Absolute Beginners (Absolute #1) (8 page)

In two months I have never seen her outside of class and now that I’ve slept with her, I see her the day after? The universe is against me
.

I faintly registered saying something and whipped my head back toward Matt.

“Did you just say ‘shit’?” he laughed.

Did I? I hardly recognize myself anymore
.

I ducked my head, wishing that I still had a menu to hide behind. I could hear Ms. Wilde laughing just a few feet behind me, and it sent tingles up and down my spine.

Please don’t notice me, please don’t notice me
.

“Stephen!”

Of course. Why did I even bother trying to hide?

I looked up, stunned by the bright smile she gave me. Was she actually happy to see me? My eyes traveled over her body, taking in the long-sleeved shirt that hugged her body, making it possible to make out the shape of her nipples under the fabric. Underneath her arm she had a rolled-up mat and in her hand she was holding some sort of blended ice drink. I looked at her face again and realized with complete humiliation that I had been caught ogling her like some sort of degenerate and my cheeks flushed. She simply smiled wider and gave me one of her winks.

“It’s Professor Worthington,” I heard myself mutter.

“Well, Stephen. Who’s your friend?” Matt enquired, as if he didn’t already know.

“Ms. Wilde, this is my brother Matt. Matt, this is Ms. Wilde,” I said in a monotone, while I avoided looking at either of them as they shook hands.

“Nice to finally meet the famous Ms. Wilde,” I heard him say. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

I wonder what the sentence is for committing fratricide? Surely the judge would be sympathetic if I showed him video clips of Matt’s asinine behavior
.

“I’m famous?” she asked, sounding amused. “Well, I guess I should get myself a stalker and a drinking problem, then.”

Matt laughed. “And who are these two lovely ladies?” he asked, motioning to her friends.

“This is Sophia Perez and Megan Wilson,” she said. “Girls, this is my lit professor, Stephen Worthington, and his brother, Matt.”

I studied the faces of her two friends, trying to see if my name elicited some sort of reaction from them. That would certainly reveal if Ms. Wilde had told them anything about our tryst last night. Their faces held neutral smiles and I breathed out with relief. They didn’t seem to know anything about me.

“Nice to meet you,” I said in an effort to be polite.

“Yes, very nice,” Matt crooned, addressing the tall girl with the red hair. “Megan, was it?”

“Yes,” she said, looking slightly bored.

“What have you been up to?” he asked her, using the same voice I’d heard him using minutes earlier with the waitress.

“Take a wild guess,” she said, holding up her yoga mat while looking at him as if he were a dimwit.

I took the opportunity to sneak a glance at Ms. Wilde, who was still smiling sweetly and sipping her drink. The sight of her lips wrapped around the straw brought images from last night into my head and I quickly looked away.

“We should get going,” the girl named Sophia said. “We’re late for our afternoon classes as it is.”

“Yeah, you’re right. It was great seeing you again, Stephen,” Ms. Wilde said.

“Yeah, uh, you’re g-great,” I stammered, fighting the urge to bang my head on the table.

Stupid, stupid, stupid
.

She chuckled, brushing her hand over my shoulder for a second. The contact made me flinch as if I had been electrocuted. I glanced over at my brother to see if he noticed what a gargantuan fool I’d just made of myself. Thankfully, he was preoccupied staring at Ms. Wilde’s friend.

“I’ll see you Friday,” Ms. Wilde said as she turned to leave.

“Friday,” I echoed.

“It was nice to meet you,” she said to Matt.

“You too,” he said, all the while trying to catch her friend’s attention. “Have a lovely day, Megan.”

She whipped her long hair over her shoulder and sauntered away without giving him a second glance. The three of them walked down the street and I found myself unable to not stare at Ms. Wilde’s backside. I suddenly realized that I was leaning out of my chair to do said staring, and sat up straight again. Matt was looking at me, a huge grin plastered on his face.

“So, not your type at all, huh?” he asked.

“No,” I muttered.

“She didn’t seem annoying to me,” he said. “She seemed pretty great, actually.”

“I guess.”

