Return (Coming Home #1) (12 page)

A huge cloud of dark-roasted coffee assaults my nose. Inhaling deeply, I smile as my eyes
adjust. Ah. Something new on campus.
Yates didn’t have this place when I was here. The coffee shop is tiny, with only eight tables and a short counter. Coffee, tea, and plastic-wrapped biscotti seems to be all they sell.
 

“What’s your poison?” Eric ask
s
as we walk to the counter, which
i
s a huge slab of some kind of tree, polished and varnished to a high shine. Rings as thick as my thumb show
through the wood. It
i
s gorgeous.

“Mocha latte with cinnamon,” I say as I dig through my pockets. My cash reserves are low, but I can manage the
four dollar
coffee. This one, at least. I can’t do this every day until the paychecks start rolling in.

He holds out his hand in protest. “My treat.”

That gives me pause. The
Eric I knew from three years ago didn’t have two nickels to rub together.
People don’t “treat” each other when they’re broke. They complain and borrow and lend, but they don’t do what he’s doing.
 

Suddenly this feels like a date.

And a part of me doesn’t mind.

A million answers fight with each other to come out of my mouth, but as I smooth the hem of my shirt with nervous hands I look at him. “Thank you,” I say, as genuinely as I can. “I’ll buy the next time.”

All he does is crook an eyebrow, but it tells me everything he’s thinking. I am not sure I’m thinking the same thoughts.

But I might be thinking
some
of the same thoughts. My tongue is twisted and I don’t know what to say, so I start looking around the room.

Student art covers the shabby brick wal
l
s. Half the
mortar
between the bricks has rubbed away. The sofas, if you can call them that, look
like rejects from the student center. From, say, seventy years ago. Torn and stained, at least they’re a place to sit. At your own risk.

A chess set, a game of Sorry!
and
Mastermind are scattered across a gouged coffee table. Eric gets our drinks and he nods toward a two-seater. We take it and settle in, my eyes still wandering.

“What was this before it became a coffee shop?”

“The vet school
slaughterhouse.”

That makes me choke.
The steaming coffee-milk I tried to carefully sip goes shooting down my throat, some up my nose. It burns.
 

Gasping, I stand.
The cup tips
. Eric saves it before I pour sixteen ounces of scalding liquid on us. The burning pain
in my nose
fades quickly, leaving the back of my throat raw.

I feel like a fool.

“You okay?
Do you w
ant cold water?” Eric sets my
paper cup of hot latte down gingerly, his eyebrows knitted with concern.

All I can do is nod.

He rushes off and returns in seconds, a tiny juice glass full of water. I drink it greedily. It helps.

“Thanks,” I rasp.

“I didn’t know veterinary school slaughterhouses were so upsetting,” he jokes. But his eyes are still worried.

“Caught me off-guard,” I croak. The air shifts, and all my nervousness
goes away. This is just Eric. Sure, he’s a professor now, and I’m not his student. But there’s nothing there. He’s a nice guy, I’m a friendly person, and we’re just having a cup of coffee as colleagues.

That reminds me. “Did Carol ever work with your department? Are there procedures I need to know about?”

His face changes, and then goes back to neutral quickly. I’ve said something to upset him,
but I don’t know what. And then he says, “I wouldn’t know. I’m an assistant professor, so I don’t deal with administrative affairs.” His eyes glance over mine, like he’s making a show of being polite.

The air has chilled quite fast between us.

I try to change the subject, waving my hand. “No big deal. I’m sure your department admin can tell me. So how did you become a big professor?” I ask,
leaning forward
to reach
for my coffee.

“You need training wheels for that?” he jokes, eyeing my hand warily.

I know he’s
kidd
ing, but there’s a needle in his words. “It’ll be fine. Besides, if I dump it in your lap, plastic surgery can do wonders for burns these days.”

His turn to choke, but the look he gives me isn’t one of shared laughter.

“
You’ve changed,” he says, looking down at the table, his fingers tracing a long, carved “C” in the wood.
 

