“She’s married,” he mocked. His crude expletive indicated the depth of his frustration. “Where have you been living? In the twilight zone?”
“Don’t make fun of me or my convictions,” she said, showing a flare of spirit. “I can’t help feeling the way I do.”
He cursed again and stared out the window for a long time. “Hell,” he sighed at last. “Do you want to get married? If I ask my dad, he’ll help us with money.”
Shelley didn’t even care that the proposal wasn’t exactly poetic. She catapulted herself across the car and threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Daryl, Daryl.”
That night she let him take off her bra and kiss her breasts. He had been delighted; she, disappointed. It didn’t feel as good as she had expected it to. But then it wasn’t the man she had always imagined… .
And now that man was back in her life and she was no better equipped emotionally to handle her feelings for him than she’d ever been. Except she was older and presumably wiser now. Or was she? She knew the wise thing to do would be to drop Grant Chapman’s class; she also knew she wouldn’t.
After weighing her decision for hours, wasting time she should have used for studying by staring into space, wondering how she would fend off his attempts to see her alone again, she knew a keen disappointment when he didn’t try to contact her at all.
Her heart had been hammering in her chest when she opened the door to the classroom the next time it convened, but she had arrived ahead of him. She took her seat near the back of the room and jumped each time the door opened until Grant blustered through it, his hair windblown, his expression beleaguered. “Sorry I’m late, everyone,” he apologized as he dropped his notes and texts onto the desk.
He didn’t speak to her as she left. Relief and aggravation warred within her. She told herself she should be glad he had come to his senses and converted to her way of thinking. Why then was she ruled by a feeling of discontent?
She didn’t see him on campus, but at the next meeting of her class he treated her with the same detachment. Only as she passed his desk on her way out did he say a cool, “Hello, Mrs. Robins.” To which she replied with an even cooler, “Mr. Chapman.”
“Damn him!” she cursed as she threw her pile of heavy textbooks onto her kitchen table. Kicking off her shoes, she went to the refrigerator and yanked open the door. “He’s doing it to me again.”
In reality, he wasn’t doing anything and that was what rankled. “I didn’t concentrate on anything but him my whole junior year in high school. He ruined it for me.” Of course it hadn’t been his fault that she’d had an asinine crush on him then, any more than it was his fault now. The bottles and jars in the refrigerator rattled when she slammed its door closed.
“He won’t disrupt my life a second time. He won’t!” she said, ripping off the tab on the top of a soda can. Along with it, she ripped off the tip of a fingernail. She covered her face, weeping and cursing in anguish. “I’ll get him out of my system if it’s the last thing I ever do. I swear I will.”
That resolution lasted for all of two days. Laden with assignments and reading lists, she trudged up the marble steps of the library, determined to devote single-minded attention to her studies.
Grant Chapman was the first person she saw as she entered the austere building.
He was sitting at a long table with a group of faculty members from the political-science department. He didn’t see her, so she took the opportunity to study him with a fascination that had never diminished.
In spite of the silver in the hair at his temples, he looked more like a student than a teacher. He was wearing a casual pair of tan slacks and a navy pullover, V-necked sweater. The sleeves had been pushed to his elbows. His chin was resting on his fists as he leaned over the table to hear what one of his colleagues was saying.
Grant offered a comment and everyone laughed softly, especially the woman sitting next to him. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties and was attractive in a bespeckled, bookish sort of way. Grant smiled back at her.
“Hiya, Shelley.”
She whirled around to face a young man who was in her economics class. “Hi, Graham. How’s the reading?”
“Boring,” he said as he passed her on his way to the exit.
Calling a soft good-bye to him, she was still smiling when she turned around. Her smile froze when her eyes collided with Grant’s. He was staring at her from under lowered brows, paying little or no attention to the professor who was speaking earnestly to the others. He defied her to ignore him, so she merely nodded her head once in greeting and turned on the heel of her loafer toward the stairs.
She found an empty table in a deserted corner of the third-floor stacks and spread out the mound of books she had to read. Graham was right. The material was boring at best. A half hour later, the words were blurring before her eyes and running together meaninglessly.
