Scandalous

Chapter 17

The conversation had a life of its own.

That was the only way Nathan could have described it afterward — not a thing they were conducting or managing or steering, but something that moved under its own momentum, one idea producing the next the way good conversations do when both people in them are actually present. The marginalia had led, by a path that felt inevitable in retrospect, to the question of what made an annotation worth keeping versus one that aged badly, which had led to the question of which books they had returned to and found entirely different from what they'd remembered, which had led — with the specific irresistibility of two people who love literature discovering they have incompatible hierarchies — into a genuine, enjoyable argument about whether rereading a book was a sentimental act or an analytical one.

Nathan said analytical. Shae said both, which he pushed back on and she defended with enough precision that he found himself updating his position, which he acknowledged and she noted with the brief satisfaction of someone who has made a point land.

They talked about the books that had changed how they thought — not favorites, which was a sentimental category, but the ones that had done something structural, had rearranged the furniture of a mind and left it looking different than it had before. His list was longer than hers by the margin of eighteen years. Hers had items on it he hadn't expected — not the obvious choices a student might offer to impress a teacher, but the actual ones, the ones with the particular weight of genuine encounter. She had read Camus at fourteen and spent three weeks thinking he was wrong before deciding he was right about the wrong things, and this was such a precise and specific response to Camus that Nathan had looked at her for a moment without saying anything.

She talked about the way she read — fast on the first pass, slow on the second, never skimming because skimming felt like cheating in a way she couldn't rationalize away even when she was pressed for time. He talked about the way he read — marginally slower but with the kind of attention that made him occasionally stop mid-page and simply think before continuing, which his students would have recognized as the same thing he did in class when someone said something worth sitting with.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd had a conversation like this.

Not the approximate version — not the faculty dinner party exchanges about literary theory conducted at the level of performance rather than genuine inquiry, not the marriage conversations about books that had gradually become Maryanne describing what she was working on rather than both of them engaging with what they were reading. This. The specific pleasure of two minds that were built similarly enough to understand each other and differently enough to create genuine friction, friction that produced heat rather than damage.

He was aware of this pleasure as he was experiencing it, which was unusual — usually you knew a conversation had been good only in its aftermath. He was aware of it in real time, the way you are aware of warmth when you've been cold for long enough that warmth has become notable.

For Shae, the feeling had a different shape but the same essential quality.

Gwendolyn was the only person she had ever been able to talk to without adjusting. Without gauging the other person's comprehension and dialing back accordingly, without finding the simplified version of the thought, without watching someone's face carefully for the moment they'd lost the thread so she could either retrieve them or let it go. Gwen met her where she was, always had, and the relief of that had never become ordinary even after years of it.

With Claire she calibrated. She did it automatically, without resentment, because she loved Claire completely and understood that loving someone completely didn't require them to be a particular kind of smart. Claire was loyal and funny and saw things about people and situations that Shae routinely missed. They complemented each other in ways that mattered. But when Shae wanted to push an idea all the way to its edge — to argue about it, to have it argued back at her, to find out where it broke and what was on the other side of the break — Claire would nod along with the bright, agreeable expression of someone who had followed for a while and was now smiling in the hope that smiling would be sufficient. It usually was. It was also, sometimes, quietly lonely.

She hadn't realized how quietly lonely until right now.

He didn't nod along. He pushed back. He found the weak point in her argument before she'd finished articulating it and waited, and when she got there he was waiting, and they argued about it properly — not to win, but in the way that people argue when they're actually trying to find out what's true. She liked this about him with a fierceness that surprised her. The way he took her seriously. The way he held his own ground without condescension and held it purely on the strength of the idea, not the authority of the position. He wasn't Mr. Kingston in this room right now. He was just someone who had read a great many books and thought hard about them and was interested in what she thought, and the simplicity of that was more comfortable than anything she'd felt in a long time.

She was entirely herself here. She couldn't think of very many places where that was true.

The door swung open.

They both looked up. The janitor — a steady, unhurried man with a cart of cleaning supplies and the expression of someone who has found teachers in their classrooms at odd hours before and found nothing remarkable about it — paused in the doorway, took in the scene, and said: "I can come back."

Nathan looked at him. Then looked at his watch.

"Bloody hell," he said, quietly, under his breath, in the tone of a man whose internal clock has failed him completely.

"What time is it?" Shae asked.

"Half six." He straightened. "Nearly."

She looked at the window — the light outside had gone the dark blue of evening properly arrived, not the amber of late afternoon but the genuine article. She had arrived just after five. She began reaching for her bag with the expression of someone who is calculating how this happened and not arriving at a satisfying answer.

"It's alright," Nathan told the janitor. "We're leaving."

He picked up his bag. Turned off the banker's lamp. Held the door while Shae went through, and let it swing shut behind them into the empty corridor.

The school at this hour had the particular, specific quality of an institutional building after hours — the long corridors quiet in a way they never were during the day, the overhead lights on their evening setting, lower and more yellow, the particular acoustics of a space that was designed for noise and was currently without any. Their footsteps were the only sound.

They didn't talk. The conversation had found a natural resting place and neither of them felt the need to start it again, which was itself a quality of something that had gone well — the absence of the obligation to fill the silence because the silence was comfortable.

The main doors opened onto the car park, and the evening air came in warm and dry and smelling of the California night. Nathan paused at the top of the steps.

