Scandalous

Chapter 14

He was up at six.

Not because the alarm required it — he had set it for seven — but because sleep had done what it had been doing lately, which was releasing him early without ceremony, depositing him back into the quiet dark of the bedroom with his thoughts already running. He lay there for four minutes and then got up, because four minutes was sufficient to establish that lying there was not going to produce sleep and was producing the specific opposite.

He showered. Made coffee. Stood at the kitchen counter while the Pasadena morning came through the window in pale, unhurried increments, and had a conversation with himself.

He laid it out plainly, in the firm internal register he reserved for occasions that required clarity rather than deliberation. What had happened Saturday night was not going to happen again. The conversation that went too far, the room they should not have walked into, the hand — none of it. He was her teacher. She was his student. That relationship existed within a defined set of boundaries for reasons that were sound and well-established and required no further examination. He had lost the thread for one evening and the evening was over and that was the end of it.

From here on out: strictly professional.

He said it again, quietly, to the kitchen window. Then he picked up his bag and his thermos and went to school forty minutes before he needed to.

Room 214 was quiet when he arrived. He set up in the low light of the banker's lamp, went through his notes on the first four chapters of Wuthering Heights, marked the passages he wanted to press the class on, refilled his thermos from the staff room, and came back and sat at his desk and did not think about Saturday night.

He did this for thirty minutes, with moderate success.

The chime rang. The hallway outside filled with the sound of Crestwood on a Monday morning — locker doors, voices, the particular pitched energy of students arriving at a place they were required to be after two days of not being required to be anywhere. Nathan kept his eyes on the papers in front of him. Students began filtering in — the scrape of chairs, the thud of bags, the front-row contingent settling with their punctual, visible efficiency.

He was reading a margin note he had made in his copy of the novel on Saturday — before the party, before any of it — when his gaze moved to the door.

He had not decided to look. He had not heard anything distinguishable from the other sounds. Some part of him that was operating independently of his instructions simply looked up, and she was there.

Shae walked in with her eyes down. Not the focused, internal downward look of someone thinking — the tight, held quality of someone managing something they would not like to be seen managing. Her jaw was set. There was a stiffness in her shoulders that was not her usual composure but something harder, the particular tension of a person who has already had a morning and is not finished with it yet. She moved to the back left corner without looking at anyone and sat down with more force than she probably intended.

Nathan looked back at his papers.

Professional, he said to himself.

A few minutes later Sloane Hartley came through the door. Her two closest friends flanked her, and the three of them moved through the room with the low, shared energy of people conducting a private joke — small glances exchanged, the compressed amusement of something that did not need to be said out loud because they had already said it to each other. As she passed the back of the room the glances went briefly, deliberately, in the direction of the back left corner. Then Sloane sat down, arranged herself, and put on the expression of a student who is ready for class and has nothing in particular on her mind.

Nathan watched the arc of it from the front and catalogued it without comment.

Claire Monroe appeared in the doorway thirty seconds before the second chime. She looked at Sloane. The look lasted approximately two seconds and contained, in those two seconds, the full and unambiguous communication of a person who knows exactly what has happened and has decided exactly how she feels about it. Then she went to the back left corner and sat next to Shae and leaned across, close, and said something Nathan couldn't catch over the classroom noise. Shae's face did something small. Her lips moved. From the front of the room Nathan read the shape of the words — I'm fine — delivered with the flat, brief efficiency of someone who has said this enough times that it has stopped meaning anything and is now simply a thing you say to redirect attention.

The second chime rang.

Nathan stood.

"First four chapters," he said, to the room. "Wuthering Heights. Let's start with the obvious question and move past it quickly — what kind of place is the Heights, and why does it matter?"

