Something Fierce (2 page)

A carload of young women pulled into the parking lot and the guys watched them as they got out, shed their winter coats, tossed them inside the car and made a run for the door of the Powerhouse, all short skirts and high heels, laughing and shrieking all the way.

“Lord, have mercy,” Graham said after a moment and then asked, “What was I saying?”

“How I went for it in the first half. And it was impressive.”

“It was. And you did. You really did, but…you took a lot of hits. Hard hits. And nothing turned out like it was supposed to. You got out of Cherry Run, but you couldn’t find a place to land. You wrote a good novel and got it published, but you didn’t make any money. You finally got to L.A. and met a great woman, but neither of those worked out either. And here you are forty years old—”

“Are you
trying
to kill my buzz?”

“No. I’m just…”

“Drunk?”

“Yes, a little, but I’m just telling
you
what you told
me
.”

“Well, don’t. And you shouldn’t use football metaphors. You shouldn’t even repeat them. They just don’t work when you do them.”

“Listen, dickhead, I’m serious here. I see the way you look when you talk about this girl. Which would be great if she were older. I mean, this isn’t like you.”

“I’m turning her down, Graham. In fact,” he said as he took his phone from his pocket, “I’m turning her down right now.” He pulled up his email account and began pecking out a response.

“You’re still responding.”

“Yeah, well, ignoring people isn’t me either and I’m not doing that.”

Graham stood up and began to stomp his feet. “Let’s walk. I’m freezing my ass off here.” Seth stood, still poking at the keypad on his phone, and they started walking across the parking lot toward the Cuyahoga River amid old industrial buildings, some reborn as bars and nightclubs, others going to rack. “One more bar,” he said, nodding at the one they seemed to be walking toward, “and I’m done. What are you telling her?”

“That I’m flattered by the offer. That she is an attractive and intelligent young woman but that a teacher and a student meeting outside of school isn’t a good idea. And,” he paused to type in the last few words, “that I’m too old for her and not nearly as cool in real life as I am in class.”

As if the universe were rewarding his good behavior, he heard a female voice behind him. “Seth Hardy?”

He turned to see two attractive, thirty-something women, a brunette and a redhead. The sight had a sobering effect on both him and Graham. “Oh, my God,” the brunette gushed, looking star-struck. “You’re the writer. You teach at Northeast.”

“Guilty,” Seth said, “on both charges.”

“I’m a student there,” she said. Then, sort of embarrassed, she added, “A sophomore…again and anyway, I love
The Fourth Option.
I read it for class last semester and am actually rereading it over the Christmas break.”

“She likes all the sex in it,” the redhead chimed in and the other woman shot her a raised eyebrow.

“That’s okay,” Seth said, “those are my favorite parts too.”

“I wish I had my book with me. I would get you to sign it.”

“I’m sure we can arrange that. I’m teaching next semester too.”

“Really? That would be fantastic. My name is Melissa,” she offered her hand, cold and slender in Seth’s own, then she smiled into his eyes. “The loud mouth behind me is Tammy. She doesn’t read.”

“Ha, ha,” Tammy said. Seth introduced Graham as a songwriter visiting from San Francisco, which lit Tammy up.

“So,” Melissa said to Seth, “when’s the next book coming out?”

“Soon,” Graham said. “And it’s bad luck to talk about it before it’s done so don’t ask him what it’s about.”

“Really?” She put her hand over her mouth and asked through her fingers, “Can I ask if it’s a sequel?”

“No,” Graham said.

“Okay. Sorry. Well, it’s so great to meet you,” she said. “Your writing just…speaks to me. So are you gentlemen coming or going?”

“Coming,” Seth said.

“Great! Well,” she said, moving toward the door with an amorous smile, “look for us inside!”

“Will do.”

“Professor Lucky Bastard,” Graham said, as they watched the women go inside.

“I know. It’s great.” Seth turned to Graham. “What I didn’t know…is that I was close to finishing the second book. Here I thought I was stuck and so hopelessly blocked that there might not be a second book at all.”

“I guess we both learned something. I found out I was a songwriter.”

“You
are
a songwriter. A good one.”

