Discipline (13 page)

And instantly, I was a useless, speechless
puddle of mush. Which wasn’t good because in the back of my head,
something was nagging me, telling me that it was dangerous for
Daniel to be here, despite the fact that we were in the city, in
the Lower East Side. Not Woodhill.

“Alright, lovebirds, we’re gonna go inside,”
Mike’s voice declared from behind me. I spun around to see him with
an arm draped around Linh, who gave me a little wink.

“Okay, well we’ll see you inside in a few —
” I sucked in a gasp before finishing my sentence.

Linh blinked. “What?”

I turned back to Daniel. “
Kelsey’s
here. She can’t see you!” Guilt washed over me as I noticed the
anxious glint in Daniel’s eye despite the outward calm he put on
for me. Linh cut in.

“You two go,” she said simply. She peered
into the restaurant window. “I’ll cover for you. Just go fast
because Kelsey’s starting to look for you. She’s coming this
way.”

Daniel and I exchanged eyes, tense little
grins touching our lips at the same time. His blue eyes glimmered
at me as he nodded up the street.

“Come on.”

I didn’t need to be told twice.

~

I’d sobered up by the time Daniel and I
reached the arch and colonnade of the Manhattan Bridge. After
laughing our way through a speed walk out of the Lower East Side,
we’d let ourselves stroll leisurely along The Bowery. I smiled to
myself as Daniel kept his hands in his pockets. He was letting
himself check me out now, but he had yet to let himself touch me as
he wanted to. Which I found frustrating.

“And you live with Kelsey now?”

“For the past two months or so,” I answered
while testing Daniel by walking closer to him. Within steps, he’d
spaced himself away from me again. I wanted to laugh at his stupid,
persistent compulsions to be professional but I forced myself not
to. “Basically since the night that Ben and I broke up.”

Daniel nodded. “Ben. Right. Awesome guy,
that Ben.”

I laughed, pleasantly surprised by his
sarcasm. “Totally. The best kind of manipulative jerk that exists
out there.”

“Jerk?” Daniel glanced at me with a sexy
little grin. “You’re being kind.”

“Maybe.” I wiggled my lips, feeling some
sass coming on. “It’s just ‘cause I don’t want to curse in front of
you. Since you’re being so very proper in front of me.”

Whoops
. I’d let myself sound even
more teasing than I had meant to. A little mocking, even. Daniel
promptly stopped walking, turning to me with a frown between
inquisitive eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

I looked at him for a moment. “You’re being
Mr. Cole with me right now,” I answered, starting up our walking
again. He followed, a step behind me. I could feel the intensity of
his gaze on me through the corner of my eye. “I know you might not
realize it but you’ve got this compulsion to be polite and
professional around me all the time. Like I’m still your student,
which I’m sure you recognize that I’m not.”

“I know you’re not,” his hard voice came
from behind me.

“Then treat me how you want to treat me.” I
turned to face him, walking slowly backwards. My heels clicked
neatly on the concrete as I watched him follow me, his look so
solemn that it made my heart pound. We were on the bridge now,
walking towards Brooklyn beside the dark, shimmering velvet that
was the river. The wind blew my hair forward but I let it, too busy
trying to keep the confidence in my tone as I spoke. “No one’s
watching you. You can be Mr. Cole in Woodhill but it’s summer right
now and you’re with me, so be Daniel. Do what you want.”

“That’s dangerous.”

“Why?”

His jaw tightened, but he didn’t answer.

“You came here to see me, didn’t you?” I
asked.

“Yes, but that’s because I needed to see
you. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I did, I just needed
it.” He sounded as frustrated as he looked, running his hand from
his head all the way to the back of his neck. “I never knew I could
be so preoccupied with thinking about someone that there was no
room for any other thought or image in my head. I can’t stop
wondering about you, who you are now, how you got there. I keep
trying to put pieces together from my memories of you and what I’ve
gathered since we bumped into each other. And when I can’t think
anymore, all I see is you. I see that little white dress or that
night I had you against the wall at the bar. When I could smell
your skin and it took everything in me not to put my hands all over
you.”

