We stood there staring at each other, the silence closing in, neither one of us moving. It was like we were locked in place.
There was no coming back from that kiss.
I opened my mouth, digging deep, trying to find the words, scraping my insides out for her until I came up empty. This was purgatory, in between everything I wanted and the hell I’d clawed my way out of, knowing I didn’t deserve the softness of her lips or the sweetness of her mouth.
I didn’t want to make love to her. I didn’t want to give her my heart—didn’t even have one to give. I wanted to fuck her. That was it. That was all this was supposed to be.
This feeling inside of me hurt. It was a cruel joke to put her in front of me, to know that she wanted me as much as I wanted her. She was a temptation I couldn’t afford, a line I feared crossing.
The longer I stayed, the more I wanted to kiss her again, the harder it was to convince myself that I couldn’t have her.
So I gave her a jerky nod, my jaw clenched, and fled.
Chapter Seven
We were disappointed to miss out on a meeting between Blair Reynolds and her former fiancé. Rumor has it Blair left the party early and stayed far away from the Wyatts . . .
—Capital Confessions blog
Blair
I couldn’t stop thinking about our kiss. It distracted me when I sat in class, when my mind should have been on con law. It had been two days and the memory of Gray kissing me had yet to fade. Unfortunately, neither had the image of him fleeing like he’d contract the plague if he stood near me for another moment.
What did it take to make a man like that retreat?
I didn’t understand it, wanted to die every time I thought about it. He’d kissed me back. He’d definitely kissed me back. And then, it was like a switch had flipped off, and he’d just left. I had been trying to come to terms with what I’d done, and then I’d blinked, and he was gone.
Was it the fact that he was my teacher? Had I imagined the desire between us? He’d flirted with me in our own weird way. Constantly. For weeks now. And the second I’d let my guard down, the second I’d put myself out there, he’d looked at me like I terrified him.
That was a new one.
A voice from the front of the classroom pulled me out of my mental freak-out.
“Ms. Reynolds, please tell us the issue in Gibbons v. Ogden.”
Ugh.
I needed all of my wits about me to make it through con law.
Professor Myers stared at me expectantly from the front of the room. While torts was my least favorite class, con law ran a very close second. It wasn’t just that Professor Myers was eccentric as hell, or that our textbook was heavy enough to double as a deadly weapon, or that the book’s pages were ridiculously thin and sucked up highlighter ink at an alarming rate. No, the biggest reason I hated con law was that I didn’t understand it. At all.
Part of the problem was that Myers was a genius, so things that were incredibly simple to him were indecipherable to the rest of the class. He also had a tendency to speak quickly, which made taking notes a near impossibility. In a moment of desperation, I’d shelled out eighty bucks for the supplement, only to be even more confused. And that fucker was a solid five hundred pages on its own. Only in law school would it take five hundred pages to condense a semester worth of material.
I cleared my throat, staring down at my notes, trying to find the case’s issue. Sometimes our casebooks broke out the issue neatly, other times you had to go searching for it through antiquated language and confusing tangents. This was one of those times. I scanned my brief, staving off a near-heart attack when I spotted the section where I’d bolded the issue.
“Whether the state monopoly prevails over the federal act.”
“Very good. And how does that relate to the Court’s holding in Carter v. Carter Coal?”
And that was where I unraveled. In a pinch, on a good day, I could get enough out of the actual cases to answer the questions thrown at me. But when I was forced to compare holdings or extrapolate information from one case to another, I completely lost it. Which was kind of the point of law school.
Law school didn’t necessarily teach you how to practice law—even though it should have. Instead, it taught you to think like a lawyer. There was a bit of a learning curve, but by now the vast majority of my classmates got it. We all still fumbled, still had moments when we were lost, but I alone seemed this lost.
I stumbled over the explanation until Professor Myers’s eyes filled with disappointment. My cheeks heated at the silence around me and the scrutiny of my classmates’ gazes on me. Finally, he called on another student. She managed to reach the conclusion he’d wanted in a fraction of the time I’d rambled on.
“Thank you, Ms. Barnett.” He turned his attention to the rest of the room. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Commerce Clause is one of the central concepts to understanding the federal legislative power. You need to know these cases like the back of your hand in order to do well on the final exam in December. We’re a month and a half away. If you haven’t gotten it by now, you should really rethink whether law school is a good fit for you.”
Shit.
I ducked my head, staring down at the textbook and my sheets of notes, the words blurring on the page. Tears filled my eyes, threatening to spill down my cheeks. The crazy thing was that he wasn’t even being unkind. Just honest. He didn’t say anything I hadn’t already thought.
I entertained fantasies of withdrawing from school on a nearly daily basis. It took me all of a week to realize that I’d made a hasty decision in some misguided attempt to redeem myself after everything ended with Thom. I should have taken some time to figure things out. Maybe then I would have realized that I’d put myself on a career path that was totally wrong for me.
The only thing that stopped me from correcting the mistake now was the sheer embarrassment of admitting that this, too, hadn’t worked out for me. And the total uselessness of a semester—or half a semester—of law school. I’d basically spent twenty-five thousand dollars to learn I made bad decisions and was a shitty law student.
Talk about adding insult to injury.
* * *
After con law ended, I walked out of the building and headed to the faculty parking lot. I was meeting Professor Canter—Gray—to check out the middle school for the 1L pro bono project. We hadn’t seen each other since our kiss on Wednesday night, our only communication stilted emails couched in professional courtesy through the law school’s webmail system. Between the tension of seeing him again and the epic fuckup in con law, my sanity hung by a thread.
And then I saw him.
Maybe he didn’t have classes on Fridays; maybe he came to school like this on days he didn’t teach. Maybe he just wanted to fit in. Whatever it was, he was dressed casually in jeans and a gray sweater that made me want to bite him.
He stopped a foot away from me and smiled, his gaze shielded by a pair of dark sunglasses.
“Ready?”
I nodded, even though I was anything but.
I followed him through the crowded parking lot, trying not to check out how good he looked from behind, until we stopped in front of a black Range Rover. Despite the chill in the air, my body felt like it was on fire. Gray slid into the driver’s side, putting the school’s address into the car’s navigation system.
He pulled back, turning out of the parking lot and maneuvering the massive car with ease.
Silence descended around us, and while I struggled to come up with something interesting to say, I couldn’t think of one single thing. We were in a weird place. We’d kissed, and yet we didn’t really know anything about each other. It reduced the ability to lead with one of those conversations where you spoke without saying anything at all. It was like we’d fast-forwarded into an intimacy I wasn’t sure either one of us wanted and I definitely didn’t know how to handle.