It Happened on Maple Street

Class ended. I busied myself closing my notebook very slowly. Conversation buzzed around me. Someone stepped on my foot, in a hurry to vacate the premises. Probably to drop the class.

My entire back burned. My senses were tuned. I had to time my exit just right. And I had to be legitimately occupied until then or I’d appear forward. Like, maybe I was interested or something.

I’d blow it before it had ever begun.

My notebook was closed. My pencil was back in my denim purse. I checked my schedule. Yep, I had a break after that class just like I’d known I did. I stacked my other books up on top of my notebook.

I made sure that my romance novel didn’t show out of a corner of my purse. And I turned.

Just in time to see him exit out the other side of his row and trot down the steps on the other side of the room.

I wasn’t surprised.

I wasn’t like other girls.

I didn’t meet guys.

I read books.

I was a writer. And that was exactly what I wanted to be. What I had to be. I was seventeen when I got my first job as a professional writer. Seventeen when I received my first paycheck for writing.

It wasn’t much. Twenty-five dollars. But on the line that read Pay to the Order of . . . the words typed right there beside them read Tara Gumser. That was me.

And in the upper-left corner, the identifier of the payee, it read, Dayton Daily News.

I was a stringer for the largest newspaper in the area. My beat was the Vandalia City council. Vandalia was a small city on the outskirts of Dayton. Once a month I went to their city council meetings, determined what of interest happened, and wrote a story about it.

I was a respected professional and on my way to writing for Harlequin.

I had my whole life in front of me. A whole lot of time to meet my Harlequin hero.

After I’d become somebody he’d want to meet.

I had myself firmly in check two days later when the next geology class rolled around. I’d thought of my great-hair guy far too much. All the time. Even when I was reading. One night, late, I’d been lying in bed reading and somehow my hero had great hair. Dark hair. Longish. Not at all as it looked on the cover of the book. He had brown eyes, too. And legs that looked . . . mmm . . . in jeans as they’d climbed steps.

So I was done. Over the nonsense.

I got to class early. I took my seat. I told myself to look at my literature book. I’d been busy with my real life’s work—reading a Harlequin—and hadn’t quite finished the reading required for my college literature class.

I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t help glancing toward the door every two seconds.

I couldn’t help being disappointed when my great-hair guy arrived and walked past my row without noticing that I was sitting there needing to meet him.

That was it. I was over him.

Over the next weeks, geology class got in my way. I was not interested in the subject, which left me entirely too much time to notice Great-Hair Guy. I’d get bored with the lecture and next thing I knew, class was ending and I’d spent the entire time fantasizing about him.

Was there any chance the guy was ever going to say hello to me?

Great-Hair Guy didn’t say hello to me. At all. September traveled on

. Leaves changed colors and fell to the ground. Some days my feelings felt like those leaves. Like I’d had a glorious moment of colorful possibility and then . . . nothing.

My great-hair guy—I secretly continued to think of him as mine as my thoughts didn’t hurt anyone—came to class regularly. That impressed me. He participated, too, like he really knew what was going on.

Igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic—I remembered the names of the types of rocks but I couldn’t distinguish between them. I liked the words. What they represented were all rocks to me.

But I remembered all kinds of details about Great-Hair Guy. Like I was some besotted girl. You know, the kind that irritated me. Like she had no worth on her own but, rather, was judged by how cute her boyfriend was.