The discussion was uneven, which he had expected. A handful of students engaged genuinely — they had read carefully, they could locate the specific atmosphere of Brontë's moorland and articulate why it functioned as something more than setting. He pushed them. One girl in the third row came close to something real when she described the Heights as a place that makes people worse, and Nathan spent four minutes on that idea, pulling it apart, asking her what she meant and whether the place made people worse or simply revealed what was already there, and she was not quite able to follow the thread all the way but she had found the thread, which was something.

The majority of the class understood the surface. They could tell him about Heathcliff, about Lockwood's discomfort, about the wildness of the landscape and its relationship to the characters who inhabited it. They stayed on the surface because the surface was safe and the surface gave you enough to participate without requiring you to go under. He let them stay there for a while and then pushed them under, gently and without warning, the way he always did.

Two students had not read. He did not say this. He asked questions that made it evident and moved on.

He did not call on Shae.

She was present — he was aware of this with the peripheral precision he had been cultivating all morning, the deliberate practice of knowing where she was without looking directly. She had not opened her mouth once. She sat with her book in front of her and her pen in her hand and she looked at the page or the middle distance and she said nothing. This was not the quiet of a student who hasn't done the reading. It was the quiet of a person who is somewhere else and is doing an adequate job of looking like they aren't.

He left her alone.

When the bell rang she was out of her seat before the sound finished, Claire beside her, and they were through the door with a speed that suggested a destination rather than simply an exit. Nathan watched them go from the front of the room and remained exactly where he was and did not follow.

He knew something was wrong. He knew it beyond the obvious indicators — the set jaw, the silence, the way she'd sat down hard and not looked at anyone. He knew it the way he had been knowing things about her that he had no professional business knowing, with the particular attentiveness of someone who has been paying more attention than they should.

It was not his place to seek her out. It was not appropriate. She was not his to fix.

He turned to the board and erased it and began preparing for third period.

The day dragged.

The cafeteria at Crestwood was large and loud and organized, as most high school cafeterias are, by the invisible architecture of social geography — who sat where and with whom communicated more about the internal structure of the school than any official document. Shae had understood this map since her first week and had navigated it accordingly. She had no particular interest in the social hierarchy and had never made any effort to participate in it, which had made her, for most of her time at Crestwood, relatively invisible to the people at the top of it.

This morning she had looked up from her phone for half a second and Sloane Hartley had caught her eye and that had been sufficient.

It was always sufficient, with people like Sloane. Shae had known enough of them in enough schools to understand that the triggering incident was never really the point. The point was that Sloane had decided she was interesting today, and that decision had nothing to do with Shae and everything to do with the specific hunger that girls like Sloane carried — the need for a target, for the proof of their own position relative to someone else's. All morning Shae had felt the looks tracking her through hallways and doorways, the low, shared laughter that followed her at a distance. She had done what she always did with things she couldn't fix immediately: filed them, kept moving, kept her face arranged.

She was tired. She had not slept well. She had sat on her bed last night with her laptop and her essay and had written three good paragraphs and then had sat for an indeterminate amount of time not writing anything, and the thing she'd been not-writing-anything about had been the same thing that had been present all day at the edge of her attention, a warm and specific and entirely inconvenient thing that she had no intention of examining in the school cafeteria on a Monday afternoon.

She got her lunch. Found a table as far from Sloane's usual territory as the room allowed. Opened her book, set it beside her tray, and picked up her fork.

She had gotten one bite in when something hit her in the side of the head.

The impact was sharp and immediate, and what followed it was worse — a wet, spreading cold as the contents of whatever Sloane had thrown distributed themselves across the side of her face, her neck, her shoulder, soaking into her shirt in the specific, unhurried way that cold liquids occupy fabric. A smoothie, thick and pink, the plastic cup bouncing off the table and landing on the floor. Laughter from Sloane's table — not suppressed, not even bothering to be quiet about it.

The cafeteria did the thing cafeterias do when something happens — a ripple of awareness moving outward from the incident, heads turning, phones coming up.

Shae sat very still for one moment.

