Winter Jacket: New Beginnings (3 page)

An adorable half-smi
le curled onto Hunter’s mouth. “I’m glad you’re thinking about it though. That the idea doesn’t completely terrify you.”

“Confession.” I winced.
“It does kind of freak me out.”

She cocked her head and looked thoughtful
, not offended. “Really?”

“It’
s my own problem though,” I said, shaking my head. “It has nothing to do with you, or me questioning our relationship.”

“You know how to make a girl swoon, Professor Graft,” she chuckled.

I cleared my throat.
She
was the one who knew how to make me swoon, actually. Whenever she called me by a title, my knees buckled.

I watched as she
finished her drink with alacrity. She licked at the corners of her mouth, gathering any remnants of her sweet mixed drink. “I’ve had enough of Peggy’s for tonight. Take me home, will you?”

She never had to ask me twice.

+++++

I was in my campus office, catching up on emails.
Even though the semester was new, that didn’t keep the number of emails down. If I didn’t check my Inbox every few hours, it would become overwhelming.

There was a hesitant knock on my open office door, and when I looked away from my computer screen, a young woman
was sitting in the chair opposite my desk. Her presence momentarily startled me, and that seemed to make her smile. She looked to be in her early twenties, a student perhaps. She was fair skinned with slightly wavy blonde hair. Even sitting down and wearing a modest polo shirt and jeans, I could tell she was attractively proportioned with generous curves.

“Hello,” I greeted formally. “Can I help you?”

She scooted forward in her chair, sitting just on the front edge. “I was hoping you’d have time to look over the paper we just got back. I didn’t do as well as I thought.”

She produced a typewritten essay from her backpack
, and I recognized my handwriting in the margins. I frowned because while my own handwriting was familiar, the girl wasn’t.

“Sure thing,” I said. “
Did you have any specific questions?”

“Not really,” she said with a small shrug.

I rummaged around in my top desk drawer to get out my reading glasses. “Well, let’s take a look at your essay and see where you went wrong.”

The name in the top left-hand corner of her essay didn’t look familiar. It was early in the semester, but
I was normally pretty good at learning students’ names right away. I didn’t recognize her face, and I couldn’t even pin-point which class of mine she was in. But here she was in my office, during office hours, with an essay with my handwriting on it. She had to be one of my students.

“Since I didn’t do well on this first essay, do you assign any extra credit so I can make up the points?”
she asked.

I leaned back in my chair
and adjusted my glasses on my nose. “Not usually. I do allow you to write multiple drafts though, so as long as you’re on top of that, you should do well.”

The girl frowned, petulant and pouty. “I’m not a very good writer.”

“Oh, don’t sell yourself short.” I silently berated myself
. Why couldn’t I remember this girl?
“There’s no magic to writing. It’s a skill just like everything else. Give it some practice, and you’ll be a much stronger writer by the end of the semester.”

She sighed and toyed with the collar of her shirt, a button-up
light yellow polo. The movement drew my eyes to her hand, which drew me to her breasts. I hastily looked away.

“I might need a tutor or something.”

“We do have a Writing Center on campus,” I supplied. “Let me just find the contact info for you.” I rifled through some papers on my desk. I had the contact information for the writing lab somewhere, but my desk seemed messier than usual.

When I looked back at the student, I sw
ore she’d unbuttoned something on her shirt. I could just make out the scalloped top of her bra. The light pink cotton material contrasted attractively with her alabaster skin. She leaned forward again, and I worried how sturdy her bra was constructed; she was threatening to spill over the cups already even without the extra tilt.

“Actually, I was hoping that maybe
you
could tutor me, Professor.”

I cleare
d my throat and looked anywhere but in the direction of her exposed breasts. “I’m afraid I really don’t have the time. That’s what the Writing Lab is for.”

“That’s too bad,” she said wistfully. “I was hoping we could help each other ou
t. I know you have particular tastes.” The tip of a pink tongue peeked out from between two plump lips and slowly traveled the distance around the perimeter of her wide mouth.