To occupy her wandering mind, she tracked the approaching footsteps that tapped lightly on the tile floor. Walk, walk, stop. Turn. Go back. Forward. Stop. Walk, walk …
Suddenly he was standing in front of her at the end of a long canyon formed by towering bookshelves. A smile of gratification tugged at the corners of his mouth. Had he been looking for her?
Quickly she lowered her eyes to the text in front of her. In her peripheral vision, she saw his trousered legs coming closer until he stood directly in front of her across the narrow table. When he set down a folder stuffed with papers, she raised her eyes to his, then glanced pointedly at an unoccupied table a few feet away.
“Is this seat taken?” he asked with exaggerated politeness, bowing slightly at the waist.
“No. And neither is that one.” She indicated the other table with a nod of her head.
He gave it only a cursory look over his shoulder. “The lighting is better over here.” He tried to pull the chair out, but met resistance. Bending down to see what was keeping it from sliding out from under the table, he chuckled softly. “This chair
is
taken.” Her stockinged feet were propped on it.
She lowered them to the floor and he sat down. Why had she pretended to be annoyed by his intrusion? Actually, her heart was jumping with glee that he had sought her out. If the depth of feeling she saw in his eyes was any indication, he was just as glad to be alone with her. For long, silent moments, they stared at each other. Then, fighting the need to reach out and touch him, she lowered her head back to her book and feigned interest.
“Here,” he said, patting his thigh under the table.
“What?” she asked breathlessly, bringing her head back up. She ought to act as though she were engrossed in her studies, as though he had interrupted her. Why didn’t she gather up her things and leave?
“Put your feet in my lap.”
Her heart pounded wildly. “No,” she said in a whisper, glancing over her shoulder.
“There’s no one around,” he said, and she was drawn under the bewitching spell of his low voice. “Please. Aren’t they cold?”
She wouldn’t admit they were. “You shouldn’t have left your meeting,” she said, hoping to change the direction of the conversation.
“It was over.”
“I’m sure you have something else to do.”
“I do,” he said, opening the folder and smiling benignly. “I have some reading to catch up on. Now come on, lift your feet up.”
“Grant … Mr. Chapman … I can’t sit here with my feet in your lap. What if someone saw us?”
His grin faded a trifle and he weighed her words. “Does it matter to you that much? What people think of you?”
It wasn’t a casual question and she didn’t treat it as such. She faltered, lowering her eyes from the penetrating power of his. “Yes. Perhaps it shouldn’t, but it does. Doesn’t it matter to you what people think?” She looked up at him again.
He considered her question. “No,” he answered softly, but with conviction. “Maybe I should pay more attention to the opinions of other people. It might be safer, more judicious. But I could waste a lot of valuable time guessing at what someone thought of me, and then I’d probably be wrong. In the long run, it’s better to do what you feel is right for you than to do what you think others feel is right for you. Within the limits of decency and the law, of course.” He smiled, but she wasn’t ready to dismiss his philosophy without more discussion. She wanted so badly to understand him.
“Is that how you were able to bounce back after the Washington scandal? If something like that had happened to me, I’d want to sequester myself and never come out. Whether I was guilty or innocent, if everyone thought I was guilty, I’d never want to face the world again. You joke, you laugh,” she said, remembering the jest he’d made to his colleagues just that evening. “I don’t think I’d be able to laugh for a long while if something like that happened to me.”
He smiled gently. “I’m a fighter, Shelley. Always have been. I didn’t do anything wrong and I’ll be damned before I’ll let erroneous public opinion keep me from living as happy and full a life as possible.” He reached across the table and took her hand. It never occurred to her to pull away. “Frankly,” he said with chagrin, “there were times when if I hadn’t laughed, I would have cried.”
Later, she didn’t recall ever lifting her legs and letting him secure her feet between his thighs. But at some point she became aware of him pressing the hard muscles of his thighs against them and massaging the soles with his thumbs.
“I guessed right. They’re cold,” he whispered.