He is pissed, and trying to hide it. A plume of fear spreads through me. The tiny room closes in.
All my confidence disappears. A cloud of shame hovers over me. Everything that felt just right now is terribly wrong. Who do I think I am, joking and feeling good? Like I have
a right to think I am like everyone else.
 

“I have?”

“H
uh
,” he says, then takes an angry gulp of coffee. “Let’s talk about something other than scorching my balls, Carrie.” My name sounds like he’s spitting it, and he won’t look at me.

I don’t know what to say. All I can process is my pounding heart and the bare-naked feeling I have. Like my skin is turned inside out and everyone is staring
at me. It’s the same feeling I had after Dad’s arrest whenever I set foot on campus, or went to the grocery store. People knew something was wrong with me. They just knew.

Eric makes me feel this way right now.

“How about your job? Working out fine with Dean Landau?” At the sound of my boss’s name, I blink, my trance ended. Shame floats away slowly, reluctantly, but I can will it to leave.

It does. Barely.

“Fine,”
I answer in a measured tone.
 

“No problems?” He eyes me with a skeptical glance.

“It’s only day two. Ask again in a few months.”

That gets a more genuine laugh. Whatever storm I’ve triggered in him seems to be passing. “Claudia was livid when they took you instead of her,”
he says with a fake casual tone.
 

My ears perk up. Is he sharing gossip, for fishing for information?

“
I kind of guessed.” Another gulp of my cooler coffee feels like a bit of me is restored. “She wasn’t happy to see me yesterday,” I add.
 

“She was up there?” His eyes light up. Reading his signals is giving me a headache. I pinch the bridge of my nose and close my eyes. Am I getting this wrong? He seems to be attracted to me, but then he shuts down in anger. And now he’s looking at me like
I’m Claudia’
s
BFF who can put in a good word for him.

Middle school. I’m in the grown-up version of middle school. Great.

I nod and drink more. The cinnamon feels comforting. The sense of shameful unreality lingers on my skin like dried sweat. I pretend to look at my phone.
I pretend I have a pressing message.
 

“I have to go!”
I exclaim.
“The dean needs me to get his lunch. He’s working through.”
Please believe the lie.
 

Eric’s laugh is bitter, but he stands with me. “He has you fetching his lunch?” Shaking his head, it’s clear Eric disapproves. The cloud of
weirdness
lurks, ready to shadow me.

We duck to leave the tiny little coffee hovel, the sunshine so bright it leaves me feeling cleansed. All the
strange
ness back there is gone, and Eric’s walking with confidence, smiling at me like
he hadn’t just been terse.

Confusion settles in my bones. I just want to
go
back at my desk, even if The Claw is there. At least I know where I stand with her. Knowing someone hates you is somehow easier than not knowing what Eric is feeling toward me.

“Just be careful in there,” Eric cautions. A landscaping crew is busy fixing dried-out, brown patches of grass. They carefully cut out the dead
spots and drop in a piece of bright green, lush sod.
One week
until the students move in.
They h
ave to make the campus look good for the parents.
B
y mid-September the dead patches will be back. The hundreds of thousands of flowers planted all over campus will be dead.

No one will care about appearances again until Homecoming.

“
In where?” I ask as we reach the Human Resources office. His stride
slows and we stand before the glass doors, our reflections clear in the sunlight.
 

“Dean’s office. You don’t want to be on Claudia’s bad side,”
h
e explains.

My rippling laughter pours out, loud and pealing like a bell. I can’t help it. Great whoops of giggles continue. It takes me three minutes to calm down. I have to wipe tears from the corners of my eyes. Mascara comes off on my knuckles.

“Claudia’s...bad...side,” I gasp. “Little late for that. She’s hated me since
elementary school
.”

E
ric frowns. “That’s right. I forgot you’re a townie.” He shrugs. “Well, then, you know more about her than me.” That makes him
scowl deeper
, then squint at me, holding his hand like a military salute. He’s shielding the sun from his eyes.

