Unlike almost every other man she’d known, Martin got hints. After a final, awkward half-bow, he left and partially shut the door behind him.
But once he was gone, she didn’t check her lesson plans for the umpteenth time or straighten the student desks by a micron or two. Instead, she thought about Martin. Took the observation she’d just made about him and spun it out.
Martin got hints. Martin was watchful. Martin could read and interpret body language.
Most well-off, cishet white men couldn’t do either. Didn’t need to do either, unlike the people in their orbit, because they held the power. They created the weather, while others languished in the rain or cringed away from the lightning.
Maybe he’d grown up poor, like her. Maybe he’d learned empathy and watchfulness from his years of teaching. But the way he’d stepped back from a simple glare…she’d seen that kind of reaction before. In some of the neighbor kids at the trailer park. In the wife of one of Barton’s colleagues. In some of her students, the ones she watched for bruises.
And she wondered. About his childhood. About his marriage.
It was foolish. She barely knew the man. She could be entirely wrong in every way.
Still, what she was wondering burned in her chest like coals. The sudden, shocking anger didn’t leave her until the first student arrived at the door, slouching and feigning casual disinterest to the best of his young abilities.
Then she became Ms. Owens, not Rose.
Right now, Martin didn’t matter. Couldn’t matter.
She stood. Smiled at her student. Told him where to find the class schedule, the syllabus, and his seat. Swung the door wide and waited for the next arrivals.
Her hands weren’t shaking anymore.
The new school year had begun, and she was ready to kick some pedagogical ass.
Four
Martin encountered Rose several more times throughout the day, as one would expect, but only for brief instants as they entered or exited her classroom or passed in the hall. He had no idea whether they shared the same lunch block, since he’d brought his food and hurriedly eaten it inside the social studies office next to the other department floater, a twenty-something woman named Dakota Brown.
Dakota was eager and chipper and damned young. She’d arrived in the office right after he’d left Rose’s classroom that morning, and the vast gulf between the two women had disoriented him for a minute. If Dakota were confetti ice cream, sweet, cheerful, and straightforward, Rose would be bittersweet chocolate gelato. Dense. Complexly, intensely flavored. Not to everyone’s taste.
The grocery store closest to his house carried pints of gelato. Maybe he and Bea could do a taste test of those someday and pretend they were classier than they really were.
But Dakota was good company for lunch, and the students were…well, students. Not too different from the kids at his previous school. Some chatty, some quiet. Some awkward, some posturing. They’d relax and become more themselves once they learned the routine and trusted him.
By the end of the year, if all went as planned, each class would become sort of an extended, temporary family. An evolving but unitary organism, working toward the same purposes: factual knowledge, greater ease with critical thinking and writing, increased ability to make connections between different ideas, different time periods, and different subjects, and—above all—comfort in the educational environment.
He couldn’t always make his students happy to be in his class. But he could make them feel safe while they were there, and he knew all too well the importance of safe spaces.
When the last bell rang, and his seventh-period students rushed toward the door clutching backpacks and fistfuls of forms to complete, he dropped down into one of their chairs for a moment. Just a moment. Just until the adrenaline crash inevitable at the end of a long, important, stressful day subsided.
Rose strode through the door, and then came to a sudden halt upon spotting him.
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Gave her head an impatient little shake, but somehow it seemed more self-directed than an indication of displeasure with him. “Are you ill, Mr. Krause?”
He wondered idly if the school administered coffee in IV form at the nurse’s office. “Not sick, just tired. Sorry. I’ll move momentarily.”
“Take your time.” She swept toward the desk, her heels clicking with each long stride. “But as a reminder, we have a faculty meeting in the cafeteria in ten minutes.”
And he needed to talk to Bea before then, to confirm their dinner plans. He rose to his feet with a groan, which Rose didn’t acknowledge.
But as he reached her doorway, her voice stopped him. “The beginning of the year is exhausting enough, even if this weren’t a new school for you. Be sure not to run yourself into the ground.”
A quick glance backward revealed an impassive face, angled down toward her papers.
“I won’t.” He sighed. “I mean, I will.”
When she didn’t say anything more, he left and shut the door behind him. Because she deserved at least a couple minutes of privacy after a long day, even if she hadn’t asked for them.
During the faculty meeting, he saw her across the cafeteria. Spine straight, not a strand of her hair out of place. Sitting next to other faculty members, but entirely removed from them. There were no whispers or furtive laughs. No idle conversations between speakers. No smiles, much less adorable snorts.
He didn’t get it. At all.
He’d have said she considered herself above the rest of them, but that didn’t ring true. Not given her friendliness with Bea, and the brief glimpses he’d garnered of how she interacted with students. With them, she was all lively, charismatic warmth, rather than the chill of an empress. And even with him, all her coldness didn’t negate her generosity.
She’d given him her time and guidance during the summer. She’d given him a substantial portion of her classroom storage. She’d put up posters for his students. She’d even reminded him to take care of himself, albeit in an affectless way.
As Churchill might have said, Rose Owens was a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside a really soft-looking black blouse.
After the meeting, he lingered to introduce himself to a few of Bea’s teachers. By the time he left the cafeteria, Rose was long gone. But along the way to the department office, he glanced into her closed door’s little window.
He couldn’t see her. The placement of her desk meant she wasn’t visible from the door, which he imagined was not accidental. But there, on the floor beside her desk, he could just see a pair of breathtakingly high black heels, tumbled onto their sides. And over the back of a nearby student chair, a black velvet blazer lay carefully folded in half.
She was in there barefoot, in that silky confection of a shirt.
For her, he guessed that was basically one step from naked.
He stumbled over his own feet. Then made himself keep moving down the hall.
But three hours later, as shadows crept into the corners of the department office, and he couldn’t seem to focus his eyes anymore, he couldn’t help himself. He had to know. So he slipped his school-issued laptop inside his briefcase and slung the strap over his shoulder, gathered a stack of freshly-copied papers, and headed toward her classroom.
Nothing had changed. Shoes on the floor, jacket on the chair.