said about Paulina. You are never to speak about her again. Do I make myself clear?”
Julia swallowed hard but was too upset to answer.
“I said do I make myself clear?” he growled.
“Yes.”
“My self-control is tenuous at best. You would do well not to push it.
And I expect you to fight your own battles and not manipulate Paul into rescuing you from your own stupidity. He has his own problems.”
Julia looked at the carpet, avoiding his eyes, which seemed to glow in the darkness.
“I think you wanted me to lose my temper. I think you wanted me to get angry and make a scene, so you’d be justified in running away. You wanted me to behave like every other abusive asshole that has knocked you around. Well, I’m not an abusive asshole, and I’m not going to do that.”
She glanced over at the twisted wreckage of the chair — (a nice, Swedish chair that had done nothing in its short life to hurt anyone) — and looked back at The Professor. But she didn’t argue.
His tongue darted out, and he licked his lips. “Is this a game to you?
Hmmmm? Playing us off each other like something out of Prokofiev? He’s Peter; I’m the Wolf. What does that make you — the duck?”
Julia shook her head.
“What happened in my seminar today will never happen again. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Professor.”
She clutched at the doorknob behind her. It was locked. “I’ll apologize to the class.”
“And expose us to even more gossip? You will do no such thing. Why wouldn’t you talk to me? One phone call. One meeting. I could have spoken to you through a door, for God’s sake. And instead, you finally choose to talk to me in the middle of my fucking graduate seminar!”
“You put a bra in my mailbox…I thought — ”
“Use your head!” he snapped. “If I’d mailed it to you, there would have been a paper trail. That would have been far more incriminating. And I wasn’t about to leave your iPod on your porch in the middle of a rainstorm.”
Julia was confused by his apparent non sequitur but decided not to question him.
“I started this clusterfuck by changing my lecture, but you finished it, Julianne, and you finished it with the equivalent of a hydrogen bomb.
You are not going to drop my class. Clear? You are not going to drop out of the program. And we’re going to pretend this debacle never happened and hope that the other students are too wrapped up in their own lives to notice anything.”
Gabriel fixed her with an impassive look. “Come.” He pointed to a space on the carpet.
She took a few steps forward.
“Have you returned the bursary?”
“Not yet. The chair of Italian Studies has swine flu.”
“But you’ve made an appointment?”
“Yes.”
“So you made an appointment with him, but you didn’t have the courtesy to send me a two word text message when I was desperate to know how you were,” he growled.
Julia blinked.
“You’re going to cancel that appointment.”
“But I don’t want the money, and…”
“You will cancel the appointment, you will take the money, and you will keep your mouth shut. You’ve made the mess; I have to clean it up.”
He glared at her darkly. “Understood?”
Julia held her breath and nodded rather reluctantly.
“The e-mail you sent me was disgraceful, a real slap in the face after all the messages I left you. Did you even listen to my voice mails? Or did you just delete them?”
“I listened to them.”
“You listened to them, but you didn’t believe them. And you sure as hell didn’t answer them. You used the word harassment in your e-mail to me. What the fuck did you hope to accomplish by that?”
“Um — I don’t know.”
Gabriel closed the gap between them, standing only inches from her.
“It’s quite possible that your e-mail has been red-flagged by someone already.
Even if I erase that e-mail, and I did, someone could still find it. E-mails are forever, Julianne. You are never going to e-mail me again. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“You seem to be the only person capable of pushing all of my buttons, and I do mean all of them.”
Julia glanced over at the door, wishing she could fling it open and escape.
“Look at me,” he breathed.
When she met his eyes he continued. “I’m going to have to do some damage control. I just handled Christa, and now I’m going to have to deal with Paul, thanks to you. Christa is a menace, but Paul was a good research assistant.”
Was a good research assistant?
“Please don’t fire Paul. It’s my fault he came to you. I’ll make sure he doesn’t say anything,” she pleaded.
“Is he who you want?” Gabriel’s tone grew glacial.
Julia fidgeted with her book bag.
“Answer me.”
“I tried.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing when I see you in his arms in front of the mailboxes. It doesn’t look like nothing when he knocks on my door, like a knight, ready to fight me to protect you. Why can’t you tell me what you want, Julianne? Or do you only answer to Rabbit?” Gabriel’s voice dripped with sarcasm.
Julia’s eyes widened in surprise, but she said nothing. She didn’t know what to say.
“Fine. I give up.” He waved his hand contemptuously at the door.
“Paul can have you.”
It took a moment for Julia’s brain to tell her feet to walk toward the door, but eventually it did. She walked with lowered head and hunched shoulders, looking remarkably like a butterfly that had had its wings torn off. But she’d kept her spot in his class, and she hadn’t been expelled. Small consolation for some of the other losses she had just suffered.
Gabriel stood motionless as she fumbled with the door. A whimper escaped her lips as she struggled with the lock. He stepped behind her and reached an arm around her waist to unlock the door, brushing against her left hip. When she didn’t flinch, he leaned closer, bringing his lips to her ear.
“So all of this agony was for nothing?”
She could feel the heat of his body behind her. It radiated from his chest to her shoulder blades. The silk of his bow tie brushed against her hair, penetrating it, until it grazed across the surface of her neck, causing it to explode into goose-pimples.
“You exposed us to malicious gossip for nothing?”
“You were cruel.”
“So were you.”
“You hurt me.”
“And you hurt me. Is revenge everything you dreamed it might be?”
Gabriel continued whispering, his warm breath huffing across her cheek.
“You’ve transformed from a rabbit into a furious kitten. Well, you scratched me deeply today, my kitten. You drew blood with every word. Are you happy now? Now that you’ve humiliated me in front of my students by reciting all my secret sins? It was a true bonfire of the vanities, with you lighting the flame.”
He brought his lips even closer to her ear, and the air from his mouth caused her to shiver. “You’re a coward.”
“I am not a coward.”
“You’re the one who’s leaving.”
“You’re sending me to him.”
“Like hell I am! Do you do everything people tell you to do? Where’s my furious kitten now?”
“I’m just a student, Professor Emerson. You’re the one with all the power. You could — destroy me.”
“Bullshit. Is that what you think? That this is a power trip?” Gabriel pul ed her book bag from her tense and twisted fingers and cast it aside.
He spun her around and grasped her face, moving his hands to the curves of her cheeks. “You think I’d destroy you? After our history?”
“I’m not the one with the memory problem. You think I’m happy?
You think this is what I want? I’m miserable. To finally see you after all these years and to see you like this? I don’t even recognize you!”
“You never gave me a chance. How the hell would I know what you want, Julianne, when you won’t fucking talk to me? You tell me nothing!”
“Shouting at me won’t persuade me to talk to you!”
His mouth collided with hers, passionately but briefly, until he tore himself from her lips to whisper in her ear. “Talk to me.” His lower lip trailed temptingly along her earlobe.
She was silent as she felt the energy between them shift, like a serpent circling back on itself, swallowing itself whole, anger and passion feeding off one another.
“Tell me that you want me, or get out.”
When she didn’t answer, Gabriel slowly withdrew. She felt ill from the loss of contact and didn’t even think about the words as they tumbled impetuously from her lips. “I never wanted anyone else.”
He stared into her eyes before he initiated the kiss. Lips met tightly, warm breath against warm breath, mouths wet and slick. Gabriel’s right hand smoothed across Julia’s cheek and slowly past her ear, before moving to the nape of her neck. As his mouth engulfed hers, he began to rub his thumbs across the surface of her skin, coaxing her to relax. Their lips floated together, sliding and smoothing. After a moment or two, he tilted her head back slightly — a silent plea.