The look he gives me has new respect in it. I still have
no idea what this guy is thinking or feeling.
He is s
o different from Mark, who just tells you, upfront. Like it or not.

“I’ll just try to stay away from her claws,” I whisper, leaning toward him.

He startles, then laughs. But it’s a slow, halting chuckle, one that makes my skin crawl.

“Have fun with your HR paperwork,” he says, now very distracted. As he walks away he doesn’t acknowledge
my wave. I don’t know what to think.

But being on Claudia’s bad side? Been there, done that, have the emotional scars to prove it.

My time at HR is brief and fabulous.
The benefits specialist, Debbie Hansen, is my new best friend.
Yes, I can take classes
this semester
. I pay a
fifty dollar
fee per course, so my checkbook comes out and
two hundred dollars
later, I’m a full time student again,
as long as I rush my paper to the Registrar’s office and enroll.

My phone tells me
it’s long past time
to check in
and get the dean his lunch
, so I go back to the office, happy again.
All I need now is to find four classes that don’t clash with work and that fit into my graduation needs.
 

S
imple. Do-able. Achieveable. Zippidy-do-da. Things are finally going my way.

The weirdness with Eric
is washing off, replaced by a flash of Mark’s kisses last night. I am instantly transported back to his hands on my ribcage, the warm scent of cedar and masculinity, how his breath hitched when my own tongue met his tease for tease, search for search.

The heat inside me simmers nice and low, ever present. I imagine my hands in his silky hair. His lips on my earlobe. His promise to come back and
talk.

Talk.

Right.

My step quickens and I practically run up the stairs, bouncing with a happiness even Eric’s moods can’t ruin. The custodians
are
strip
ping
the waxed linoleum floors and my normal path is obstructed.
That rush to get everything nice and clean for the parents means staff are inconvenienced. I don’t care.
 

A staircase I wouldn’t normally use is free, so I climb up. It’s an
old, pinched little set of rickety stairs, like an afterthought. When I was a student here someone told me it was for servants to the university president when his offices were in this building. That seems unlikely. I think the stairs were
p
robably for workmen to get downstairs to the basement furnaces easily, or up to the roof.

I stop and look up. The stairs do go all the way to the roof. I
can see the padlocked door, two stories up.

It reminds me of my new little home.
Except the padlock is intact on this door.
 

The stairs get me to my floor and as I’m walking to the office, I hear muffled voices.

“We need to start charging for coffee, Sean,” says a woman’s voice. Older, like a smoker’s, with a barely held-back cough. “The graduate students are drinking it by the gallon and not
putting in the suggested donation.”

“
Effi
e, if we just bought one of those Keurig machines we could make people pay.
T
hey’d have to slide seventy-five cents in and we wouldn’t have this problem,” a male voice answers. I’m two doors down from my office. Academic Advising.
Effie
must be
Effie
Cummings, the department coordinator who is older than my
(dead)
grandmother
s
.

She makes a grunt of disgust
as I walk by. “Buy something new. Why is that everyone’s answer? People don’t act the way they should and that means we buy something new? No! Of course not, Sean! We make them change their ways.”

Their voices fade out as I roll my eyes. Seems easier to just buy a Keurig. Heck, I’d pay
seventy-five cents
for an easy cup of vanilla caramel coffee two doors away. Hmmm. Maybe I should mention that
to Sean.
M
ust be Sean Hofstadtler, my former academic adviser.

Actually, now he’s my academic adviser again, I realize. My hand still holds my enrollment papers.

A zing of glee shoots through me. I can’t wait to tell Amy I’ll be a full-time student again. Coming home is working
out
. My future is on track.

And tonight, Mark might visit me again. Whatever comes next, I know it’s going to be just
fine.

As I walk through the threshold to my office, something green catches my eye, inside the dean’s office. His door is ajar, and I see long, black hair. Claudia. Damn.

Ignoring her, I step behind my desk. A sticky note on my monitor reads:

Gone to lunch with the vice chancellor. No need for take-out
after all
. Please deliver expense reports to anthropology for grant project due today.