Oh
. From the bottom half of my
vision, I could see my chest heaving. My breaths were shallow and
Daniel gave me no time to catch them as he continued his
confession.

“I see that moment when I recognized you
outside the restaurant. I knew it was you, Nina. It took me less
than a second to realize that I was looking at a former
student.”

My lashes fluttered. I hadn’t known that for
sure.

“And I don’t know what happened, but I
turned into someone else the moment I saw you looking so fucking
good. I said and thought things that I never let myself say or
think before. I couldn’t control it. And I tried to chalk it up to
the thrill of taboo, of having those kinds of thoughts about
someone I taught in my classroom. But that wasn’t it.” He swallowed
hard. “It’s because of something I felt for you three years
ago.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. “What?” I could
see his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat as he looked at me.

“I know you never tried, but you were the
first student that made me question what I was thinking. Or feeling
towards you. It happened suddenly, I remember, and I told myself I
was just… proud. Charmed, maybe, by how genuinely passionate you
were. About a book. Not even my class or the subject, but just this
one story. ” His gaze drifted and a smile crept upon one side of
his lips, making the exquisite shape of a crooked Cupid’s bow. “I
told myself that I had you lead the class because they responded
well to you, but I realized it was more for me. Because there was a
morning that I woke up and my first thought was you. I was excited
to see you, to see you stand in front of the room and talk and have
this adorable sparkle in your eye. To tap that pen against your lip
when you got excited.” He leaned against the chain link fence, his
broad shoulders expanding as he took in a deep breath. He let go of
it in the form of a small laugh, one of disbelief. “I kept
defending it too, telling myself that it was just that I loved
seeing you transform into this passionate creature the second you
stepped into my room. But once you graduated, I found myself still
thinking about you. In the summer and then the fall. Missing you,
really. I had to force myself to stop thinking about you or I
wouldn’t be able to stand myself because these were the exact
feelings I prided myself on never having.”

He peered up at me once he stopped speaking
and I remembered to breathe. Though I still couldn’t think of
anything to say. All I could think of was that in his classroom my
senior year, our inappropriate thoughts had at some point existed
simultaneously for each other. The thrill of the thought coursed
through my veins and buzzed in my chest. “So…” I played with the
cutouts of my dress, hooking my fingers inside of them. He watched
me do it. “The way you felt about me back in high school… is what
made you feel so strongly when you saw me again? Three years
later?” The tips of our shoes were touching at this point and I had
a beautiful, glowing view of downtown Manhattan in front of me, but
all I could look at was Daniel.

“For the most part, I had you erased you
from my mind because otherwise, I couldn’t do my job in that town.
But once in awhile, I wondered how you were doing. What you were
doing. What made you passionate now, the way that story did.” He
chewed his lip for a moment. “So when I recognized you that night
at the restaurant, I felt it all come back. All those thoughts and
more. Because you still looked like the student I remembered but
you were suddenly also this gorgeous, happy, unbelievably sexy
woman. That dress you were wearing drove me insane. And right away
I felt this need for you. I wanted you so fucking badly that I was
fantasizing about you before I even stepped into the
restaurant.”

“Why is any of that a bad thing?” I asked.
Excitement was building in my stomach. I forced myself not to just
grab him right there and then since I had the irrational need for
him to touch me first. For now, all I’d allow was for the wind to
blow my hair forward to graze his chest. “I know you think that the
feelings you had for me were wrong but they couldn’t be anything
that other teachers hadn’t felt before. They were just thoughts.
There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not like you were anything
but professional towards me.” My heart beat in my ears as I waited
for him to respond. Since he was quiet, I took the liberty of
reading his mind. “I know people at home would do more than
disapprove if they saw us together. And that they’d make up stories
and give in to crazy rumors just because of me. I know you love
your job and that it’s an incredible school to teach at. But that
doesn’t mean Woodhill should get to dictate your personal life. Or
mine. I let them do it for too long, but I’ve learned my lesson.” I
thought of Ben, my mother. Dane. “And that lesson is screw
Woodhill. Fuck ‘em.”