“T-tastes?” I stammered inelegantly.

“Students,” the young woman supplied. “Female? Blonde?” A sardonic smile crossed her lips. “And lucky for me, I happen to be all three of those.”

Oh shit.

I needed to get out of there. I wasn’t normally claustrophobic, but even with my office door open, the walls felt like they were closing in on me, and I began to feel faint.

I launched out of my o
ffice chair, nearly stumbling over the student on my way out. I caught the edges of the doorframe before I threw myself completely into the hallway. Outside my office was a line-up of students, snaking down the corridor of the English department. All of them, attractive females, waited, holding typewritten essays in their manicured hands.

“Oh God, no.
”

I sat up in bed, my eyes flying open.
My heart raced in my chest and I gripped the sheets tightly in clenched fists until the beating of my heart slowed to a more measured pace. My cell phone alarm chose that moment to go off, and I hastily reached over to the bedside table and silenced its morning call.

Sy
lvia, the cat I’d adopted last Spring, gave me an annoyed look. She was currently hogging my side of the bed. I was convinced she was, little by little, creeping up the mattress. In a week’s time she would have crawled up to my pillow. She stood up and humped her back in an exaggerated stretch before hopping off the bed and padding out of the bedroom.

“Morning, baby,” came a husky voice, lower and thicker than usual due to the early morning hour. Hunter rolled onto her back and brushed her sleep-wild hair out of her eyes. The sheets rearranged as she fought to tame her stubborn hair, revealing more of
her slightly tanned skin, a leftover from our trip to California.

“Hey.”

She looked over at me with a sweet, sleepy smile. She had lines from her pillow on one cheek and her mascara and eyeliner were smudged. Her hair became impossibly tangled in the night, curling ever so slightly at her temples. She was a hot mess, but she was
my
mess, and I loved it.

I pulled my own brunette tangles into a loose ponytail. “Sleep okay?”
I asked, still feeling uneasy from my dream.

Hunter stretched and emitted a sound that resembled a low purr. The sheet traveled further sout
h down her elongated torso. “Mmmhmm. Like a log.” She paused and cocked her head to the side. “What does that even mean, anyways? ‘Sleep like a log’…I mean, logs don’t sleep?”

“Well, if that’s not a rhetorical question, the phrase originated in the 1600s and re
fers to one sleeping immobile –.”

“Thanks for the history lesson, Dr. Graft,” she teased.

“Well actually, it’s not history; it’s an idiom,” I corrected.

“Uh huh,” she said through a yawn. “You’re cute.
”

I anxiously toyed with the top edge of the comforter. “Have any, um…weird dreams?”

She gave me a lopsided grin as she turned on her side and rested her weight on one elbow. “Nothing except the memory of some hot action last night.”

I felt my face flush, unable to resist the lascivious grin Hunter was currently giving me. She often looked ready and eager to devour me. It was a part of her personality I hadn’t expected when we
’d first started dating, but I certainly had no complaints.

“I’ve got to review some lecture notes,” I announced, pushing back the covers. If she kept grinning at me like that, we’d never get out of bed, and I actually had to be productive today. “You getting up soon?”

Hunter buried her face back into the downy goodness of her pillow. She wasn’t much of a morning person. Her eyes, like a newborn kitten, didn’t quite fully open until she’d had her coffee. She mumbled incoherently and waved a hand at me, shooing me away.

Before crawling out of bed, I turned and kissed her bare shoulder,
the soft skin peeking above the top of the comforter. “I’ll make coffee,” I mumbled into her soft, fragrant skin. “Come down when you’re ready, okay?”

Hunter growled into the pillow, but made no motion to get up. Despite the memory of my unsettling dre
am trampling noisily through my brain, I smiled at the disgruntled woman beside me. Finally, I slid out of bed and redressed in my pajamas, not wanting to disturb Hunter’s rest anymore than I already had that morning.