“I’m a corporate whore wearing golden shackles.”

“That’s another discussion. But in the meantime, you do look nice in gold.”

“Fuck you.”

“Come on, let’s go buy the ladies a drink before someone beats us to it.”

Melissa and Tammy were both newly single and hell-bent on making up for whatever wildness they thought they’d missed out on when they were married. It was fun for a while, but both women drank too much, too fast and neither could hold her booze or be persuaded to slow down a bit. By last call, they were so wasted that Seth and Graham had lost interest. When Seth saw them stumbling toward their car, however, he ran after them and insisted that they share the cab Graham had flagged down. After dropping the women off, Graham passed out on the ride home. Seth checked his phone to see if Kerri had replied to his earlier message. She hadn’t. Which was good, he supposed.

Gazing out the window as the cab raced east on Route 2, Seth hoped she didn’t feel foolish or embarrassed by his rejection of her offer, though he knew he would if the situation was reversed. Still, it had been the right thing to do, the responsible thing, and if she didn’t see that now, she probably would someday. He imagined her being older, maybe his age, looking back on it fondly, appreciating him for not taking advantage of the situation.

Though again, if things were reversed, he wouldn’t be reminiscing that way. In fact, when he was seventeen—three years younger and light-years more naïve than Kerri Engel—his high school English teacher, Candice Bracknell, had made a move on him. He was still a virgin and so infatuated with her that when she placed her hand on his lap, he’d been too stunned to react. Before he could snap out of it and fulfill the fantasy he had entertained countless times, “Candy”—as the leering boys called her when she was out of earshot—had immediately withdrawn her hand and never so much as flirted with crossing that line again. Which, of course, was the right thing to do. But even now, he wished it would have gone the other direction. Despite a love life that has been, for the most part, satisfying and even adventurous at times, he still wondered what it would have been like to lose his virginity to an older woman that inexperience and masturbatory fantasies had elevated to a sexual goddess. What might she have taught him in their first few sessions that took years to figure out with girls his own age, fumbling in backseats and dorm rooms?

He didn’t have nearly enough money to cover the cab and the women had contributed nothing so he had to wake Graham before they got to his place and hit him up for the fare. “See,” he said to Graham, as his buddy handed over a fist full of cash, “if it weren’t for those golden shackles of the corporate world, we’d be on our way to jail.”

Graham mumbled something inaudible as they walked into Seth’s place, a beautiful home that was on loan to Northeast’s guest instructor until May. Graham went straight to one of the spare bedrooms. Seth checked his email one last time and found what he’d been looking for. In fact, there were
two
emails from Kerri-Go-Round121. He scrolled down to the one she had sent first. The subject read:
Two Ships Passing in the Night…

“Oh no,” he said, to the empty room, and opened it.

Dear Mr. Hardy,

Although my heart is broken, I want to thank you for letting me down so gently and reminding me that I am still an “attractive and intelligent young woman.” You are a very nice man. That’s probably why I liked you so much. I guess it is natural for girls to have crushes on their teachers. It was very courteous of you to remind me of this. I hope we can still be friends. (Check yes or no in the box below)

Your Former Student,

Kerri Engel

“‘Check yes or no?’” Seth said aloud and laughed. “Smartass!” He opened the second email, sent five minutes later and titled:
One More Thing…

Sorry, Seth. I couldn’t resist. But it serves you right after that insipid reply. Honestly! Self-deprecation is not your style, nor is waxing philosophical about boundaries and judging someone solely on the amount of years she has spent on the planet. Just so you have it in writing: I am not naïve. I am not a child. I know the risks, if you want to call them that. I considered all of the possible consequences of that first email long before I sent it. I thought about it all semester long, in fact, and had the good sense to wait until the class was over and grades were turned in.

My feelings haven’t changed and the offer still stands…if you think you are up for it.

Kerri

Still slightly buzzed, Seth had hit reply, typed:
Noon on Monday—downtown Willoughby at Coffee and Books,
sent the email and swaggered to the shower.