Then she put her fork down. She stood up. She picked up her bag and she began walking toward the exit, and she kept her face forward and her breathing measured and she told herself, with the precision of someone who has done this before, that she was fine and she was leaving and she was not going to cry in a school cafeteria in front of two hundred people because of Sloane Hartley.

She was almost at the door.

"Aww, leaving so soon?" Sloane's voice, carrying from behind her with the projection of someone who wants the room to hear. "Sorry about the smoothie. I guess I just feel bad for you. I mean — " a pause that was calculated in its timing " — no mom, no dad, not even a family that actually wanted her. Just bouncing around from house to house like someone's castoff. Must be exhausting, living off other people's charity."

The cafeteria went the particular quality of quiet that follows something that has gone too far even by the standards of people who are used to watching things go too far.

Shae stopped walking.

She stood at the edge of the cafeteria for one full second. The smoothie was cold on her neck. The room was quiet. Sloane was behind her and waiting for whatever came next with the confidence of a person who has calculated the response and found it acceptable.

Something in Shae's chest simply — snapped.

She turned.

She crossed the cafeteria in eight strides and Sloane barely had time to register that the expression on Shae's face was not the one she had calculated for before Shae hit her — not a slap, not a shove, a full tackle that took Sloane off her feet and onto the floor with the weight of someone who has stopped caring about consequences entirely. And then she was hitting her. Not once, not measured — she was hitting her with the compressed force of everything that had been filed and managed and held precisely in place for weeks and years, the smoothie and the hallway looks and the laughter and the seven-year-old in a hospital bed and every single time she had said I'm fine when she wasn't.

She couldn't stop.

She was distantly aware of noise around her — voices, chairs, the cafeteria erupting into the chaos of two hundred people reacting to something unexpected — but she was not in the room in any meaningful sense, she was somewhere past it, past the part of herself that managed things.

Then the arms came.

They wrapped around her from behind — both arms, firm and deliberate, closing across her front and pulling her back and up in one controlled motion. She pushed against them. The grip didn't give. She pushed harder, reaching forward, and the arms tightened and a body pressed against her back — solid, warm, completely immovable — and held her completely still.

She fought it for another moment.

Then she smelled it.

Bergamot. Sweet tobacco. Patchouli underneath — warm and deep — and something else beneath all of it that was not any single note but the specific, composite, unmistakable smell of him. She had registered it only once before, briefly, in a library, close enough to know it and file it. She hadn't been able to stop filing it since.

Her body went still before she had made any decision to still it.

"It's alright." His voice, directly in her ear. Low, close, the British vowels unhurried and deliberate. "It's alright. Calm down, love. You're alright."

She drew a breath. It shook on the way in.

"I've got you," he said, in the same register, the same measured quiet. "I've got you. Easy."

She felt the tears before she knew they were coming — not the slow, manageable kind but the sudden, pressurized kind that happen when a dam gives rather than when you decide to let something go. She hadn't cried in front of anyone in a very long time. She had been very deliberate about this. It was not, as it turned out, a decision that held indefinitely.

Without thinking — without any available thought that would have told her not to — she turned in his arms.

Her face went against his chest and her hands gripped the front of his shirt and she breathed in and the smell of him was immediate and close and she pressed into it like it was solid ground.

Nathan went completely still.

For one moment he stood with his arms around her and his chin somewhere above her hair and the weight of her against him and did not move and did not breathe and was not, for that one moment, thinking anything organized at all.

Then he held her.

His arms adjusted — not loosening, just settling, the shift from restraint to something different, something that was simply the act of keeping her upright while she needed to be kept. The cafeteria was noise and movement around them and he was aware of exactly none of it.

She smelled of lavender and vanilla and something beneath it that was simply and entirely her. He was aware of this the way he was aware of everything about her — precisely, involuntarily, and with the full understanding that he was going to have to put it somewhere he could not reach it and leave it there.

He held her until she was done.