Amy
The Jolly Rancher was pretty quiet that night. Mondays were usually slow, and sometimes I was able to do some course reading, perched on my little stool behind the bar. My co-worker Theo let me sit and read as he cleaned the glasses and chatted with the regulars. I tried to focus on my book, imaginatively titled Quantitive Research Methods in business, but my mind kept lingering over the sight of Profession Cole and Monica Delvany, standing outside the faculty building. Professor Delvany had had her hands all over Cole. My Professor Cole. It had made me mad, and jealous, and feel foolish at the same time. He wasn’t mine, and that was no doubt a good thing. Despite knowing this, it hurt to watch them. It had helped a little when he’d pushed her away, but I knew how these things worked. She clearly liked him, and they were co-workers. Before long, they’d be dating.
I turned back a page in my book, losing the thread of where I was once again. I marked the top of the page with a light dot. It was a habit I used to tell myself how distracted I was. Tonight, I was at sixteen dots already. This clearly wasn’t my night.
“Look alive, stud alert. Hello, daddy,” Theo suddenly muttered, appearing at my side. He nudged me and made me lose my place in the book for the seventeenth time.
“Hey, stop that. You serve him if he’s so hot,” I teased him.
“I would, honey, except this isn’t my type of daddy. Well, it is, but I’m not his type. Besides, with the look he’s giving you, you don’t want to miss this,” Theo said, and pushed me off the stool. I lost my balance and landed on my ass on the tile floor. I glared up at him. He held his hands out. “Hey, don’t look at me. I thought you were an athlete or something, who face plants getting off a chair, I don’t know,” Theo muttered, giving me an extremely judgemental look and then waltzing off without helping me up. I got up slowly, my ass smarting, and my book wet from the floor. Oops. It was a library book too. I sighed, wiping the corner off on my apron, as I turned my attention to the bar, and the ‘daddy’ waiting for service.
Holy shit.
All other thoughts fled my head as I took in Professor Cole, in all his fine as hell glory, sitting casually on the other side of the bar, watching me with narrowed, dark eyes. He was attracting attention from the regulars and no wonder. The man was outrageously hot, and not only in looks. He had that powerful, big-dick energy other men dreamed of having. For Professor Cole, it was effortless. He wore his dominance and confidence like a thick mantle across his shoulders. I couldn’t picture him without it, it was too much a part of him, as natural as his eye colour and build.
“I’m sure this is just one reason studying at a bar isn’t a good idea, Miss Mackintosh,” he said. Great, not only had he seen me fall, but he was going to continue reprimanding me as well.
“Like I said, Professor, we don’t all have a choice in the matter,” I muttered, leaving my book on the shelf and wiping my hands on a rag. “What can I get you?”
“Whiskey, neat. It feels odd to hear my title off campus. Call me Aaron,” he said.
“Aaron?” I repeated. I’d honestly never considered that Professor Cole might have a first name, or that it would sound so good on my lips. Aaron. I liked the way it rolled around my mouth. “Does that mean you’re going to call me Amy?” I wondered. He smirked.
“Do you want me to?”
I shrugged, unsure how to continue that line of thinking. There were a lot of things I’d like Professor Cole to call me, but none of them were suitable for saying out loud. “So, I haven’t seen you here before,” I said, and jerked my head to the looks that Aaron was attracting. “You’re causing quite the commotion.”
“Well, I wanted to see what kind of job was important enough to mess up your paper for,” he said, taking the glass of whiskey from me as I went to set it down. His finger brushed mine, and I remembered the feel of it against my chin, and bit down a gasp. “I’m not gay, in case you were wondering,” he continued.
“Yeah, I didn’t think you were. I saw you earlier, with Professor Devany,” I said, and then cursed myself. Why had I brought that up? Now I looked like a crazy stalker.
“Did you?” He asked. I nodded, feeling scrutinized and seen right now. I knew he had seen me, he had looked right at me, and yet, here he was making me squirm.
“You know I did,” I challenged softly. A hint of a smile touched his lips, and he inclined his head, agreeing with me.