And here he was. It was exactly noon now. He was relieved in a way that it was finally too late to turn back. He climbed out of his Escape—the first vehicle he’d ever paid payments on, the first he’d acquired with less than 100,000 miles on the odometer—and walked into the coffee shop.

Kerri had been there all along drinking a cappuccino and reading a book. Striking in a black, leather jacket and casual blouse, her thick golden hair spilled wildly over and well below her shoulders. She wore designer jeans and knee-high boots, her long legs crossed, the pointed toe of a high-heeled boot rocked gently back and forth as she read. She could have been an actress directed to exude confidence, to vibrate with it. Just then she looked up and their eyes locked for barely a second before her demeanor cracked with a nervous laugh that brought her hand to her mouth as if she weren’t expecting him. Seth broke into a grin, shaking his head feeling like they were serious actors trying to do a sexy scene from a soap opera and breaking up in the middle of it.

She stood and moved to hug him like an old friend, but they weren’t old friends; the distance between them and the book in her hand made it so awkward that she nearly fell. “Oops!” she said, as he caught her and a whiff of her apple and spice perfume. “New boots,” she said, her face bright red, then added, “Hey! We match.”

He was dressed the same way he would have for class, and had in fact, probably worn this exact outfit to school before: leather jacket, burgundy button-down, faded Levi’s, and the well-worn cowboy boots the students sometimes teased him about. “Twins,” he said, realizing it was the first time he’d seen her without glasses. Those eyes. Stunning. “Who are you reading?”

She turned the book toward him. “W. Somerset Maugham.”

“
The Moon and Sixpence,
” he read. “That’s one of my favorites by him.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s funny. I’ve been rereading his stuff over the past few months.”

“That’s weird. I just picked it up this morning.” She held the book up and flicked the sales slip sticking out between the pages as proof. “It was recommended to me ages ago by,” she glanced at the ceiling, “I don’t even remember who. I got here early and there it was on their classics shelf and so I bought it.”

“That is weird.” He noted that she was wearing eyeliner and light makeup. She rarely wore makeup to class. She didn’t need it but it did add a little something extra. He had a flash of her getting ready for their day together, leaning toward the mirror as he’d seen past lovers do, carefully tracing her eye with a tiny pencil. “Shall we?” he said, gesturing toward the door.

“We shall,” she said.

K
erri Engel’s heart hadn’t
stopped racing
from the moment Seth Hardy had walked into Coffee and Books, and now, sitting in the passenger seat of his bright red, too clean SUV, she felt like a five-year-old who should have, but didn’t pee one more time before getting in the car.

Things had been so different in her imagination. She had looked up from her book, meeting him with just the hint of a smile, stayed seated, gestured to the chair next to her, ordered him a cappuccino without asking, and in the vampy manner she’d perfected in the emails, said something like, “I was half-expecting you to chicken out.”

But when he walked in looking so relaxed and yet exuding the very intensity, or charisma, or whatever it was that drew her so strongly toward him, her composure vanished. She’d gotten too cocky with the emails, forgetting that the sheer aliveness he crackled with in class wouldn’t be divided among twenty-four other people but focused solely on her. She swallowed, and trying to make her directions sound predetermined, said, “Bear to the right at the stoplight. This will turn into Euclid Avenue and we’ll pick up I-90 from there.”

“Where are we going first?” he asked.

“It’s a surprise,” she said, which of course, it was. After all of her careful planning—the emails written and rewritten to sound more siren than slut, the online interviews she had practically memorized, the book by Maugham, the casual yet classy blouse bought for the occasion, the new lotion from Bath and Body Works, the entire morning spent shaving, plucking, applying the right makeup, doing and redoing her hair—how the hell could she have not planned a tour!?

In her own defense, she never expected him to literally want
a tour.
She had offered one, yes, but it was just an excuse to hook up. Her ability to tell when a man liked her in
that way
was something she never doubted. Ever since she was thirteen years old, boys and men wanted the same thing from her, and by the time she was seventeen, she’d learned how to control the dance. Whether she seduced them, allowed them to seduce her, or strung them along for whatever reason, it was
her
dance. This was not the case today. The sexual attraction was intense but she was suddenly afraid that it was one-sided, that she had misread his interest in her.