Shae turned left.

He watched her for a moment before he understood. She wasn't heading toward the car park. She was heading toward the far edge of it, where the school grounds ended and the tree line began — the dark mass of the woods that ran along the back boundary of the campus and, he understood now, connected eventually to whatever lane led to the road that led to her house.

"Miss Madison," he said.

She turned.

"Do you need a ride?"

She shook her head. "I like the walk," she said. "It's quiet." She said it the way she said most things — simply, without performing it. A statement of genuine preference rather than a deflection.

He looked at the tree line. The dark between the trees had the specific quality of actual dark, not the ambient city dark he'd become accustomed to but the kind produced by a dense wood at the end of the day, where the light didn't penetrate and the sound changed.

"Aren't you concerned about what might be in there?" he said. "Foxes at the very least. This is Southern California — mountain lions aren't unheard of."

Shae looked at the wood. Then at him. The corner of her mouth moved.

"Mr. Kingston," she said, with a composure that managed to be very slightly devastating, "I believe I'm the scariest thing in those woods."

He looked at her.

He thought about Sloane Hartley on the cafeteria floor and decided this was probably accurate.

"Nevertheless," he said. He turned back to his car — reached through the open window to where he kept a notepad on the passenger seat, tore off a page, and wrote his number on it with the pen from his jacket pocket. He held it out to her.

She looked at the paper. Looked at him.

He was aware, with absolute clarity, that this was not something he would normally do. There were professional guidelines about this for reasons that were sensible and that he had, until this moment, never found occasion to argue with. He was also aware that she was about to walk into a dark wood alone at half past six in the evening and that he was going to drive home and spend the remainder of the night unable to account for whether she had arrived safely, and the discomfort of that particular prospect had the quality of something he was not able to simply file.

He justified it as a safety measure. It was a safety measure. He told himself this and found it, technically, defensible.

"Text me when you're home," he said. "Otherwise I'll spend the entire evening worried sick."

She took the paper. Looked at it once — the number, his handwriting, the small square of it in her hand. Then she looked at him with the expression he couldn't always name but always recognized, the one that came and went quickly and had never yet been given words.

"Goodnight, Mr. Kingston," she said.

He gave her the small smile — the real one, not the professional version. "Goodnight, Miss Madison."

She turned and walked toward the trees.

He stood by his car and watched until the dark between the trees had taken her in completely. Then he got in, started the engine, and drove.

The woods at this hour were Shae's.

They had always been Shae's, or felt that way — the particular quality of a space that has absorbed enough of your solitude that it begins to carry your frequency. She walked without a torch, which she had never needed, the path through the trees familiar enough under her feet that her body knew it without her having to think. The sounds came in layers: the high, continuous insistence of crickets, the movement of something small in the undergrowth to her left, the distant, hollow sound of an owl that had been in the same tree for as long as she could remember.

It had been, she thought, a good day.

This was not the conclusion she had expected to reach at the end of a day that had included an after-school suspension, a smoothie in her hair, and Sloane saying the thing she had said. But the day was the sum of everything in it, and the latter portion of it had been — something else entirely.

She thought about the classroom. The amber light. The conversation that had moved on its own, one thing becoming the next, neither of them steering it. The ease of it — the specific ease of not having to adjust herself, not having to calculate how much she could say before she'd lost the other person. The way he'd argued with her and meant it and expected her to argue back and been satisfied when she did.

She told herself, carefully and with the full use of her considerable reasoning ability: he's a teacher. This is what good teachers do. He's invested in his students. That's the job.

She told herself this.

She also thought about the way he looked at her when she'd said something that landed — the moment before the professional arrangement of his expression resumed, the brief, unguarded quality of it. She thought about the real smile, the one that was different from the other one, the one that she was now apparently cataloguing with enough precision to distinguish between them.

She thought about his hand on her knee in the library and told herself that was separate and she was not going to think about it.

She thought about it for the rest of the walk home.

The house appeared through the trees the way it always did — suddenly, the lights of it visible between the trunks before the structure itself, as if the house announced itself in sections. She came through the garden gate and up the steps and through the front door, locked the deadbolt and set the alarm, and stood in the foyer for a moment in the particular quiet of a big empty house that is not unhappy, just spacious.

She pulled out the paper from her jacket pocket. Looked at the number in his handwriting.

She typed it into her phone, saved it — NK in her contacts, which was as much as she was going to acknowledge — and sent the text.

Made it home, safe and sound.

The reply came back in the time it took her to start up the stairs.

Good. Get some sleep — presentations tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing what you've been working on.

She stopped on the third step.

The flutter in her belly was immediate and specific and she pressed her lips together and told it firmly to stop. She typed back:

It'll definitely be unforgettable. Goodnight, Mr. Kingston.

She waited.

The phone screen lit up.

Goodnight, Shae.

Not Miss Madison. Not the professional designation, not the careful, maintained distance of the classroom register. Just her name, in his voice — because that was where her mind went immediately and without permission, into the particular quality of the way his accent would give it those two syllables, the vowel in the middle open and unhurried.

Her heart did a thing she did not have a professional designation for.

She stood on the third step of the staircase in her silent mansion and looked at the words on her screen for longer than she intended to.

Then she went upstairs and opened her laptop and told herself, with everything she had, that she needed to focus on the presentation.

She focused on the presentation.

She thought about his voice saying her name approximately every third sentence.