There was a snicker at the door, but I didn’t bother to look over my shoulder at whoever made the sound.
Most likely, it was my brother’s wife, Camryn.
That, or Raleigh. Or Ezra. Both Ezra and Raleigh also worked at the school, along with Camryn, me, and my annoying brother.
Also, Raleigh was married to Ezra, the head football coach for Gun Barrel High School.
“I’m sorry for coming in here and breaking up a fight,” Flint, my brother who also happened to be the school resource officer, said. “But I got wind of it going down, and I’m really fuckin’ sorry, but I didn’t want you hurt.”
I sighed. “I had it handled.”
And I did.
Kind of.
“You didn’t have shit handled,” came a voice from behind me. A voice that most certainly didn’t work at this school.
I turned woodenly and blinked when I saw Croft, my long-time crush, standing there staring at me as if I was a weak little woman instead of the strong, confident woman that I actually was.
“I had it handled,” I disagreed. “And now, you may all leave.”
My brother growled in frustration.
“You can’t handle this class, Carmichael,” Flint told me bluntly. “They’re going to kill you.”
“They’re not going to kill me,” I argued. Maim me, maybe. But not kill me. “I had it handled.”
“That kid had your computer and he was swinging it at your face,” Croft butted in. “If your brother and I hadn’t walked in when it happened, he would’ve taken you to the ground with it.”
That might’ve been true.
If I hadn’t been paying attention.
But I had been paying attention.
It’d only been my brother barreling into the room with his big ass self that had momentarily made me lose concentration on what was happening in front of me.
“I beg to differ,” I hissed. “I had it handled. And I would’ve handled Bryan Abrams.”
Bryan Abrams, along with about eight more high school-aged kids from several of my other classes, were beginning to be a rather large pain in my ass.
At this point, I was fairly sure that if I continued to work here much longer, either I was going to be shoved out because I couldn’t handle the class, or I was going to finally get a handle on this teaching thing and kick ass.
See, what I didn’t know when I accepted the teaching position in theater class was that I was accepting a class that was full of a bunch of assholes and fuck-ups.
The teacher before me, Mrs. Robbins, was what you could call a ‘bad’ teacher.
She wasn’t a bad person, per se, but she was a bad teacher that didn’t really give a shit what her students did.
That was why there was a waiting list for the theater class, because they knew that they were going to get into it and it’d be an easy A for them.
The bad thing was, half the students rarely even showed up for class.
That was until Mrs. Robbins took a leave of absence due to a car accident hurting her hand and having to have surgery. Once I replaced Mrs. Robbins, I started to actually take roll instead of assuming that everyone was there. And when they started to get truancy charges directed at them, the problem children started to come to class.
Only, they resented the hell out of it, and that was where I was at right now.
It’d been a little over six months since I’d taken this class over, and I was no closer to conquering the students now than I was when I took the job.
Luckily, I only had about a month and a half left before this set of kids graduated.
Then, maybe, I could find a different class to teach since I knew absolutely freakin’ nothing about theater.
“You would’ve gotten beaten by your computer, and who the hell knows what the hell would’ve happened after that,” Croft countered, sounding pissed as hell.
That was when I turned to face him fully.
“What’s it even matter to you?” I countered. “Last I checked, you weren’t my brother or my boyfriend. Whatever happens to me should matter little to you.”
Croft’s jaw tightened and he narrowed his eyes.
“It doesn’t matter to me,” he growled. “Except I don’t want my friend to have his sister hurt.”
Asshole.
About six months ago, I’d thought that Croft was going to be my one and only.
Only, just as I was thinking that and getting my hopes up, he was thinking other things.
Things that had nothing to do with me.
There I was, thinking that we had something that could be happening between us, and he was bringing dates to the gym to work out with him.
It was more than obvious after the third time that he’d brought that particular woman that Croft and I weren’t ever going to be a ‘thing.’
The only thing we had going for us was being work colleagues.