“There is nothing going on between Monica and I,” he said finally. He called her Monica. It hurt to hear. I was clearly going insane. “I’m not interested in her in that way, or anyway,” he said.
“You’re not?” I questioned. My hands were clutching the counter behind me, and I felt tight with tension. Aaron’s eyes fixed on me, and he shook his head.
“Does that make you happy?” he asked, so quietly, I wasn’t completely sure I wasn’t imagining it, but nodded anyway. His smirk spread into a smile, a real one, just a flash, and then it was gone. “There’s only one woman I’m interested in,” he continued. I felt hot all over, pinned by his look to the counter, like I couldn’t move unless he allowed it. His eyes moved from my eyes down to my lips and then lower still. He looked me up and down, his eyes lingering in places on my body that send blood rushing to my cheeks. Was he really blatantly checking me out, or was this just another power play? Another way to exert his dominance over a lowly student? That seemed unlikely, since he never gave other students a second glance, even when they spoke to him, but still, the fact that Professor Cole, hottest man on campus, and celebrity business mastermind, could show me such appreciation seemed insane. I had clearly lost my mind when I fell off the stool.
I had to get laid, I decided, as I attempted to wet my parched lips. It wasn’t right to be a virgin at the ripe old age of twenty-three, and lusting after your thirty-five-year-old professor. It was lust, addling my brain. It was just chemical, and my body was bound to embarrass me some more, if I didn’t get it under control.
“What are you thinking about, Amy? Your expression tells me it’s quite the hot topic?” he asked, his attention back on my face, and rapt.
“Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. Do you know you wear your feeling on your face?” he wondered. I nodded, feeling guilty and exposed somehow.
“I’ve always had a glass face, my father used to say,” I confessed. “It’s pretty much a liability in business, or anything else,” I muttered. Aaron frowned, considering my words.
“I don’t see it as a liability, but a strength, in fact, Amy,” he said. I pondered that statement. “Most people aren’t brave enough to show how they feel. They hide it away. You wear it for all to see. It’s braver than most,” he continued. I didn’t know how to handle that compliment from this man that consumed my thoughts far more often than he should.
“Is that what you do? Hide your feelings away?” I wondered, leaning on the bar, pulled into our conversation enough that I forgot I was meant to be working.
“Maybe, or maybe I just don’t have any. There are plenty of sociopaths who made great business people,” he said. My eyes widened as I stared at him. Did he just call himself a sociopath? Then he smiled, a faint, precious thing. “Only kidding. I don a mask, just like every other self-respecting coward,” he said, and made me laugh.
“You had me going there. I thought you were about to prove to be far more self aware than most of us,” I said, flashing him a smile, as I went to serve someone else. I was aware of Aaron’s eyes on me the entire time. Once I was done serving the customer, I lingered before the professor again, drawn there like a moth to a flame.
“Does that mean you think I’m a sociopath?” he asked me, immediately returning to the topic at hand. He raised an eyebrow as I crossed my arms over my chest and gave him an assessing look.
“Well, let’s weigh the evidence. Brilliant, anti-social, untouchable… cold,” I finished listing things, and stilled. Shit, did I just insult my professor? Brilliant move to piss him off. He was only watching me, expressionless. “I’m only teasing you. You’re good at hiding your human parts. Better than me, but who isn’t?” I said breezily, trying to steer the conversation back to safer ground.
“Hmm, you had me going there. For a moment I thought you were going to prove to be far more switched on than others,” he said, repeating my words, and puzzling me, even as he grinned to take the edge off. There it was, that edge of darkness I always felt around this man. The edge that drew me in. The edge I toed around and wondered what it would be like to fall completely over. I wanted to know what was on the other side, in my deepest, most secret fantasies.
“Look, I have another agenda for coming here,” Professor Cole suddenly said, breaking the weird, white-hot tension between us. “I’m hiring a TA for the rest of the semester.”
“Congratulations,” I said, wondering at the sudden change of topic. He raised his glass to me in a toast.
“Likewise. It’s you,” he said shortly.
“Me?” I repeated, trying to keep up with his mercurial mood. He nodded. There wasn’t even a hint of teasing on his face now.
“I didn’t apply for a TA position.”