Just then, the waitress came out with our food and drinks, and this time, Matt didn’t flirt with her. I had a pretty good guess as to why he wanted to get rid of her so quickly.

“OK, so you need to hit that,” he said.

The only thing I need to hit is
you
, stepbrother dear
.

“She’s my student, Matt. And I don’t even like her.”

“You’re so full of it. You were practically drooling all over her. If that wasn’t a total eye-fuck, I don’t know what is.”

“It wasn’t,” I said firmly, although I didn’t have a clue what an “eye-fuck” was.

“She did it to you too, you know, She’s totally into you.”

“No, she isn’t!” I insisted. “I’m too old for her and, according to you, I’m exceedingly boring. Can we drop it, please?”

“I’m just saying. That little firecracker could be just what the doctor ordered to resuscitate you. If you’ve ever been alive,” he added under his breath.

I sighed and started to eat my sandwich, which wasn’t even that good.

Ms. Wilde’s was better
.

“Oh, and I really liked her friend, Megan. Do you think you could get me her number?” Matt asked eagerly.

“I think that would be crossing a line.”

Like I haven’t done that already
.

“Besides, you only like her because she wasn’t fawning over you like most women,” I added.

“Yeah, what was that about?” Matt asked, seeming genuinely surprised. “I think it will be fun to pursue her. A little chase makes for an interesting change.”

“Well, I’m not asking my student Ms. Wilde for her friend’s number, so I guess you’ll have to find an alternate way of wooing the girl,” I said, taking a drink.

“ ‘Wooing’?” he asked. “Dude, what century are you living in?”

“You’re one to talk. You sound like you belong in an ’80s movie when you call me ‘dude.’ ”

“Ooh, snappy comeback,” he chuckled. “I think Ms. Wilde may be a good influence on you.”

I highly doubt that
.

“Maybe I should find that Megan girl on Facebook and send her a message,” he mused.

“Do you think she’s on there?”

Matt gave me a look. “Everyone’s on there.”

“I’m not.”

“Everyone who doesn’t still use a fountain pen for writing, I mean.”

“I have a computer!”

“An old one. It’s not even a laptop.” He shook his head. “Anyway, I should definitely contact her. What was her last name?”

“I’m not telling you if you’re going to write something obscene,” I said.

“I won’t.”

“Why don’t I believe you?”

“Please, I swear I won’t write anything offensive. I like this girl.”

“You’ve known her for two minutes,” I said.

He looked so pathetic in his attempt at making puppy-dog eyes that I figured this must mean a lot to him. Besides, I didn’t think he had any chance with her after seeing her reaction to him so I decided that it probably wouldn’t cause any harm.

“Wilson,” I said. “Megan Wilson.”

“Thanks, you’re the best!”

We finished our lunch and I was grateful that Matt didn’t mention Ms. Wilde again. Afterward, he said that he might go to work. I shook my head and wondered how my stepbrother’s business was running so well when he was hardly ever there.

* * *

Once I was home again, I made some tea and turned on my apparently outdated computer with the intent of working on an article I was writing for a literary magazine. First I checked my emails and saw that I had one from Matt, which he’d sent five minutes earlier. I opened it and read:

What was her last name again?

I chuckled and wrote back “Bilson.” That ought to teach him to pay better attention when he learned a girl’s name. Maybe it was a little mean, but I had every intention of giving him the real name later…possibly.

I wonder if Ms. Wilde is on the Facebook?

No, it was definitely better not to look. I couldn’t figure out why I even cared, and yet before I knew it, I was creating a profile for myself and logging on. I told myself it was probably a good thing to look at her profile, to see what sort of person she was. It would help me decide whether I could trust her not to tell anyone that we had slept together. All in the name of protecting myself, of course.

Her profile picture was not at all what I expected. She was dressed up in a Halloween costume—or at least I hoped it was a costume, and not one of her strange outfits. She looked just like a 1950s housewife in a red dress with white polka dots and an apron. Her hair was curly and she had on red lipstick. She was giving the camera a demure but flirty smile and I could faintly make out other people in the background. The photo looked like it was taken at a party. She probably went to plenty of those.