In the midst of rubbing his neck, Daniel
raised an eyebrow at me with amusement. “Yeah?”

God
, just one word and he had my
heart racing and my cheeks warming again. “Yeah,” I managed.
“Forget what they think and treat me the way you want to.” Heat
spread through me so that my skin tingled against the fabric of my
dress. “Do what you want.” The words rolled off my tongue with a
lust so thick that I surprised even myself. I hardly recognized my
voice but then again, the need I felt for Daniel’s touch was unlike
any other I’d experienced before. It dizzied me and pulsed in my
neck, my chest, between my thighs, erasing my memory of anything
else around me just to focus on getting the one thing I wanted. It
consumed and intoxicated me in a way that Ben had never come close
to doing, not even in the beginning.

And it sent all my blood rushing to one,
aching spot the moment Daniel touched me. Sliding his fingers into
the cutouts of my dress, he pulled me into him by handfuls of
stretchy fabric, drawing a hard but breathy exhale from my mouth.
Suddenly, he had me against the chain link fence, the metal feeling
like ice against my hot neck. I gasped upon feeling the softness of
his lips and then the warmth of his tongue right above my collar
bone, the mix of sensations curling my fingers in his hair, tugging
lightly and prompting a low, sexy grunt from his throat as he
withdrew his mouth from my neck.

“I can’t do what I want right now,” he
rasped with a pained laugh. Under my dress, his hands squeezed my
bare waist with frustration. “Not here.”

The groan I heard came from my own mouth.
Writhing with breathless, lightheaded, searing desire, the bridge
was truly the last place I needed to be right now — out in the
open, between Manhattan and Brooklyn, cars zooming by us virtually
every second.

“But I want you.” The torture in my breathy
voice immediately drew his body back into mine. His hands clasped
around my neck and I felt a low rumble from his chest before his
lips crushed against mine. His fingers tightened around me, his
thumbs propping under my jaw and holding my face still so that all
I could do was part my mouth to welcome the thrust of his tongue.
The sensation of cold metal crisscrossed on my palm and only then
did I realize that my hands were at my sides, my fingers
intertwined with the fence as a means to stop themselves from
grabbing the top of Daniel’s jeans. I could feel his erection
against me and I didn’t trust myself not to tear those jeans off if
I let myself touch it.

“
Fuck
.” Daniel ripped himself away
from me for a moment, stepping back and raking through his hair
hard with both hands. The image of his flexing muscles didn’t help
my frustration, which had me squeezing handfuls of chain link in my
fingers. Daniel panted as he stared at me. “I’m so sorry. I want to
give you everything you want right now. Trust me.”

I nodded, murmuring some sort of response as
I tried to think of the best way for us to find privacy, though it
still meant a torturous walk back into Manhattan.

But the brainstorming proved unnecessary
because, of course, Daniel’s phone rang. It was then that I
realized I’d left my own at Todos.

“Yeah, Mike,” Daniel all but grunted when he
picked up. “Alright,” was all he said before hanging up. He looked
at me, seeming to be cooling down. “He said Kelsey needs you back
at the restaurant.” At the mention of her name, I felt my body
simmering too. Our chests still heaving, we stared at each other
for a couple seconds, finally cracking a laugh at the same time
before turning back towards Manhattan, walking yards apart from
each other just as we had before. It was the best way to survive
the walk.

CHAPTER
9

I tried to ignore Adriana’s knowing look as
I counted out at the register, shuffling through a stack twenties,
tens, fives and then singles in record speed.

“Damn, girl. You are dying to get out of
here.” I could practically hear the smirk on her lips. “Got
bluewalled yesterday?”

I stuffed the money into an envelope and
stared at her, already laughing. “Bluewalled?”

“Yeah. You know how guys get blueballed? And
since you’re a girl — ”

I stopped her. “Okay, I figured that’s what
it was,” I snorted, sticking my closing report into the envelope
before sealing it and scribbling my name on the front in what
looked like a serial killer’s handwriting.