Why was he whispering? Minutes had ticked by and they hadn’t said a word, gazing at each other over the ink-stained table piled with neglected papers. No one had invaded their privacy. The dim halls of the library were hushed. The tall shelves of dusty volumes formed a stockade around them. He whispered because even though they were in a public building, the moment was intimate and belonged exclusively to them.
“It’s chilly in here,” she murmured, mindless of what she was saying. It didn’t matter. She was speaking to him. He was so close to her she could count the fine lines that edged his eyes, hear his faintest whisper. For years she had yearned for the sight of him. Now she gluttonously feasted on it.
“You could put your sweater on.” The sleeves of a cardigan were knotted around her neck.
She shook her head. “I’m fine.” Actually she was becoming uncomfortably warm. Her head felt incredibly heavy and as light as a bubble at one and the same time. She was somnambulant, but aware of every tingling sensation in her body.
She hadn’t experienced this conflict of emotions since the days when she had sat in his classroom at Poshman Valley and graded papers while he worked nearby. One moment she had wanted to dance, to express the excitement that surged through her. The next she had wanted to surrender to blissful lassitude, to lie down and be blanketed by his weight. She felt that same way now.
For a while they read—or pretended to read. Shelley could only vouch for herself, but she thought Grant might be having as hard a time concentrating on the printed words in front of him as she was. He continued to massage her feet. No longer systematic, his movements were idle, somehow sexual. When he had to turn a page in his book, he held both her feet in one hand until he could return the other one.
She loved to watch his eyes as they traveled across the page. Imagining them moving over her body that way caused her to blush hotly. He raised his head and looked at her inquiringly, smiling slightly at the intent way she was studying him and the warm color mounting in her cheeks.
“It just occurred to me that I don’t know anything about you,” she blurted out. “Your home, your family. You weren’t from Poshman Valley.”
“I grew up in Tulsa. I was the second of three sons. My father died while I was in college. I had a very normal, happy childhood. I guess being the middle child accounts for my fighter instincts and the knack I have for getting into trouble. Maybe I’m still only trying to attract attention.”
She smiled. “I was the older child and always having to set a good example. Where are your brothers now? And your mother?”
“I lost my youngest brother in the Vietnam war. Mother, whose heart wasn’t all that strong, died within months of him.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it. She’d never lost anyone in her immediate family. Though she’d been away from home for years, she knew her parents were there, should she need them. The only time she’d disappointed them was with the divorce. It had distressed them greatly; they never had been able to understand the need for it. She hadn’t told them that at the time she’d had no choice. Daryl had filed the papers before he saw fit to discuss the divorce with her.
“My older brother lives in Tulsa with his wife and children. I think he’s embarrassed by me,” he admitted sadly. “I stopped to see them before coming here from Washington. He was friendly and loving enough, but there was an undeniable restraint there.”
“Maybe he’s only in awe of you.”
“Maybe.” Grant sighed. “Since there are only the two of us left, I’d like for us to be closer than we are.” His eyes scanned her face intently. “I guess it’ll be up to his sons to carry on the family name.”
She swallowed and glanced down at the page of the periodical she was supposed to be studying. It was filled with line after line of print that she should have digested by now. “It’s funny that you … that you never married.”
“Is it?”
Her head came up. “Isn’t it?” Why was her voice tremulous? She cleared her throat.
He shook his head. “Not really. During the first few years in Washington I was too busy with my career to become seriously involved with anyone.”
Involved, just not seriously involved, she thought.
“Then, I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “I just didn’t meet anyone who appealed to me, at least not enough to marry.”
The silence that descended was palpable. One could sense the tension between them. His thumbs massaged the arches of her feet with long, slow strokes. With each lazy pass, her throat constricted a degree tighter and the tautening of her breasts became more pronounced.
“Shelley,” he said compellingly, and she had no choice but to obey his unspoken command and look at him. “Before the night I kissed you, I never gave a thought to what you and that jock boyfriend of yours did in his souped-up car. But long after I moved to Washington, my imagination drove me close to insanity. I envisioned him ravaging you with kisses, pawing your breasts—”