As I perused her profile, which was, thankfully, public, I saw that she had lots of other pictures. The albums labeled with the names of cities and countries around the world were by far the most interesting and I looked through all of them: Ms. Wilde in London on a bridge, looking out over the water as if she didn’t know she was being photographed. Ms. Wilde in Brazil, holding a parrot, an old man with a large mustache next to her, both of them smiling. Ms. Wilde in front of the ruins of a castle in Scotland.

Does she always travel alone? No—then who would be taking the pictures? How can she afford this?

I looked at her personal information and discovered that she was as young as I had thought, namely twenty-two, turning twenty-three this year. From the dates on her pictures I could see that she had done most of her traveling after high school and figured that this was why she was slightly older than her classmates. Not that it made a difference.

My eyes almost popped out of my head when I saw her relationship status: “It’s complicated.”

It’s complicated? What’s complicated? Is she seeing multiple people casually? Why am I asking myself all these questions?

I looked at her recent status updates. She had written
Yoga with the girls and then classes
a few hours ago. Scrolling further down the screen, my heart started racing when I read her status update from last night:
Sometimes a boring Tuesday night becomes fun out of the blue
.

Is she talking about me? Am I the fun she’s referring to? Does she actually think I’m fun to be around?

She was probably talking about going to Matt’s bar. A lot of her friends had commented on the update, wanting to know what it meant. I held my breath as I scrolled to the bottom and saw that she had answered them with a smiley face. That was all, just a smiley face. I let out my breath and logged off the Facebook. It seemed that Ms. Wilde hadn’t told anyone about spending last night with me, at least not her girlfriends or her online friends.

That’s a load off my mind. Now I can forget that it ever happened and things can get back to normal
.

But they didn’t. By Friday afternoon, I was a complete nervous wreck, knowing that I would have to see Ms. Wilde in class. I was sitting in my office trying to mentally prepare myself when my colleague and friend Brian came in. He sat across from me, giving me a strange look.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You look…different.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Did you get your hair cut?”

“No, it just looks like this when I don’t touch it after I’ve towel-dried it,” I said, wondering why we were talking about my hair. We had never discussed my appearance before.

“Looks good,” he remarked, smiling. “You have plans this weekend? A date?”

“No. Dinner at my parents’ tonight and I think Matt and I are going to the gym and then lunch afterward on Sunday.”

The same as always
.

“What about you?” I asked.

“Jodie and the kids want to go to the zoo, so we’re going to the zoo,” he said, smiling helplessly. “I do miss being a bachelor sometimes, having all that time to myself.”

I shrugged. I knew how much Brian loved his wife and their twin girls and most likely didn’t mean it. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” I told him. “Being on your own.”

He nodded. “We’ll do something soon. Just you and me, OK?”

“Sure.” I smiled, even though I knew that it probably wouldn’t happen.

Brian had a family, and he spent his nights at home with them. It was as it should be. I wasn’t jealous of my friend, but I did wish for my own version of his life. I wanted a woman to spend my nights and weekends with, someone who cared about me and who called me on the phone. Someone I could care for and share my life with.

I didn’t want to be alone anymore.

Perhaps I should take a chance and finally let Matt set me up on a blind date. The university faculty seemed lacking when it came to eligible women around my age, and I didn’t have the first clue where else I’d meet a potential girlfriend since I didn’t like bars and clubs very much. Plus, I didn’t think the right woman for me frequented those kinds of places. I needed someone nice and—perhaps in Matt’s estimation—boring, but she wouldn’t feel that way to me, since I was apparently boring myself.

Lost in thought, I nearly forgot my nervousness, but it returned tenfold when Brian got up and announced that it was time for his afternoon class. As I walked to my own class, my hands felt clammy and my heart pounded so fiercely that I worried others around me would notice. I needed to get back in control. I was Professor Worthington here, not the bumbling novice I’d been in Ms. Wilde’s bedroom. This was my domain, where I was respected and didn’t need any guidance. I just needed to hang on to that thought and the class would go by as usual. It was, after all, imperative that none of the other students got even the slightest inkling that I now knew her intimately.