+++++

Chewing on her toothbrush, Hunter bounced downstairs and found me in the kitchen, sitting on a stool at the island counter. I looked up from my lecture notes when I heard the wooden floorboards creak upon her entrance. Today I was teaching my writing seminar students about Quote Sandwiches and lecturing about the Harlem Renaissance in my 20
th
Century American Literature class.

Hunter
helped herself to some coffee and grabbed a box of cereal out of the pantry. I was a fan of the cartoon-on-the-box sugary stuff, but Hunter was more about raisin bran and granola. Sometimes I forgot which one of us was in their thirties.

“What do you want do for Spring Break?”
I asked.

“Spring Break?
” Hunter looked up from pouring cornflakes into a bowl. “Babe, the semester
just
started…like three days ago.”

“I know, but I’ve been looking online for some travel deals
, and I was thinking someplace in the South Caribbean might be nice, or I could ask Troian if she could get us a good price on that Malibu condo again.”

Hunter bit her lip
and her face visibly crumpled. I could anticipate what she was going to say.

“And don’t you dare feel guilty about money,” I asserted before she could mount a protest. “I know you don’t w
ant me to be your Sugar Mama. But this isn’t about me wanting to take care of you. This is about me wanting to see you in a bikini,” I said with a cheeky smile.

An elegant eyebrow lifted on her forehead. “I wasn’t going
to decline because of the money,” she admitted. “I just don’t know if I can go anywhere because of my internship. The hospital will probably want me there, even over break. If I want to set myself up to get hired when I graduate, I should probably make myself available.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t thought about her internship
, but I supposed she was right. Even though she was doing the smart thing, the responsible thing, I couldn’t hide my disappointment. We’d had so much fun in Malibu, I wanted another adventure with her.

She stood in front of me and swung a leg over my thighs so she was straddling me like a chair. Her arms draped around my neck and my hands instinctively went to her waist
to hold her steady. “Just because I can’t go doesn’t mean you shouldn’t,” she said. “You work so hard during the semester; you deserve a
piña
colada
on a beach.”

“I wou
ldn’t have any fun without you,” I insisted with a hard shake of my head.

“Is that so?
” she said in a near-mocking tone. She wiggled a little on my lap, getting comfortable or reminding me of where she sat – probably the former because there was no way I could overlook something like that. My hands went to the tops of her thighs, taunt and hard beneath the material of her jeans. “You would have absolutely
no
fun sitting poolside somewhere, drinking alcohol, and looking at girls in their bathing suits?”

My wand
ering eyes were infamous; I didn’t think I could ever be like Troian who seemed to have blinders on when it came to attractive women who weren’t Nikole. “It would be a
little
fun,” I admitted with a playful grin. “But the entire time I’d be wishing you were there because I know how much
more
fun I’d have with you.”

She
swung her long legs off of me and stood up from my lap. I wanted to grab onto her hips and pull her back for more.

“You don’t need a foreign country to get me into a bikini, you know.”

I leered at her as she poured herself a cup of coffee. “I’m filing that away on my list of Things To Do.”

She smiled and returned to her bowl of cereal.
“What’s your plan this morning?”

“I’m supposed to meet Troi for
a coffee date,” I said, tapping a pen on the countertop. “Nikole might join us since it’s her off-season. I don’t think she’s planting seedlings in her greenhouse yet. Are you free to come with?”

Hunter made a face.
“I don’t have classes today, but I should probably get back to my apartment and help Sara pack boxes or something. She’s moving in a few days, so naturally she’s a complete disaster.”

“You’re a better person than me,
” I remarked. No amount of karma points or the promise of free pizza and beer could convince me to help someone move on my day off.

She
leaned across the counter and kissed me on the tip of my nose. “I know.”

+++++

Troian hustled through the front doors of my favorite coffee shop, Del Sol. She looked disheveled from a fierce late winter wind. Her jacket, scarf, and hair were dusted with powdered snow. It was the kind of overcast, stormy winter day where you’d rather be snuggled up at home than be out in it.